CONTENTS
Buddhism and William Blake – an essay by Sangharakshita (1977)
Blake, Bhante and Us – notes from a talk by Satyalila (2017)
A sequence of four Blake Readers – compiled by Prajnamat from Sangharakshita’s Seminars (2017):
Bhante on Blake 1: Vision
Bhante on Blake 2: Energy & Reason
Bhante on Blake 3: Imaginaton
Bhante on Blake 4: Dakini as Sangha
1 Contents...... 1 Preface...... 4 Buddhism and William Blake...... 5 Blake, Bhante and Us...... 12 I must create a system...... 16 Horizontal and vertcal...... 16 The Horizontal Dimension in Blake’s system...... 17 The Horizontal Dimension in Bhante’s system...... 18 The Vertcal Dimension in Blake's system...... 19 The Vertcal dimensions in Bhante’s system...... 20 Doctrine and method...... 21 Bhante's Blake Themes and the Mandala...... 21 Conclusion...... 22 Bhante on Blake...... 24 Bhante on Blake 1: Vision...... 25 Introducton...... 26 Overview...... 26 Blake’s Hierarchy of Vision...... 26 Bhante’s references to this...... 26 Conclusion...... 29 Sources...... 30 Books...... 30 Lectures...... 32 Seminars...... 34 Bhante on Blake 2: Energy & Reason...... 49 Introducton...... 50 Overview...... 50 Energy and Reason...... 50 Energy...... 50 Reason...... 52 Conclusion...... 56 Sources...... 57 Books...... 57 Lectures...... 58
2 Seminars...... 59 Bhante on Blake 3: Imaginaton...... 73 Introducton...... 74 Overview...... 74 Distncton from Fancy...... 74 Imaginaton and Intuiton...... 75 Ethical Dimension...... 76 A Hierarchy of Experience...... 76 Minute Partculars...... 77 Conclusion...... 78 Sources...... 79 Books...... 79 Seminars...... 81 Papers...... 87 Bhante on Blake 4: Dakini as Sangha Refuge...... 88 Introducton...... 89 Overview...... 89 Blake’s concepton of the universal man as Manifold...... 89 Blake’s concepton of Communicaton through Emanatons...... 90 The Dakini...... 90 The Dakini as the Esoteric Sangha Refuge...... 90 Bhante’s associaton of the Dakini as Sangha Refuge with Blake’s Emanaton...... 90 Conclusion...... 92 Sources...... 93 Lectures...... 93 Seminars...... 94
3 PREFACE
This ‘reader’ arose from a shared love of the Dharma, Bhante Sangharakshita’s presentaton of it, and William Blake: and from an intuiton that others may beneft from a ‘friendly way in’ to understanding a bit about Blake and the light he can shed on Bhante’s presentatonntranslaton of the Dharma
It begins with Sangharakshita’s own essay ‘Buddhism and William Blake’ frst published in ‘FWBO News Winter 1977’ in the heyday of the ‘Blake era’ around the London Buddhist Centre. There were one or two Blake study groups, two or three communites and even an order member with Blakean names. Blake was ‘in the air’ just as he’s been around ‘in the DNA’ of Bhante’s approach to the Dharma.
The second piece in this collecton is the set of notes made by Satyalila for a talk given on the frst Blake retreat at Adhisthana in July 2017. In this talk, Satyalila endeavoured to track and trace the ways in which Blake’s influence can be found in Sangharakshita’s teaching.
The last piece in the collecton comprises four substantal ‘readers’ compiled by Prajnamat on the main themes that Bhante was elucidatng when he references William Blake: Vision, Energy&Reason; Imaginaton; and the Dakini as Sangha Refuge. In each one an overview of the points Bhante makes is followed by a summary of the references from lectures, seminars, and books. The intenton is to make it as easy as possible for the reader to dig down from this overview to the full text of what Bhante is saying in its context.
We hope you will fnd this an enjoyable and engaging way in to exploring a fascinatng and important facet of Bhante Sangharakshita’s thought.
Prajnamat and Satyalila
4 BUDDHISM AND WILLIAM BLAKE Sangharakshita
5 Buddhism is a universal teaching. It speaks to all men. It speaks to them, moreover, not as belonging to any partcular social group, e.g. clan, tribe, caste, race, naton, but as individual human beings. What it tells each one of them is that he can grow -that he can grow from manhood into Buddhahood, or from unenlightened humanity into enlightened humanity. It also tells him how he can do this. When Buddhism speaks to men in this way it of course has to speak to them in a language which they can understand. This means much more than speaking to them in their own vernacular. It means communicatng with them through the medium of their own ideas, their own culture. Since Buddhism originated in Ancient India it at frst had to speak -the Buddha had to speak -the language of Ancient Indian culture. In fact it had to speak the language of two cultures, the Shramanic and the Brahmanic. Later, when Buddhism spread outside India, it had to speak the language of other cultures, in partcular those of South-east Asia, China, Japan, and Tibet. (Sometmes, when the indigenous ‘linguistc’ resources were inadequate, it had to take Indian culture along with it, but that is another story.) Since Buddhism did not spread beyond Asia, all the cultures with which it came into contact, and through which it had to communicate, were Asian cultures. Although it is in reality a universal teaching, when identfed with its medium of communicaton Buddhism tends to appear as a phenomenon of the cultural history of the East. It tends to appear as an Eastern religion.
During the last hundred years Buddhism has begun to spread beyond Asia. It has begun to make contact with Western culture. As yet, however, it has not really begun to communicate through the medium of that culture. Western Buddhists, and those interested in Buddhism, therefore have to study it in a foreign language, as it were, i.e. through the medium of one or another Asian culture. The situaton is made more difcult by the fact that what Asian Buddhist teachers bring to the West is, only too ofen, not so much Buddhism as the cultural forms with which, for them, it is associated, even identfed. Buddhism will not really spread in the West untl it speaks the language of Western culture. This will take tme. One of the ways in which we can hasten the process is by bringing Buddhism into contact with those Western poets, thinkers, and mystcs in whose life or work, or both, there is a reflecton, however faint, of the supra-historical splendours of the principial Dharma and who, therefore, already communicate to us something of the spirit of Buddhism in the language of Western culture. One of the greatest of these winged spirits is the English poet, prophet, and visionary William Blake.
Blake was born in London on 28 November 1757, and died there on 12 August 1827. His life thus coincided with one of the most momentous periods in English indeed in modern Western -history. As a young man he saw and welcomed the American and French Revolutons, while in middle life he was witness to the tremendous upheavals of the Napoleonic wars. He also lived through the Industrial Revoluton, with all the changes that this brought about in the social, economic, and politcal life of the naton. Although he lived in such eventul tmes, Blake’s outward life at least was uneventul. He atended a drawing school for a few years (the only formal educaton he received), and when he was ffeen his father, a hosier, apprentced him to an engraver, with whom he spent the customary seven years learning his trade. Thereafer Blake supported himself by his own labour, but since the skill of the engraver was less in demand than previously he had ofen to fght a losing batle with poverty and want -a batle that ended only with his death. In 1782 he married the daughter of a market- gardener, and though childless the union was a happy one. From 1782 to 1827 only
6 two events occurred to interrupt the even tenor of Blake’s existence in a succession of London lodgings and his work as engraver, poet, painter, and printer of his own illuminated books. The frst of these was when, at the invitaton of his would-be patron Hayley, he and his wife lef London for Felpham, a village on the coast of West Sussex, where they lived -not very happily -for three years (1801–1803). The second occurred shortly afer this period of exile when, as a result of an incident with a drunken soldier which had taken place the previous summer, at Felpham, Blake was accused of seditous libel and tried for the capital crime of high treason. Apart from these two events, both of which made a deep impression on him, the history of the greater part of Blake’s life is the history of his spiritual realizatons and his creatve work.
This truer history begins quite early, for Blake’s extraordinary qualites quickly revealed themselves. When only four years old he saw God looking in at the window, which set him screaming, and thereafer visionary experiences of this sort were not uncommon. Indeed, they became part of his ordinary waking life. His literary and artstc development was no less rapid. It has been said of him that he ‘became an artst at the age of ten, and a poet at the age of twelve’. More remarkable stll, his tastes and preferences were very decided, and he showed striking independence of judgement. As he wrote long aferwards, ‘I saw and knew immediately the difference between Raffaelle and Rubens’. This was not a difference that was apparent to everybody at the tme, but neither then nor in later life did Blake ever hesitate to differ from -or to denounce -even the most respected authorites. Both as a man and as an artst he thought and felt and spoke for himself, without fear and without favour. Independence and originality were in fact among his most outstanding characteristcs, together with sturdy self- confdence, honesty, openness, and extreme vehemence of expression. But much as his independence and originality contributed to the ultmate greatness of his achievement, they tended to isolate him from his contemporaries. Some people thought him mad. Although he is generally included among the older generaton of the romantc poets, along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and his life and work accounted part of the Romantc Movement, his personal contact with them was of the slightest, and they knew hardly anything of his work. Southey, indeed, was among those who thought him mad. Yet despite isolaton, and even neglect, Blake’s life was a happy one, and towards the end of it he had the satsfacton of gathering around him a small group of young artsts who loved and venerated him. When death came he was ready. ‘His countenance became fair, his eyes brightened, and he burst out singing.’
Being so much an individual himself, it was only natural that Blake should uphold the importance of the general principle of individuality. Indeed, he regarded it as the indispensable basis of true morality and true religion. For him the individual was sacred and inviolable. He therefore believed that it was the duty of each man to be himself, to develop his own potentalites to the utmost, and to allow others to do likewise. ‘The Worship of God,’ he wrote in one of his fnest passages, ‘is honouring his gifs in other men; & loving the greatest men best, each according to his Genius: which is the Holy Ghost in man’. Blake meant this quite literally: for him God is man, and there is no other God. In another passage he insists that vice is not so much giving expression to one’s own energies as hindering the energies of others. Man cannot develop his potentalites unless he is free. The corollary of the principle of individuality is the principle of liberty. As a young man Blake was a revolutonary, and he therefore saw liberty in primarily social and politcal terms, as freedom from the tyranny of kings and priests. Later his ideas changed, or rather they developed as he developed, and he saw it frst psychologically, as the liberaton of the instnctual and emotonal energies from the bondage of reason, and then as the liberaton of the whole man from the internal divisions into which he had fallen, including the division between reason and emoton. True liberty was to exercise ‘the Divine Arts of Imaginaton’. It was to expand one’s consciousness, exploring ‘inward into the Worlds of Thought’. It was to enter, or rather re-enter, Eternity.
7 Blake’s enlarged concepton of liberty corresponds to an enlarged concepton of man. Man is not twofold but fourfold, consistng of the body and its instncts, reason, the emotons, and imaginaton. This obviously antcipates Jung’s four basic functons of sensaton, thought, feeling, and intuiton. There is also some resemblance to the frst four of the fve Spiritual Facultes of Buddhist traditon, i.e. to (in matching order) Vigour (virya), Wisdom (praja), faith and devoton (sraddha), and concentraton (samadhi), although the fact that these are accompanied by a ffh spiritual faculty, that of Mindfulness (smrt), which balances Faith and Wisdom, and Vigour and Concentraton, means that all four are raised to a higher level and enabled to work together for the atainment of Enlightenment. For Blake, man is fourfold both in his divided and in his undivided state. In his fallen and divided state the body and its instncts are present as his Shadow, by which Blake meant suppressed desires, the emotons as his (fallen) Emanaton, or split-off feminine counterpart, while reason is present as his Spectre, which is also the self-centred Selfood with which the fallen man now identfes himself. Imaginaton, or his Humanity, is absent, or rather is in abeyance, sunk ‘in deadly sleep’. Within the context of this enlarged concepton of man the individual develops his potentalites when his Humanity awakes. When his Humanity awakes, i.e. when he identfes himself with his Imaginaton, he can enter his Shadow, absorb his Emanaton, and cast out (and also love) his Spectre. In man’s unfallen and undivided state, or in Eternity, the four basic functons appear in their ‘archetypal’ forms as what Blake calls the Four Zoas.
These are Tharmas, ‘the mildest son of heaven’, the Zoa of sense; Urizen, the Prince of Light, the Zoa of reason; Luvah, the Prince of Love, the Zoa of the emotons; and Urthona, ‘the keeper of the gates of heaven’, the Zoa of Imaginaton. There is thus a correspondence, in the hermetc sense, not only between the four basic functons and the Four Zoas, but also between Shadow, (fallen) Emanaton, Spectre, and sleeping Humanity and the Four Zoas, in other words between the fallen and divided and the unfallen and undivided states of the four basic functons. This is not unlike the general correspondence, in the Mahayana and Vajrayana forms of Buddhism, between samsara and nirvana, klesa (deflement), and bodhi (Enlightenment), or, more specifcally, between the fve poisons of delusion, hatred, pride, craving, and jealousy, and the mandala of the Five Jinas or Five Buddhas, i.e. (in matching order), Vairocana, Aksobhya, Ratnasambhava, Amitabha, and Amoghasiddhi. There is, however, one important difference. In Buddhism there is no doctrine concerning the absolute beginning of things, which is said to be imperceptble. Samsara does not originate from nirvana; bodhi never becomes the klesas. In Blake’s system the Four Zoas divide one from another and fall from Eternity into tme, from Truth into error. They fall in antclockwise order. Tharmas, whose compass point is west, enters tme frst, followed by Urizen (south), Luvah (east), and Urthona (north). The story of how the Zoas fell, and what terrible conflicts took place between them and their Emanatons, as well as the story of how they were all delivered and restored to unity, consttutes Blake’s great myth. It is this myth which, in various stages of development, forms the subject mater of the major ‘prophetc books’, especially the second longest of them, the central but unfnished Vala,or The Four Zoas.
The correspondence between psychic functons and Zoas, and poisons and Buddhas, is not the only one. Both Blake and Vajrayana Buddhism see the whole of existence as one vast and complex system of correspondences. Both use the hermetc principle, as it may be termed, as a principle of order, as a means of organizing the more prominent features of our experience into a beautful and meaningful patern, i.e. into a mandala, and in this way achieve integraton. Both Blake and Vajrayana Buddhism are
8 therefore concerned to establish sets of correlatons, some of them natural and obvious, others apparently quite arbitrary. Blake correlates the Four Zoas not only with the four basic psychic functons, but also with various other sets of four, such as the four points of the compass, the four worlds, the four occupatons, the four metals, the four contnents, the four arts, the four quarters of the Britsh Isles, the four cites, and the four senses. Thus Tharmas, the Zoa of sense, is associated with the western directon, the world of generaton, the occupaton of shepherd, the metal brass, the contnent of America, the art of paintng, Ireland, the city of York, and the tongue or sense of taste. Some of the correlatons are quite elaborate (though not without minor discrepancies), such as those between the countes of Great Britain and the Sons of Israel, and the countes of England and the Sons of Albion. Blake’s system of correspondences is most fully worked out in Jerusalem, the Emanaton of the Giant Albion, the longest of the prophetc books, and the last. In much the same way, Vajrayana Buddhism correlates the Five Jinas or Five Buddhas not only with the fve poisons but with the fve wisdoms (janas), the fve colours, the fve directons, the fve elements, the fve mudras or hand-gestures, the fve emblems, the fve vehicles or mounts, and the fve ‘aggregates’ (skandhas). (The Vajrayana deals in pentads rather than tetrads inasmuch as the ‘central’ Buddha Vairocana and his ‘absolute’ wisdom represent the unity of the other four -though according to an early Buddhist Tantric traditon ‘everything goes in fours’.) Thus the Buddha Aksobhya, the ‘Imperturbable’, is associated with the mirror-like wisdom, the colour blue, the eastern directon, the element water, the earth-touching mudra, the emblem of the vajra or ‘mystc thunderbolt’, the elephant vehicle, and the aggregate of form (rupa). There are, of course, many other sets of correlatons. Both Blake and Vajrayana Buddhism see a correspondence between the order in which the Four Zoas, or the Four Buddhas (i.e. the Five Buddhas minus Vairocana, the Buddha of the centre) are distributed round the four quarters of the mandala and the successive stages by which the individual develops his potentalites. Beginning with Tharmas in the west, the Four Zoas enter into tme in antclockwise order, which is the order in which their corresponding psychic functons develop in the individual. In Buddhism, of course, there is no original cosmic fall, but when the Four Buddhas, beginning with Amoghasiddhi in the north, are enumerated in antclockwise order this corresponds to the order in which, upon the occurrence of the profound spiritual experience of ‘turning about’ (paravrit), the fve sense-consciousnesses, the mind- consciousness, the soiled-mind-consciousness, and the (relatve) store-consciousness, are transformed into the corresponding four Buddha-wisdoms. It also corresponds to the clockwise order in which the Five Buddhas appear to the consciousness of the deceased person in The Tibetan Book of the Dead (where, so far as the individual is concerned, a ‘fall’ may indeed occur), as well as to the order in which they are depicted as consttuent parts of the visualized seed-syllable hum in the Yoga of the Long Hum.
Blake’s emphasis on the importance of individuality connects not only with his concepton of man and his system of correspondences but also with his deep insight into the true nature of the individual. Man is in reality not a natural but a spiritual being, and his essence is eternal. Nature has, indeed, no existence apart from man, and like man is fundamentally spiritual, being simply ‘a porton of soul [i.e. the emotons] discerned by the fve senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age’. Nature appears as a separate entty from man only afer the fall, when the individual’s senses are turned inside out, so that he perceives what is internal as external, and when, forgetng his true existence, he passes through various states or worlds. These states are quite different from the individual who passes through them, and it is important that the two should be distnguished. States can change, and be annihilated, but individuals cannot. States may be judged and condemned, but individuals can only be forgiven. This is Blake’s great doctrine of the Forgiveness of Sins, and since the Forgiveness of Sins is mutual it is the basis of the Brotherhood of Man. The way in which fallen man passes, like a traveller, through various states or worlds, is not unlike the way in which, according to Buddhist traditon, the ever-changing stream of consciousness wanders as a result of spiritual ignorance (avidya) from one to another of the fve (or six) realms of conditoned existence, appearing now as a god, now as an animal, and now as a man, and so on, through a whole series of lives untl, with the cessaton of craving and the atainment of nirvana, the process of compulsory rebirth comes to an end. In keeping with its refusal to recognize a causal nexus between phenomenal existence and the Absolute, Buddhism does not, of course, speak of a fallen Buddha who wanders through the fve (or six) realms of conditoned existence for a while and then gains, or regains, Enlightenment. Yet there is a parallel between Blake and Buddhism at least so far as the origin of the states or worlds is concerned. According to Blake the states are created by the imaginaton,
9 or by Jesus (for him it amounts to the same thing), as a means of defning the errors into which man has fallen and thus delivering him from them. In Buddhism, at least in its Tibetan form, Shinje, the Lord of the Dead, who judges people afer their death and assigns them a place in the other world according with their deeds, is in reality a form of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisatva of Compassion.
The fact that the states are created by the imaginaton makes it clear that, as Blake insists, ‘The Imaginaton is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself....’ Since the imaginaton is also identfed with Jesus, and since Jesus is God, the true man is not only the imaginaton, or poetc genius, but also God. Blake in fact explicitly equates God and man. ‘Thou art a Man, God is no more,nThy own humanity learn to adore,...’ This does not mean that man in his fallen state, or man as a purely animal and ratonal being, can be set up in the place formerly occupied by God, as so ofen happens in the case of secular humanism. It means that instead of submitng to the arbitrary commands of an angry God who dwells high above him in an external heaven man should develop his own imaginaton, his own Divine Humanity, and become what, in the depths of his being, he truly is. Blake’s humanism is a spiritual humanism, and as such is akin to the transcendental humanism of Buddhism, which acknowledges no form of existence higher than a Buddha or perfectly enlightened human being. Blake not only equates God and man but also, with equal explicitness, rejects deism. His positon is, in fact, not just non-deistc but even, in effect, non-theistc, and so to that extent not really Christan, at least not in the traditonal sense of that term. His name for the ‘angry God’ is Nobodaddy (i.e. ‘nobody’s daddy’), and he identfes him with the jealous God of the Old Testament, with Satan the Accuser, and with the fallen Urizen. It is this false God, the God of this world, that is worshipped by the worldly. Blake’s positon here is broadly that of Gnostcism. He also rejects the religion of this God, which is that of punishment for sin, as well as the dogmas of the Virgin Birth, the Vicarious Atonement, a personal Devil, and an everlastng hell. He rejects, in fact, the whole structure of ‘orthodox’ Christan belief, and although he considers himself a Christan his version of Christanity if it can be called that -is not only different from, but diametrically opposed to, the more popular ‘Urizenic’ version. Blake is fully aware of this oppositon. In a well known couplet he declares, ‘The vision of Christ that thou dost see, n Is my vision’s greatest enemy.’ At tmes he seems to reject not just ‘orthodox’ Christanity but religion itself, as when he speaks of Jesus sending his seventy-two disciples ‘Against religion and government’. One modern commentator in fact says that Blake ofen used ‘religion’ as a smear word, and it is true that at his best and most characteristc he speaks in terms of artstc inspiraton rather then in terms of religious belief. Even when he does use the language of belief he uses it in his own way, i.e. not literally and dogmatcally but metaphorically and symbolically. According to him this is in fact the right way to use it, for all religion is ‘decayed poetry’ and to understand it poetcally is to understand it as it was originally meant to be understood. Then as now, it is the poetc genius, the man of imaginaton, who is the truly religious man.
A whole century before Buddhism was really known in the West Blake offers us the unique example of a non- theistc imaginatve vision of rare intensity and integrity. That he could do this was due in the frst place to his own extraordinary creatve powers -powers which manifested early, and of which he remained in unimpaired possession to the end of his days, he being faithful to them, and they being faithful to him. It was also due to the fact that in additon to the Bible and the major English poets Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (and, of course, the works of Michelangelo and the monuments in Westminster Abbey) Blake was able to draw inspiraton -indeed, to derive certain elements of his own system -from the ‘alternatve traditon’ of Agrippa and Paracelsus, Boehme and Swedenborg. He was also indebted to some of his more unorthodox contemporaries, such as the freethinker and radical Thomas Paine, the Swiss poet and theologian Gaspar Lavater, Thomas Taylor ‘the Platonist’, and the mythologogue William Stukeley. But important though all these were for his development, Blake’s combatve and fery genius probably owed as much to his spiritual enemies as to his spiritual friends, for it was largely in oppositon to their mistaken beliefs that he formulated his own system. The most distnguished and influental of these enemies -the enemies
10 of Blake’s ‘Divine Vision’ -were Bacon, Newton, and Locke, whose mechanistc science, mechanistc natural philosophy, and mechanistc psychology lef no room for imaginatve truth or spiritual values. In setng himself in oppositon to them -a David against three Goliaths -Blake set himself against the master-current of the age, and in this lies the true measure of his greatness. Indeed, through his life and his creatve work Blake accomplishes in his own person what he calls a Last Judgement, which is not a condemnaton of sinners to everlastng hell-fre but a fnal castng out of error from the bosom of the Eternal Man or the imaginaton. What Blake therefore offers us is not only a non-theistc imaginatve vision, -not only something of the spirit of Buddhism in the language of Western culture, -but an example of the kind of radical revaluaton of Western religion and culture that Buddhism, in the person of the Western Buddhist, may soon be called upon to undertake.
(Sangharakshita: First published in FWBO News Winter 1977)
11 BLAKE, BHANTE AND US
Satyalila
HEAR THE VOICE OF THE BARD
Hear the voice of the Bard, Who present, past, and future, sees; Whose ears have heard The Holy Word That walk’d among the ancient trees;.
Calling the lapsed soul, And weeping in the evening dew;. That might control The starry pole, And fallen, fallen light renew!
O Earth, O Earth return! Arise from out the dewy grass! Night is worn, And the morn Rises from the slumbrous mass.
Turn away no more; Why wilt thou turn away? The starry foor, The watery shore, Is given thee tll the break of day.
William Blake: Songs of Experience
12 HOMAGE TO WILLIAM BLAKE
My Spectre stands there white as snow; Whate’er I ask, he answers ‘No’. Till I can melt him with my fre He blocks the path of my desire.
My Emanaton, weak and poor, Lies outstretched upon the foor. Till I can claim her for my own Both of us must howl and groan.
Therefore will I, all I can, Build up complete the Fourfold Man, Head and heart, and loins fne, And hands and feet, all made divine.
Banish single vision far! With double vision ever war! Fourfold vision night and day Light and guide you on your way.
In that fourfold vision bright See the whole world with delight. Rock and stone, and fower and tree, And bird and beast, are men like thee.
Men like thee, and women too, Androgynous, ever-new – Divine Imaginatons free Exultng in Eternity.
Sangharakshita 1972
13 Bhante has been inspired by William Blake for over seven decades, since his frst 'acquaintance' with him 'per courtesy of Tootng Public Library,' as he says in his 2015 Moseley Miscellany.
Over six decades ago, he was writng, in A Survey of Buddhism, of the Jewelled Net of Indra as a traditonal evocaton of the principle of mutual interpenetraton, and he said
In the Far East this concepton of mutual interpenetraton fostered an attude towards nature very similar to that expressed by Blake in his vision of 'the world in a grain of sand'
And it is in respect of vision and imaginaton especially that Bhante has contnued to invoke the inspiraton of Blake in over a hundred seminars, books and lectures, especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I’ll talk a bit later about this – and the work Prajnamat has been doing to discover and share exactly what Bhante did say in those seminars, books and lectures, and the signifcance of all that.
It was in FWBO News No 36 Winter 1977, an issue devoted to 'Art and the Creatve Vision', that Bhante frst published his essay 'Buddhism and William Blake'. (In that same newsleter was the poem we just heard,'Homage to William Blake', writen in 1972). The essay was republished as a pamphlet many tmes and eventually incorporated into the book Alternatve Traditons.
So what is it about Blake that really captured Bhante's imaginaton as a teenager? In his 2015 Moseley Miscellany artcle about his literary heroes, Bhante writes:
My frst acquaintance with Blake and his work was through Swinburne's William Blake: A Critcal Essay, published in 1868...Swinburne quotes extensively from Blake's literary output, from the early lyrics to the last of the so-called Prophetc Books, thus giving me an idea of his extraordinary originality both as a poet and as a thinker. As I realised later, Blake was quite aware that he was original, but he did not seek to be original. He was 'original' because he was true to his own experience and his own spiritual vision. [I think this is the heart of it. Bhante goes on...]
At that tme I was greatly struck by The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a short work which includes what Blake called 'The Proverbs of Hell'. I was fascinated by its bizarre imagery and by its bold reversal of conventonal values, a reversal that reminded me of certain of the old Gnostcs and which seemed to antcipate Friedrich Nietzsche. I know how impressed I was by The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for a I remembering copying out the whole work, or as much of it as Swinburne gives, into one of my notebooks.
I also greatly enjoyed some of Blake's shorter poems, especially the beautful Thel, a minor Prophetc Book, and the much earlier 'To the Muses', a youthful lament for the disappearance of true poetry. Later, I became acquainted with Blake's graphic output...
I was partcularly fond of Blake's illustratons to the Book of Job, my favourite book of the Bible. In fact I came to own an editon of the authorized version of the Book of Job in which the text was printed as poetry, and which was illustrated, moreover, by Blake's sublime engravings. I spent many happy tmes poring over the precious volume, which I lost in the summer of 1943 when our house was destroyed by a German V-I or 'fying bomb'.
In the years – or decades – which followed my love for Blake steadily grew, and I had the satsfacton of seeing him become a popular fgure with the poets and writers of the Beat Generaton on both sides of the Atlantc, but especially with Allen Ginsberg. When Ginsberg came to see me in 1979 or 1980, in London, he chanted one of Blake's poems for my beneft, chantng in a hoarse, unmusical voice to the accompaniment of his fnger cymbals.
I was then stll [four decades afer his frst encounter with Blake!] struggling to understand Blake's major Prophetc Books, The Four Zoas, Jerusalem and Milton... At intervals, there are descriptve passages of 14 astonishing beauty, as well as spiritual insights such as are hardly to be met with elsewhere in English poetry...
Perhaps the most valuable and infuental part of [Blake's] legacy is his emphasis on the importance of the imaginaton. It is not just a human faculty but the man himself, in the deepest and truest sense, and without it there can be no true art and no true religion. It is the Divine Vision or Divine Humanity, in which all things have their existence.”
THE DIVINE IMAGE
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love All pray in their distress; And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is God, our farther dear, And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is Man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form, In heathen, Turk, or Jew; Where Mercyk Love, and Pity dwell There god is dwelling too.
William Blake: Songs of Innocence
William Blake’s Song of Innocence: The Divine Image recalls Bhante’s comment that we should take the image of the Order as the Thousand Armed Avalokitesvara literally.
So Bhante is saying that Blake's emphasis on the importance of imaginaton is the most valuable and influental part of his legacy because imaginaton “is not just a human faculty but the man himself, in the deepest and truest sense.” How are we to understand this? And what relevance has it for us in our Dharma practce? This
15 is central to what we're endeavouring to explore on this retreat as we bring ourselves into relatonship with Blake's imagery and imaginaton.
The great critc and writer Harold Bloom said (in a Dharmalife interview in 1997) “I cannot regard Blake as other than a spiritual preceptor”. And he goes on to say “What moves me... is the image-making power that is involved.” And that is what the Buddha did. He made images – metaphors, similes and parables which evoked the experience he'd had, which he'd been transformed by, but which he couldn't just tell people about. He needed to fnd a way of showing others a glimpse of a glimpse of what he'd 'seen'.
As Bhante says in a 1981 Tuscany seminar, Blake is like the old Buddhist Yogis – he “depicted things which he actually saw”, just as their “visions were the sources of Buddhist Iconograpy.”
Images can 'capture' our imaginaton. If we allow images such as the jewelled net of Indra to capture us, they will have a very different effect to, say, the images with which we are bombarded the in media and advertsing. Our Dharma life starts with some kind of glimpse of 'vision' (even if it's not spectacularly visual!) - for the Buddha there were the four sights. For us, there has been some vision or experience of suffering and some vision or experience of a possible end to that suffering. If we let them, these can be our guiding images, the 'stars we navigate by', the start and end of our journey or path, so far as we are able to conceive or imagine it.
I MUST CREATE A SYSTEM
Blake said:
I must create a system or be enslav'd by another man's. I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.
Jerusalem Plate 10
I need to zoom out to more of an overview, now, of Bhante's presentaton of the Dharma as influenced by Blake. Because Bhante has, in a sense, created a new 'system', a 'system of practce' by which we can practse the Buddha's teachings and, ultmately, go beyond all systems. And it's a system which relies on our capacity to respond to image and metaphor. If we approach Bhante with a literalistc mind we'll quickly run into the sand – as many have, and many do. Bhante is a poet and his presentaton of the Dharma relies as much on Sangharakshita I, the poet, as it does on Sangharakshita II, the philosophernmonk.
I want to start this exploraton by looking at the mult-dimensional nature of the systems of both Blake and Bhante. HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL
Let's return to that image at the heart of Bhante's presentaton of the Dharma, the jewelled net of Indra. It's an image of 'mutual interpenetraton', it's an image of interconnectedness and the workings of prattya samutpada. And it's an image for the 'open dimension of being', to use Guenther's rendering of the traditonal term 'sunyata'.
Let's see if we can feel into this image of Indra's net. What characterises it?
A sense of opening, a sense of expansion not contracton, a sense of freedom (a ‘taste of freedom’)… a sense of being related/in relaton
16 It's an image that invites us to connect outwards in all directons (north, south, east, west, zenith and nadir), as well as to recognise that we are, ourselves, all mult-faceted jewels. In order to shine in the net, as the jewels that we can be, we need all our facets, as it were, to be polished.
In order to communicate this vision, both Blake and Bhante have created systems in which there are horizontal and vertcal dimensions, which between them point us towards this felt sense of opening and expansion in all directons. Towards integraton both on a horizontal plan and a vertcal one.
This is one of the aspects of Bhante’s teaching which has most fascinated me and it was a vision of this, conjured by Saramat on a life-changing retreat in 1995 which led me to ask for ordinaton and which forms the basis of my entre understanding of the Dharma. It has given me an image, a felt sense, of how huge conflictng energies within myself (and the world) can be brought into creatve relatonship for the beneft of all beings. It’s like a sense of the paterning of the Dharma at work which I can see we need to translate it. We can only do this by developing our own livednfelt sense of this ‘vision’ and then translatng it into our own cultural terms.
What fascinates me about Blake is obviously very resonant with this. In a way it was the image conjured by the ttle of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell which captured my imaginaton about Blake as much as anything. I certainly knew I had ‘a heaven and a hell’ inside of me, and my whole spiritual life is about needing to fnd a way to ‘marry’ them to each other.
THE HORIZONTAL DIMENSION IN BLAKE’S SYSTEM
Blake’s four zoas can be seen as a horizontal representaton of the four ‘dis-integrated’ aspects of the fallen, unifed man, Albion. I’m going to simplify the presentaton of this and just show you a depicton of the four elements.
17 THE HORIZONTAL DIMENSION IN BHANTE’S SYSTEM
Since the 1950s when he wrote the Survey Bhante has recognised the need to integrate the different aspects and energies of ourselves. He uses the fve spiritual facultes as a way to illustrate this in Chapter 3 of the Survey (where he is using it as a principle by which to demonstrate the relatonship between the different schools of Mahayana Buddhism.) But the principle is found there all though his teachings, that we need to integrate reason and emoton, energy and samadhi – in a way deeply resonant with Blake’s ‘four-fold man’ - except, of course that there are fve spiritual facultes with mindfulness as the crucial extra central faculty – and arguably a crucial distncton between Bhante and Blake’s ‘systems’.
We can certainly see a strong resonance here between Bhante’s vision and Blake’s vision – whether or not this is Blake infuencing Bhante it would be hard to say. But it could be.
Just as I think it’s interestng that there’s a resonance between Albion as the ‘four-fold man’ and the place which Vajrasatva holds in our mythology as the kind-of ‘sixth buddha’ of the fve Buddha mandala, who sits above the mandala in the refuge tree and, as it were, ‘contains’ the whole mandala.
When Vidyadevi came to compile The Essental Sangharakshita, the mandala was the only patern she could fnd by which to organise the vast and hitherto disparate mass of material to be included. It's interestng to note for example that at the end of Mind in Harmony Subhut concludes with reference to the mandala:
“Concepts can only bring us a litle way towards non-conceptual understanding. For that reason, the Yogacārā linked the fve gnoses to an image, or an arrangement of images: the mandala of the fve Buddhas’.” (p216).
Various ways of correlatng Bhante’s ‘system of practce’ with the mandala patern have been described, eg by Tejananda and Kamalashila. Again and again we fnd this patern emerging behind Bhante’s thought. The Six Distnctve emphases of Triratna also resonate in this way (see ‘#Triratna50 Catalogue’ available from lulu.com for an exploraton of this).
18 THE VERTICAL DIMENSION IN BLAKE'S SYSTEM
Both Blake's 'system' and Bhante's 'system' are mult-dimensional, bringing horizontal and vertcal dimensions into relatonship. So I want to offer a perspectve on this which is best understood with the help of a visual image. The visual image is of an inverted pyramid, or cone.
We'll start with Blake and Blake's 'realms' as they emerge as our vision 'expands' or 'contracts'. In the verse I'm going to read, we start with the 'most expanded' form of vision, the 'fourfold vision', which is imaginaton in it's most fully developed form. In the verse, Blake describes a kind descent from this glorious 'fourfold vision' to 'Single Vision and Newton's Sleep', the uni-dimensional realm of literalism, materialism and a 'dead' world, always symbolised for Blake by Newton (and Bacon and Locke):
Now I fourfold vision see And a fourfold vision is given to me Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And three fold in sof Beulah’s night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep
So in terms of our inverted pyramid image, we have a 'descent'. So we're looking at the vertcal dimension which is widest (most expansiveninclusive) at the top and narrowest (least expansiveninclusive) at the botom:
TOP: the widest, 'fourfold' vision of the unifed (or we could say 'fully integrated') man. Eden. Divine imaginaton. It’s a living, energetc, alive state where there is a vigorous interchange between the elements. It’s not all passive, calm quiescence. Atula (in his 2010 talk ‘Mending the broken ladder’) says: “Divine Imaginaton is a state of mentalnartstc fghtnendeavour – not corporeal fght. Golgonooza constantly being built.”
NEXT DOWN: in Blake's 'threefold' vision, imaginaton or intuiton is lost from the four-fold whole. Moony Beulah, where man 'forgets' that in reality everything is a creaton of his imaginaton (“all deites reside in the human breast”) and sees his creaton as separate (and falls in love with it). Atula: “Lovernlovednchild; the 'married land'; Dream – where the masculine sleeps. A feminine world. If you try to hold onto it you fall.”
19 NEXT: two-fold vision, the realm of Generaton. - Atula: “The reciprocal relatonship with the worldnnature'. Sometmes described as ‘nature red in tooth and claw’”.
FINALLY: at the lowest level. Ulro. Atula: “Blake's archetypal realm of hell. Materialism. Subjectvely confned to human persons I.e. only humans are truly alive – rest are dead.”
So what we see as a resonance with Bhante's presentaton of the Dharma here is that:
ascent implies a simultaneous 'broadening' and integraton of more aspects of oneself. One might say it is increasingly 'inclusive' rather than 'exclusive'
that 'dry reason' or intellectual actvity characterises the lowest state, whereas imaginaton is the characteristc that completes the ideal 'fourfold state'. In Re-imagining the Buddha BhantenSubhut describes imaginaton as ‘the faculty of transcendence’.
THE VERTICAL DIMENSIONS IN BHANTE’S SYSTEM
Let us turn now to Bhante and the vertcal 'paternings' which run right through his presentaton of the Dharma, so: his use of the metaphor of 'levels' as a way of describing the lived experience of the unfoldment of Dharma practce. As well as traditonal 'levels', like the three levels of wisdom or the eight dhyanas, Bhante has 'coined' some of his own with his teachings on the ◦ 'levels' of Going for Refuge and ◦ in his presentaton of the fve niyamas.
It seems to me that the paterning in how Bhante describes the unfoldment of the Dharma life resonates strongly with Blake's hierarchy of vision and realms. So we can see Bhante the translator at work here. He has fashioned new tools and ways of describing the Dharma life of 'vision and transformaton', perhaps inspired by Blake.
Let's look at an example of the 'vertcal dimension': the example of the centrality of his teaching on the fve niyamas or levels of conditonality. Bhante has been critcised for using the term 'niyama' from the Buddhist traditon when the content of the teaching it denotes is substantally different. So let's consider two ways in which the influence of Blake might be seen in Bhante's decision to do this:
Firstly, Blake didn't hesitate to take up and use any term – or name – which might suit his creatve purposes. His sole and over-arching purpose was to enable people to share his vision and thus to be liberated from the suffering of 'single vision and Newton's sleep'. Thus Blake's writng is stuffed full of names and references, each of which have their own partcular meaning in the context of Blake's own 'system' which is based soundly in his own vision. So when Blake speaks of Jesus, he is using him as a synonym for imaginaton, Jerusalem is Liberty, Albion the four-fold unifed man and so forth.
Like Blake, Bhante has taken and 're-purposed’ the language of such words from the western traditon as:
evoluton the individual creatvity imaginaton discipleship
20 So Bhante has taken up and 're-purposed' the term 'niyama' to use within his 'own system' of an ascending order of conditonality.
The nadir of this system is utu-niyama, which interestngly corresponds to physics and materialism in much the same way as Blake's Ulro. (Though this isn’t the meaning of ‘utu niyama’ in the Pali Canon, as Dhivan could tell us.) Blake's Eden is the zenith of his system, his vision of the goal, atainable only by imaginaton. For Bhante it is the Dharma niyama. The vision of this level of conditonality he describes (in Buddhophany) as 'a glimpse of reality beyond ego clinging’. It can only be atained through imaginaton, which he describes both as 'the faculty of transcendence' and, ultmately as “the man himself, in the deepest and truest sense”. Without this ‘glimpse of reality beyond ego clinging’, he says, ‘our real faith will remain in the material world’.
DOCTRINE AND METHOD
Perhaps we can see in the example I've given that there may be a more 'systemic' way in which Bhante's thinking is resonant with (or influenced by) Blake, in terms of his presentaton of the methodology for realising one's vision? For Bhante, traditonal 'doctrines' hold true as the touchstone of Dharma derived from the Buddha – but might we see that, as to methodology, Bhante has repurposed the traditonal teaching on the niyamas (a later elucidaton of the principle of prattya samutpada) into a new tool for us in our culture?
BHANTE'S BLAKE THEMES AND THE MANDALA I’d been thinking it would be a great idea to make a really systematc study of all Bhante’s references to Blake and see what could be discovered from them. But I haven’t actually done that. I’ve dipped and diddled about, read and thought and mused and sung.
Meanwhile, at the start of 2017 Prajnamat began a substantal project to extract and analyse all Bhante's references to Blake in all the seminars, lectures and books. Having done that, he analysed the fndings and was able to tabulate which themes occurred most frequently when Bhante was referring to Blake. In over 100 references found, the top themes were:
1. Vision (as discussed) 2. Energy (& Reason) 3. Imaginaton
21 4. Dakini as Sangha Refuge
As we talked about this I realised that these four areas themselves paterned onto the mandala:
1. Vision representng a glimpse of wisdom (Eastern realm) – the vital role of vision as in vision and transformaton – staying faithful to vision 2. Dakini as sangha refugenemanatons relatng to emoton (Western realm) 3. Imaginaton as a path to Samadhi (Southern Realm) – (see Re-imagining the Buddha) • emphasis on arts and imaginaton • emphasis on metaphor not literalism 4. Energy connectng with the Northern Realm. emotonal equivalents to intellectual understandings • tantric precepts • emphasis on Team-based Right Livelihood
CONCLUSION
There are similarites between Blake and Bhante:
Vision - • 'Seeing with new eyes' - Blake's 'Guinea sun', Bhante's 'Seeing old things with new eyes, not seeing new things with old eyes'; seeing ‘The Unconditoned’ through ‘The Conditoned’. 'Everything that lives is holy' (essay in 'Crossing the Stream' which takes its ttle from Blake). lone visionaryn'true individual' The True Individual - one of Bhante's most pithy sentences on this is 'No individuals, no Sangha.' (What is the Sangha, p 87). And for Bhante, Blake was an outstanding example of an individual who was true to his own vision, no mater what. (Though arguably not a 'True Individual' in the sense that Bhante explores in What is the Sangha?). devoted to imaginaton AND and an established religious traditon (but not its insttutonalised form) Centrality of imaginaton - "It is not something we have, but something we are. It is not part of us, but the whole. We are imaginaton." (BhantenSubhut: Seven Papers, p75.). Blake: "Man is all imaginaton." (From 'On Berkeley'.). "Our life is the creaton of our mind." (Dhammapada) [That’s a loose translaton of ‘Experience is preceded by mind.”] Belief in need to free up unblock energyneros as a way to practsenovercome suffering Creatve tension - "Without contraries is no progression."; "Oppositon is true friendship." Aphoristc provoking people to change; "Any work of literature has an effect commensurate with the amount of effort it takes to understand it" - both Bhante and Blake believing in the power of literature being about elicitng a response from the reader, stmulatng the readers own facultes to respond. Not to invite a passive receptvity of content. Cf William Stafford “The life of the poem is the work of the reader.” philosophernmystc1 spiritual utlitarian2– i.e. use spiritual experience to beneft the world. (BSI) difference between 'perfect vision' and 'right understanding' vision not the sum of partal visions, but a 'gestalt' – persian carpet image of vision unfolding.3 Etymology - the relatonship of both Bhante and Blake to words is fascinatng - and how each takes certain wordsnconcepts and 'revalorises' (Saramat's term) them in the service of their own vision. Ideas of Eternity and Time
There are diferences between Blake and Bhante as proponents of a spiritual path:
1 Northrop Frye. Fearful Symmetry. [7]
2 Northrop Frye. Fearful Symmetry. [7]
3 1980: Milarepa’s First Meetng With Rechungpa [30] 22 It seems to me that Blake had a very defnite sense of a world in which suffering is transcended (his 'Eden', achieved by 'fourfold vision', imaginaton in its fullest and most profound sense.). But he had no real path to teach. Fundamentally, he lacked the 'key' that is the teaching on prattya samutpada, 'conditoned co- producton'. It's almost like he had the frst and third noble truths, but lacked the 2 nd and 4th, I.e. he recognised suffering and knew there was and end to suffering, but didn't understand the cause of suffering and have a path to teach in the way the Buddha did. He could 'show' what he saw, but not offer a practcal means for others to develop the same vision. Or like he could offer the frst limb of the noble eightold path but had no others with which to follow it up. I have an image, as I write, of Blake standing, pointng with all his might at 'the mountain peak' Bhante mentons in Vision and Transformaton. And he's speaking and gestculatng furiously, but in a language which very few people can understand. He's not a teacher and people have to 'catch' what he's saying and create or fnd their own path. Many people turn away shaking their heads in bafement, irritaton or pity, considering him mad, or not worth the effort to understand what he's saying.
The 'golden thread' which I sense runs through Blake, the Buddha and Bhante is this recogniton of a way of seeing. I think this is uterly central to Bhante's understanding of what the Buddha meant by samyak drisht in the sense of Perfect Vision. The fact that he was reading Blake in his teens, as well as the Diamond Sutra and Sutra of Hui Neng seems likely, to me, to have affected how Bhante interpreted the visionary experience he had at that tme, and to have encouraged him in fdelity to it. Blake also offered him a perspectve on the conflicted energies of Sangharakshita I and Sangharakshita II, with his proverb of hell 'Without contraries is no progression'.
Imaginaton is key to understanding the unity of Bhante's thought (and the Order). Blake is a key to understanding Bhante’s vision and the pivotal place of imaginaton in that.
(Satyalila: Notes for a talk on the frst Blake retreat at Adhisthana, July 2017)
23 BHANTE ON BLAKE
A reader in four parts
compiled by Prajnamat
From Sangharakshita’s Lectures, Seminars, and Books
1. Vision
2. Energy & Reason
3. Imaginaton
4. Dakini as Sangha Refuge
24 BHANTE ON BLAKE 1: VISION
Now I fourfold vision see And a fourfold vision is given to me Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And three fold in sof Beulah’s night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep4
4 Blake. Leter to Thomas Buts 1802 25 INTRODUCTION
This reader draws together all the references Bhante has made to William Blake where he is artculatng the theme of vision. The overview contains a brief descripton of Blake’s hierarchical concepton of vision followed by a summary of the references Bhante makes to this grouped according to the partcular points he was making at the tme.
The intenton is to make it as easy as possible for the reader to dig down from this overview to the full text of what Bhante was saying in its context.
My belief is that there is a signifcant facet of Bhante’s understanding of Buddhist Vision that he is drawing on Blake to artculate, and that this is very much part of his endeavour to communicate the dharma in a western cultural context.
OVERVIEW
BLAKE’S HIERARCHY OF VISION In Blake, the unfallen state of Eden is described as fourfold: a harmonious union of the mandala of four zoas, or aspects of the unfallen man: Urizen (reason) in the south, Luvah (emoton) in the east, Tharmas (passion) in the west, and Urthona (imaginaton) in the north. Blake’s fourfold vision is the vision of the unfallen man in Eden.5
The fall begins when the unfallen, creatve, man sees his creaton as separate – a female emanaton – and falls in love with her. He enters the state of Beulah, described as threefold for lover, beloved, and child. Blake’s threefold vision is the vision of Beulah.
From here, he falls to the world of Generaton, which is nature red in tooth and claw – seen as twofold for predator and prey. However, Blake’s twofold vision is not the vision of Generaton, but more generally the capacity for spiritual as well as mundane vision. The ability to see a host of heavenly angels rather than a golden disk about the size of a guinea, when looking at the sun6.
Lastly comes Ulro, the dead mechanical world of physics. Single vision and Newton’s sleep.
BHANTE’S REFERENCES TO THIS
TOTAL VISION
Bhante associates Blake’s fourfold vision of the ‘total man’ with the ability to see the ‘total truth’ 7. For Bhante, Vision is total and integral, not the sum of partal visions: “You’ve got to have an imaginatve apprehension of the Gestalt of the whole”8. In relaton to Wordsworth and Blake, Bhante describes the achievement of “a true
5 Blake. The Four Zoas, a prophecy. 6 Blake. A Vision of the Last Judgement What it will be Questond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fre somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Aomighty I queston not my Corporeal or Vegatve Eye any more than I would Queston a Window concerning a Signt I look thro it & not with it. 7 1975: Pali – Udana [354] 8 1982: The Three Jewels Ch11-Nature of Existence [214] 26 vision, in early adolescence” which one then “should seek to deepen … to mature … but not to lose” 9. There is a clear parallel with his descripton of his own experience of vision arising in his teens on reading the Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui-Neng10
TWOFOLD VISION As Bhante emphasises, the key to twofold vision is having “won through to any positve creatve vision” over and beyond seeing through false vision11. The distncton here is between having any sort of spiritual vision as opposed to a purely mundane vision.
Elsewhere Bhante emphasises the distncton between samatha and vipassana, using “spiritual” to refer to samatha and the cultvaton of the dhyanas and “transcendental” to refer to vipassana and insight in to the nature of reality12. This distncton is not his emphasis in relaton to Blake’s twofold vision. Vision in this context could then be either associated with dhyana or with insight. In describing the twofold vision as seeing the Unconditoned “behind the conditoned or, as it were, shining through it because your perceptons have been cleansed, as Blake would say”13 he is clearly associatng vision with insight. However, in quotng Blake’s aphorism “a fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees” 14 to describe how either the wise1516 or the spiritual practtoner conversant with dhyana17 sees the world differently, he indicates that it could be either. He goes on to develop the associaton of Blake’s visionary experience with dhyana, describing these states as ones in which “the subject-object duality becomes less” suggestng that a degree of insight is inherent to dhyanic experience18.
SINGLE VISION Single vision for Blake is to see only a world of dead objects. Bhante describes this as, “seeing things just as objects in geometrical space” with the associated tendency to relate to living beings as “mechanisms” that one can “tnker with”19. He contrasts this “very narrow, restricted sort of point of view” with the concentrated, pure, unmixed vision of an integrated mind20.
LOSS OF VISION Bhante describes how spiritual vision can be gradually lost, with the artstc depicton of an original visionary experience gradually losing the associaton with the original experience, becoming “purely conventonal religious art … in which the paintngs, images and so on no longer mirror the higher spiritual reality”21; being
9 Sangharakshita. The Essental Sangharakshita 222, from Know Your Mind 37-43 10 Sangharakshita. The History of My Going For Refuge 19-20 11 1982: Pali-Samannaphala Suta [34] 12 Lecture 125: The spiritual Signifcance of Confession [5] 13 1982: The Three Jewels Ch11-Nature of Existence [46] 14 Blake. Proverbs of Hell, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 5 15 1980: Milarepa-Rechungpa’s Repentance [161] 16 1988: Guhyaloka Questons [59] 17 1975: Pali – Udana [324] 18 1982: Jewel Ornament of Liberaton – Chapter 1 Motve [31] 19 1982: Jewel Ornament of Liberaton – Chapter 4 Transitoriness [132] 20 1982: The Buddha’s Law among the Birds tapes 01-03 21 The Door of Liberaton Seminar [31] 27 gradually vulgarized by commercial use22; or worn down by the ratonal materialism of the Industrial Revoluton23.
Bhante contrasts the “pure bright, transparent, luminous colours” of visionary art such as Blake’s illustratons with the “chocolate brown age” when vision is lost.24
FIGURATIVE AND LITERAL VISION
Bhante describes spiritual vision as fguratve: a translaton of “spiritual perceptons into visual terms”25 in contrast to mundane, or single vision, which he associates with literal-mindedness26. Here he’s using ‘fguratve’ in the positve sense of being in touch with “a higher faculty of archetypal knowledge which we may call ‘vision,’ ‘insight,’ or ‘imaginaton.’”27
Elsewhere he emphasises that descriptons of genuine vision, such as Blake’s are not “rhetorical fallacies” or “just sentmentalising”. On the contrary, “It was his direct experience”, and the import of poetry to Blake was the communicaton of this experience, rather than the aesthetc form of the poems.28
So, in Bhante’s writngs, ‘fguratve’ may hold the positve associaton of the imaginal faculty, or the negatve associaton of ‘rhetorical fallacies’ and ‘sentmentalising’. The converse, ‘literal’ may hold the positve associaton of immediate, unambiguous, and related to direct experience29, or the negatve associaton of ‘literal-mindedness’ and lack of imaginaton. The difference is generally clear in the context.
This play of ‘literal’ and ‘fguratve’ is found in the interpenetraton of the overarching imaginatve vision with the ‘minute partculars’ of immediate sense experience in Blake’s aphorism:
To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower Hold infnity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour30 Bhante associates this aphorism with the Buddhist teaching on interpenetraton described in the Gandhavuha Sutra and illustrated in the image of Indra’s net31, and with the experience of Reality itself.32
22 1981: Mitrata Omnibus Tuscany pre-ordinaton retreat [30] 23 The Essental Sangharakshita, 3223, from The Inconceivable Emancipaton 96-99 24 1982: The Three Jewels Ch11-Nature of Existence [147] 25 1982: Nanamoli Chapter 11 [39] 26 1987: Study Leaders Vimilakirt Nirdesa [158]
27 Sangharakshita , Who is the Buddha? [14] 28 1981: Pali-Dhammapada Vineahall [55] 29 Sangharakshita’s aphorism “The teachings contained in the Dhammapada are literal truth, and deserve to be engraved on our hearts in leters of gold – or fre” in Peace is a Fire can be read this way. 30 Blake Auguries of Innocence, in The Pickering Manuscript 31 Lecture 95: “The Universal Perspectve of Mahayana Buddhism” [1]. Indra’s net does not in fact feature in the Gandhavyuha Sutra, but the image of Vairocana’s Tower at the end of the Sutra is similar. 32 Lecture 95: “The Universal Perspectve of Mahayana Buddhism” [8]. This extends an equivalent piece in “A Survey of Buddhism”[859]. 28 For Blake, reality was to be seen in the ‘minute partculars’ of sense experience, not in abstract generalisatons33, but along with this, Bhante points out, Blake understood the Imaginaton to be “the operaton of the whole man or woman” which “is able to apprehend or respond to or experience reality as minute partculars in their totality”34. This fts the aphorism: a grain of sand is a ‘minute partcular’ and a world is a ‘totality’.
CONCLUSION
In the new preface to Vision and Transformaton Bhante emphasises that far from just proceeding on the basis of a ratonal understanding, to follow the path of Perfect Vision and Perfect Transformaton ‘you frst of all have a sort of spiritual vision … and then transform your life in accordance with that vision.’ 35 This is a partcular emphasis of Bhante’s, that ‘Most Theravadins have forgoten, in practce’36, and this is the heart of what he is endeavouring to communicate to an audience of Western Buddhists through drawing on Blake in the references covered in this reader.
33 For example, in Blake’s prophecy Jerusalem, plate 55: He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Partculars General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flaterer: For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Partculars And not in generalizing Demonstratons of the Ratonal Power. 34 Sangharakshita: Wisdom Beyond Words [259] 35 Sangharakshita: preface to the 2007 editon of Vision and Transformaton [8] 36 Sangharakshita: preface to the 2007 editon of Vision and Transformaton [8] 29 SOURCES
BOOKS
A SURVEY OF BUDDHISM [859]We have already seen that the Avataṁsaka Sūtra has been spoken of as occupying an intermediate positon between the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra Schools. More properly might it be regarded as supplying the connectng link between the Yogācāra and the Tantra. The Madhyamaka had declared that all things were in reality śūnyatā. The Yogācāra, afer identfying śūnyatā with “Absolute Mind, had explained ‘the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth’ as mere phenomena of consciousness. The Avataṁsaka, of which the Gaṇḍavyūha is a part, took up this idea of the essental non-duality of things and interpreted it, as we saw in our account of these sūtras in Secton 8, in terms of the unobstructed mutual interpenetraton of all existng objects, both transcendental and mundane. Just as the jewels of Indra’s Net reflect each other, so all things are reflected in Absolute Mind and Absolute Mind is reflected in all things. In the Far East this concepton of mutual interpenetraton fostered an attude towards nature very similar to that expressed by Blake in his vision of ‘the world in a grain of sand’ or by Tennyson when, contemplatng the ‘flower in the crannied wall’, he felt that if he could fully understand it he would know the true nature of God and man.
THE ESSENTIAL SANGHARAKSHITA [222]Wordsworth himself is a very clear, though unusual, example of someone who achieved a true vision in early adolescence which he managed to sustain well into his thirtes. William Blake is another – indeed, he never really lost contact with his childhood. Though he was a very mature person he never grew up at all in the sense of becoming corrupted with (in Traherne’s phrase) “the dirty devices of the world.”
There will always be people who say that it is a necessary part of one’s development to taste something of the dirty devices of this world but this is a wrong view. Ideally, one should try to remain an adolescent in this positve sense for as long as possible. One should seek to deepen one’s vision, to mature it – but not to lose it.37
[323]Much the same happened to John Stuart Mill, at least for part of his life. Even as a small boy his favorite subjects were logic and politcal economy; and as he grew older he found that he became more and more cut off from poetry. It is not just that he was cut off from poetry in the literary sense; he was – to put it rather poetcally – cut off from the poetry of life.
Today we are all exposed to this sort of danger. We all suffer from this sort of deprivaton, at least to some extent. We have been suffering from it, in fact, since the Industrial Revoluton, at the beginning of which William Blake warned against the loss of what he called “the divine vision.” He critcized Bacon, Newton, and Locke so vigorously because he felt that they tended to limit humanity to the realm of historical reality, the realm of tme, space, and causality. In his own literary and visual creatve work Blake, of course, was not limited in this way. In his Prophetc Books especially he explores the deeper levels of human experience. Blake’s profound concern with archetypal forces and forms must explain why he contnues to hold such a fascinaton for people today.
37 From Know Your Mind 37-43 30 WISDOM BEYOND WORDS [259]Plato would have said that reality does indeed reside in such universals rather than in partculars, and it might well seem that abstractons are large and embracing and whole, while partculars are bity litle separate things. But Plato seems to have experienced these universals not as abstract concepts but more as archetypes, so his experience of reality is not necessarily to be set in contradistncton to that of people who, like William Blake, experience reality as 'minute partculars'. When William Blake speaks of the experience of reality as being that of 'minute partculars', he is speaking about the operaton of the Imaginaton, and for Blake the Imaginaton is not a faculty, but the operaton of the whole man or woman, with reason and emoton fully integrated. And it is through imagery, symbols, myths, and metaphors that the Imaginaton, the whole man or woman, is able to apprehend or respond to or experience reality as minute partculars in their totality. If you do this, you are not just experiencing reality in one aspect, which leaves you sliding on the surface, nor are you just sliding from one aspect to another: rather, you are seeing all aspects of reality, not just on the surface, but in their depths.
[264]This verse tells us that the viparyasas are 'just one Suchness in this Emptness'. Although the spiritual content of the word sunyata ('Emptness') is actually positve - or rather, neither positve nor negatve - the word itself connotes the negatve: and absence. Tathata, which means 'thusness' or 'suchness', and indicates just the same reality, is, we may therefore say, its positve counterpart. Tathata points to the inexpressibility or reality, which means, if you like, the inexpressibility of individual things, of Blake's 'minute partculars'. Whenever we try to describe something there always remains in our experience of it something which is incommunicable. In the end all we can do is point to the thing and say 'It is as it is'; 'It is thus'; 'Such is it'; 'Thus- so'. The 'thusness' of things is their unique, ineffable quality or essence. The reality of things cannot be described; it can only be experienced. Everything - whether samsara or nirvana, the conditoned or the Unconditoned, changing or
[265] changeless - is such as it is. Happiness is happiness; suffering is suffering. All things are equally indescribable. But when we describe everything as 'just one Suchness', let us be careful not to imply that tathatha is, in even the subtlest sense, some kind of 'stuff'. It is an operatonal concept - so it is only in a manner of speaking that we can reify it. When we point at things, we can only indicate their 'suchness', not their 'whatness'.
31 LECTURES
LECTURE 95: THE UNIVERSAL PERSPECTIVE OF MAHAYANA BUDDHISM [1]There's a very important Mahayana sutra called the Gandhavyuha Sutra, which means the Scripture of the Cosmic Array or the Cosmic Adornment, or if you like the Adornment of the Cosmos. And in this partcular sutra, in this partcular text, the Buddha gives a very well known and very important simile; and it's called the simile of Indra's net. Now Indra, according to the Hindu mythology which Buddhism, as it were, inherited from Hinduism, Indra is the King of the Gods. He's said to dwell in the Heaven of the Thirty Three Gods. And Indra, the King of the Gods, possesses a number of treasures. And amongst these treasures, we're told, according to traditon, there is a net. And this net is not an ordinary net. This net is made entrely of jewels. And this net, made entrely of jewels, and this net made entrely of jewels has a number of wonderful and extraordinary characteristcs. And one of these characteristcs is that each and every one of the jewels in the net reflects all the other jewels, in other words reflects the rest of the net; and all the other jewels reflect that individual jewel. So that, the Buddha says in this sutra, all the jewels shine in each, and each of them shines in all.
Now this is a simile; as a simile it has a meaning. So according to the Buddha in the Gandhavyuha Sutra, the whole universe with everything in it is just like this, is just like Indra's net of jewels. The universe consists of innumerable phenomena of various kinds, just as the net, just as Indra's net, consists of innumerable jewels of all shapes, all sizes, and all degrees of brilliance. We usually think of the phenomena that make up the universe as being separate, and distnct, irreducibly so in fact, from one another, as being mutually exclusive. We usually think of the universe as consistng of a number of partcular things, and these things are all quite separate, all quite distnct from one another. This is how we in fact experience the universe, as consistng of innumerable different things. But in Reality, so the Buddha says, it is not like that at all. From the standpoint of the highest spiritual experience, the spiritual experience of the Buddha as revealed in the Gandhavyuha Sutra, all the phenomena of the universe, whether great or small, near or distant, all mutually reflect one another, mirror one another, in a sense even, we may say, contain one another. All contain each, and each contains all. And this applies throughout space, and throughout tme, so that tme and space are in effect transcended. Because everything that happens is happening now, and everything that is happening anywhere is happening here. So in this way all the categories of logical thought, all the categories of reason, are superseded. There's a very popular saying taken from the scriptures, which you fnd again and again quoted in the far East, in all the Mahayana Buddhist countries, which enters very deeply, very intmately, into their proverbial expressions, their literature, their poetry, even eventually into their everyday life. And the saying is that each and every single grain of dust in the universe contains all the Buddhafelds, as they're technically called, all the Buddha worlds that is to say, of the ten directons of space and the three periods of tme. They're all contained in a single grain of dust. Now this might seem at frst sight a rather unfamiliar, a rather strange, a rather bizarre, a rather exotc insight, but we do have something rather like it a litle nearer home. We may say, for example, that the English poet and painter and visionary William Blake had a glimpse of this sort of state, this sort of reality, when he says, or rather when he sings:
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And Heaven in a wild fower,
Hold the universe in the palm of one's hand,
And eternity in an hour.
These are very familiar lines, it's a very familiar verse, but people usually don't take it very seriously. They think, 'Oh well, it's just a flight of poetc fancy. Afer all, he didn't mean what he was saying. Surely Blake had never actually seen the world in a grain of sand, it's just a fgure of speech, it's just something not to be taken
32 very seriously at all. But Blake wasn't just a poet. Blake, as I've said, was also a visionary, a mystc, and these lines of his, this verse of his, surely springs, surely expresses, an insight and a realizaton, not perhaps in principle, in essence, very different from that of the Gandhavyuha Sutra, that of Indra's net of jewels.
[8]Fifhly there's Samadhi. This is another untranslatable term, and it has three distnct levels of meaning. First of all there's the level of meaning which is concentraton, that is to say unifcaton of all one's psychic energies, the bridging, the overcoming, of all the schisms as it were in one's being. And then there's samadhi in the sense of the experience, the personal experience, of higher and ever higher levels of consciousness, as when we formally meditate. And this includes the development of what are known in the Buddhist traditon as the supernormal powers, those of telepathy, of clairaudience, of clairvoyance and so on. So this is samadhi in its second level of meaning. And then there's samadhi in the third and the highest sense, which is experience of Reality itself, or at least receptvity to the direct influence of Reality. And this of course begins in small ways, it begins in the form of flashes of Insight, like perhaps that flash of Insight which Blake must have had when he wrote that verse which I quoted earlier on. So these are the three levels of samadhi, concentraton, meditaton in the sense of experience of higher levels of consciousness, and experience of Reality itself, beginning with flashes and then fully.
33 SEMINARS
1975: PALI – UDANA [324]
S: It does seem like that, yes. One does. You could also say that, even when you are in the highest dhyana state, supposing you open your eyes, what then? You don't see as you usually would see, because you are not the same sort of individual; but it is not as though you had become blind. There is percepton, but it is a different kind of percepton. To quote Blake again, 'A fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees', but there is a tree there, and they both see it. But inasmuch as the consciousness is different, they see in different ways. So we must not think of the fourth dhyana as necessarily a sort of cataleptc state in which you are cut off. Yes, it may be that, for a while, you are so deeply absorbed that you are completely oblivious of what is happening outside. But that is not the highest state or stage, as it were; you return to your awareness of the world, but it is a different kind of awareness. The world itself seems transformed; (it is) not that you remain oblivious to it and in order to become aware of it again you have to sink to a lower level - not quite like that.
[354]
S: Right, yes. You can overcome this only by being connected with a total traditon in which all the aspects of the Truth are - if one can speak in that way - understood and taken into consideraton, and where any one- sidedness on one's own part can be checked and corrected. I couldn't help thinking that the vision or sight of the man with eyes is a litle bit like what Blake says about the fourfold vision - not the vision of only one part of you, not just single vision, as he calls it, the vision of a very one-sided and degenerate reason or intellect, but the vision of the whole man, the fourfold man, that is to say the vision which takes into consideraton not only reason but emoton and imaginaton, and even instnct, perhaps one could say, as well. So the fourfold vision is all of these, as it were, blending together, and seeing totally.
Devaraja: When you say instnct, would intuiton ...
S (interruptng): Well, I am just mentoning that because it is in Blake. I don't want to insist upon it partcularly from a Buddhist point of view. There is just the general idea of the total Truth being apprehensible only by the total individual. You can't apprehend the total Truth with just one of your facultes. Just as one blind man - or, for the mater of that, any number of blind men - can't apprehend the total truth of the elephant, or the total truth which is the elephant.
In other words, it is not enough to put together any number of partal visions. You have to have a total vision which is more than the sum total of partal visions. The total vision is undivided - indivisible, even. And so long as you are a divided and fragmented being, you will never see it.
This is probably one of the most important parables in the whole Pali Canon. You notce the way in which the Buddha tells the parable:
34 1980: MILAREPA-RECHUNGPA'S REPENTANCE [157-8]
S: so in revealing to him, in revealing to Rechungpa that the goats which he saw were only a magical illusion, you know, created by Milar' epa, he's also teaching him that the whole of existence is like that, the whole of existence is like a magical illusion, that is to say it is perceived it is experienced in that sense it is there, but it has no absolute existence and is not to be confused with that which is, you know, absolute and absolutely existng. Do you see the point?
S: All right then, he goes on to say
Simon Sorry, is that a bit like what Blake talks about the doors of percepton being cleansed, you can see the infnite instead of what we normally see, though, I don't know quite how you describe it, but a chink.
S: Yes or perhaps you could say it more like what Blake means when he speaks of "the fool does not see the same tree that the wise man sees. The percepton is the same but the understanding is different
35 1981: MITRATA OMNIBUS TUSCANY PRE-ORDINATION RETREAT [30]
S: So to come back to the point of departure, you know, it will no doubt happen that people within the FWBO will have sort of visionary experiences and will want to actually depict them concretely rather in paintngs or you know, some other form either themselves or with others who are skilled in that partcular way. I mean in that manner a sort of traditon may well develop with regard to wrathful deites as well as with regard to peaceful ones. I mean we mustn't forget that the, the
[31] basis of Buddhist Art in this sort of way, the basis of the representatons in Thangkas and even in three- dimensional forms and images, is visionary in Buddhism. Very much like Blake's Art, you know Blake depicted things which he actually saw, whether it was Urizen or whether it was the ghost of a flea or whether it was Orc bustng his bonds or whatever. He saw these things. These were actual visionary experiences and he happened to have the, the artstc gifs necessary to, to depict them in form and colour. So this is just what happened in the case of the old Buddhist Yogis where visions were the sources of Buddhist Iconography; they all had glimpses of the, you could say, the Sambhogakaya. So the same with Blake, you know, he had glimpses of his own imaginal world.
…
Of course one must also recognize that in the course of generatons the original vision may get lost or the feeling for the vision may get lost. For instance, if you take Blake, take for example Blake, since that has been mentoned. Well, for instance there's, well all right, his well-known paintng of 'Glad Day' - there's several versions. All right supposing that somebody is quite impressed by this paintng of 'Glad Day' which no doubt represents a visionary experience on the part of Blake. O.K. so he reproduces, maybe he wants
[32] to use it for a design for the dust jacket of a book. So all right, it's reproduced, all right supposing someone copies that again, for some other purpose, maybe an advertsement for soap because if you use so-and-so's soap, well it gives you a glad day! (laughter) So it's copied, so it becomes a bit vulgarized and you get further and further away from Blake's original vision, do you see the sort of thing I mean?
36 1981: PALI-DHAMMAPADA VINEHALL [11]
Clive: What it puts me in mind of that aphorism by Blake "see the whole universe in one grain of sand"...you feel that the Buddha is the whole universe in the shape of a human being.
S: Yes, The "awakened one whose sphere is endless". But you notce also that the language is very simple. It translates into English quite untechnically. So there is conquest, sphere, endless, pathless, these are quite simple English words really aren't they? There is nothing very technical here but the meaning is quite adequately conveyed as far as words go. The Pali actually is even simpler. You can see, just if you look how few Pali words there are compared with the English.
[55]
This is why I said in an aphorism in 'Peace is a Fire', I forget the actual words: but it might have been even, it wasn't that people read the poets for instance and they don't realize that the poets actually mean what they say. Even they say "Well, poetry's an exaggeraton and hyperbole, you cannot take it seriously" But actually that is exactly how you should take it how you must take it if you are to understand it at all. The Poets mean what they say. You are to take it at its literal face value, initally at least. They were not indulging in sort of rhetorical fallacies. When Blake for instance said that he sees the world in a grain of sand he meant that he saw it, it was not a fgure of speech, he meant that, quite literally, that he was able to look at a grain of sand and actually see the world in it, that was his actual experience. And he meant that as a sort of expression of his insight into the nature of Reality. It wasn't just a prety litle poem. But you get people quotng in a sentmental sort "Oh to see the world in a grain of sand" and what is the rest of it "Heaven in a wild flower" It becomes sort of sentmental, but for Blake it wasn't anything sentmental. It was his direct experience. It was just how he saw it, just how he felt, just how he experienced it. I mean similarly Coleridge, when he wrote, "All thoughts that,.. whatever strs this mortal frame etc., etc., all are but ministers of Love and feed his sacred flame", well you know we may well disagree with Coleridge, but that is what he meant. He meant that to be taken quite seriously. He wasn't just sentmentalising. So you know we need, that is to say I'm almost sort of saying that poets aren't just poets in the ordinary superfcial sense. They are very serious people saying what they really think about life, in the best possible way that they can which is in the form of poetry. So it really sort of degrades them to just approach them as culture. The great poets are far, far more than just culture. They are nearer to say, the great poets of English are nearer to Buddhism in the sense than culture in the sense that the aesthete understands the term. The aesthete will never understand Shakespeare or Milton or
[56]
Shelley or Coleridge or Byron or D.H. Lawrence never understand them because he doesn't take life seriously enough. He doesn't see that Nirvana is supreme. They however dimly in their own way had some sense of value. They saw in a manner of speaking that Nirvana was supreme, all of them, though they might not have put it in that way and they certainly weren't Buddhists. But they had some sense of higher values far transcending their own art. That is why sometmes they were impatent with their own art. It didn't mean as much to them as it meant to some of their so-called admirers. I mean, Lawrence didn't care whether he spoiled the artstc shape of a story provided he was able to say what he wanted to say. But the aesthete would say, "Oh what a pity, he intruded his message into this beautful story and spoilt its form" (laughter) Well in a way it is a pity that he couldn't have had a perfect form and his message too or maybe that is a pity. But we cannot regret the breaking of the beautful artstc form for the sake of Lawrence saying something which he really felt it necessary to say. It is much the same when sometmes, when you project qualites that you would like to experience on to another human being, you are just sort of viewing them aesthetcally, you are not seeing them as they are. You are seeing them as it were in more cultural terms. You are not allowing
37 them perhaps to be a real live human being. You want them to behave like a work of art... so that you can admire that partcular work of art. You don't like it when the human reality breaks through the aesthetc fantasy. So it comes back to what the Buddha says, "Nirvana is supreme" put frst things frst and this is especially so in the case of culture. You don't really appreciate culture unless you can see beyond culture. The greatest poets were not concerned just with poetry in the narrow sense. You see Milton certainly wasn't, Shelley certainly wasn't. Shelley's basic aims, it seems in a way, were politcal and he used his poetry for a politcal purpose, using the word politcal quite broadly. He wanted to ameliorate the conditon of the human race, that was his real interest in life, not poetry in the narrow sense. I mean, we do say, that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of Mankind, but you know what a concepton of the poet, not just the aesthete, not just the maker of prety verses or not what Blake called "the tame fnisher of ... the tame high fnisher of paltry blots"
38 1982: JEWEL ORNAMENT OF LIBERATION – CHAPTER 1 MOTIVE [31]
So when you say, free yourself from sense experience, when you no longer have any desire for sense experience you may even be quite oblivious, literally to the senses. Your consciousness may be turned within. You experience the dhyana states progressively - that is to say, the rupa dhyana states. Consciousness becomes more and more unifed, more emotonally positve. The subject-object duality becomes less, though it is not yet abolished. So you start perceiving things, you start seeing things in a different way. You start seeing, as it were, or even literally, from the point of view of Buddhist traditon, a different world. You're in a different world. And you don't see as it were, gross physical objects. You see rupas. You see deva forms. You see a sort of divine landscape, a transfgured landscape. You see a heavenly world. You see heavenly beings, archetypal forms and images in that world. Do you see what I mean? This is the rupa loka. The world you might say, of visionary experience. The world of visionary and meditatve experience.
Dhammadinna: Does that mean you see that within or do you see the external world transformed?
S: Well it's both. You experience this, as it were, higher world. It seems as though people's experience varies. It might even be a queston of levels. You can see as it were, this higher world shining through from behind the sense world itself. As it were, illuminatng the sense world from within. Or, it may be that the sense world as it were, vanishes and you only perceive that higher world. One can think in the West of
[32] some of the experiences of William Blake, when he saw, well, angelic forms or whatever.
Kay: Would he have been in a dhyanic state, or something?
S: Yes, yes. I'm leaving aside litle refnements of distnctons, as it were, but it's basically in a sort of dhyanic state, state of higher consciousness in which one sees things in this different way, and also sees a sort of luminous ...
39 1982: JEWEL ORNAMENT OF LIBERATION – CHAPTER 4 TRANSITORINESS [132]
S: This is touching on it on a quite controversial area, but one gets the impression that when one reads discussions about aborton and things like that that the body here is also being treated as an object, even by the very people in some cases whose body it happens to be. As though you are just thinking in terms of tnkering with the mechanism. So the more one thinks about it, the more one feels that our whole outlook is very one-sided and this is what Blake was protestng against when it frst started to happen to any extent. You know, protestng against "single vision", as he called it, the purely scientfc vision, that is seeing things just as objects existng in a geometrical space, seeing them as just possessed of length, breadth and heights - and no, as it were, inner dimension. He called that "The Banishing of the Imaginaton".
40 1982: PALI-SAMANNAPHALA SUTTA [34]
So you have got a sort of analogy between the old Vedic conventons and these teachers and the Buddha on the one hand and ethnic Greek religion, ethnic Greek religious practce, and the Sophists and Socrates and Plato on the other. Do you see this? Well you fnd this in modern tmes even: there are lots of people who have seen through the churches, seen through the politcal partes, and so on, but they are in an intermediate stage, they haven't won through to any positve creatve vision in the way say that Blake did. You see Blake saw through, I might say, Bacon, Newton, and Locke, but he not only saw through them, he won through to a creatve vision of his own, which went far beyond just negatng the teachings of those partcular people.
So it is easy enough to negate, it's easy enough to be critcal and cynical, but to go beyond that and achieve some more comprehensive outlook or some more creatve vision is much more difcult. You fnd this sometmes with the secularists and humanists. I get the secularist monthly, 'The Free Thinker', but again one is ofen so conscious of its limitatons. You agree with everything they say about the pope, about Mrs Thatcher, and so on and so forth, but it's all negatve, it's all critcal. There is hardly anything which is really positve and creatve and inspiring. They've not won through to any larger vision; and it's so cramping, so confning sometmes, even though you agree with everything they say, but you want more than just negatons. Negatons are not very inspiring.
David: They're almost like the preliminary to inspiraton aren't they?
41 1982: THE BUDDHA’S LAW AMONG THE BIRDS TAPES 01-03 Silaratna: There's an element of concentraton.
S: There's an element of concentraton, yes. That's why we ofen speak of 'single-mindedness'. Because I know Blake speaks of 'single vision' in a negatve sense – it means a very narrow, restricted sort of point of view - I'm not thinking in these sort of terms. But purity of vision implies singleness of vision in the sense that you are concentrated, you are giving your whole mind, your whole atenton. You are integrated. Sometmes I think that, or sometmes I say, we shouldn't think of purity in sort of moral terms. We should think of purity in chemical terms. Do you know what I mean by that? When we say something is chemically pure, what do we mean?
Khemananda: It's not contaminated by anything.
S: It's not contaminated, it's not mixed. So purity of vision, in this sense, is vision which is not mixed with anything. There's nothing extraneous, you're not in the least distracted. There's no ambivalence. There's no inner conflict. You're just concerned with the thing that you're looking at, the thing that you're trying to understand. Your vision is so pure in that sense. It's uncontaminated. Completely concentrated.
42 1982: THE THREE JEWELS CH11-NATURE OF EXISTENCE [46]
S: Yes. Of course. There are two meanings of sunyata here in a way, or two aspects of sunyata. Well, altogether there are more than two but you sort of pass from the sunyata of the conditoned to the sunyata of the Unconditoned which is not really a separate sunyata - language has great limitatons here. One can only say it’s another dimension, it’s that deeper dimension of the relatve reality itself. So it does not mean, you know, that you, sort of, banish your experience of the conditoned world or conditoned reality, but it’s completely transformed. But that conditoned reality is stll there. You’re stll eatng and drinking and laughing and talking and seeing trees and houses but you’re seeing them in a completely different way. On the one hand illusion is no longer present because self-centredness is no longer present, unskilful emotons are no longer present, so your percepton is no longer distorted. You’re no longer a victm of the viparyasas; your perceptons are no longer upside down; you’re no longer seeing the conditoned as permanent and pleasurable and so on. You know you see it as impermanent and painful and all the rest of it. But as it were behind the relatve reality, behind the conditoned or, as it were, shining through it because your perceptons have been cleansed, as Blake would say, you see the Unconditoned which at the same tme is not a separate reality standing behind. Again language has its limitatons. Another comparison is it’s like the wave which is not separate from the ocean. The ocean is the wave or the waves, the waves are the ocean. When you’re in touch with the waves you’re in touch with the water, the ocean, and when you’re in touch with the water, well, you cannot be in touch with waves.
[147]
Nagabodhi: Is it a bit like the Golden Light, in the sutra of Golden Light, when you are exposed to the Golden Light you step ...?
S: Yes, because light is beautful. The colour gold is beautful. All pure bright colours are beautful. This is why they appear in visionary art. Visionary art is never dull-coloured. Do you see what I mean? Visionary art always consists of pure bright, transparent, luminous colours. Yes. You can see, looking at - I mean, I’m generalising wildly now but bear with it a bit - you look at, say, eighteenth-century paintng on the whole, you could tell it was a ratonalistc age. [General agreement] You don’t have pure bright clear colours, usually, in it. It was a sort of, well, chocolate brown age, you might say, where the paintngs are treacly or gravy-like. The colour of rich gravy.
I mean colour came back with William Blake. It came back with, well, maybe that’s an exaggeraton but a certain kind of colour, or a certain use of colour or sense or vision of colour came back with William Blake, with Turner, with the Pre-Raphaelites.
Voice: Blake had to discover his own from the old-fashioned ones.
[148]
Voice: What would you say the colour of this age was?
S: It’s a very mixed age. [Laughter] Colour comes in with the Impressionists, doesn’t it? [Pause] It’s interestng that Hockney’s paintngs are quite positve when it comes to colour, but not very bright, vibrant, not very visionary. There’s a certain, defnite limitaton there. I don’t know that there is any more visionary paintng.
43 Voice: In some of the modern paintngs, the colours seem quite clear and bright but not very refned. Their tendency is towards primaries.
S: Yes, yes, yes. They’re rather crude, in other words. But then again, for what one might call a visionary use of colour, one can look at many of the Persian miniature paintngs. They have quite remarkable examples of this sort of thing, very ofen. [Long pause]
[214]
Some Abhidharma teaching, I’m sorry to say, is rather like that. Or even some teaching of Buddhism itself. This was in a slightly different sense a critcism I made - I think others made it too - afer my visit to the Buddhist Society Summer School, the frst tme I visited their Summer School afer my return to England in 1964. Because there were classes and lectures on the Theravada and others on Zen, and another on Tibetan Buddhism etc., etc. But I made the point, and I think others did too, where is Buddhism? The parts were all there, but where was the whole? So you don’t sort of arrive at Buddhism by putng side to side all the different schools. You’ve got to have an imaginatve apprehension of the Gestalt of the whole lot. Again, this is what Blake was getng at. It is not enough to know parts, and just sort of add up parts and hope to get to reality in that way. That is not the way to do it. You have to have in a sense what one can only call the overall sort of spiritual imaginatve vision. Your hold on the parts may be a bit shaky even. It won’t mater so much. You must give an overall general, for want of a beter term, impression of the Dharma. You must communicate that. And you can do that on occasion - I was going to say without enumeratng all the parts - even up to a point, without knowing all the parts. Though it very ofen helps if you do. But not just as parts - knowing them as parts isn’t enough - but specifc expressions of the whole. You very ofen fnd that if you read a book on a partcular subject, it’s very easy to tell the difference between someone who’s got a real grasp of the subject and someone who hasn’t. The person who hasn’t got a real grasp of the subject
[215] gives it to you just bit by bit. There’s no spirit or understanding informing the whole.
44 1982: NANAMOLI CHAPTER 11 [39]
S: Well, the Buddha had a sort of visionary experience; but Blake, for instance, had lots of visionary experiences. When you have visionary experiences you translate spiritual perceptons into visual terms. It is not that the Buddha saw a dark cloud that a meteorologist, had he been looking around through a telescope, would have also notced; do you see what I mean? But a sort or black cloud appeared before the Buddha's inner spiritual vision, much in the same way that William Blake saw the ghost of a flea and drew it. But some people have this sort of visionary faculty: they translate what I call spiritual perceptons into actual visual forms. Some people have this faculty very strongly. Well, as I mentoned, Blake had it, Swedenborg had it. Sometmes you yourself, you might be thinking and you may not actually see something in the literal sense, almost, that the Buddha or Blake seem to have seen it, but you form a sort of mental picture of something, you don't just think about it in abstract terms.
[41]
But I think some people, it would seem again I menton Blake almost literally see the visual form into which they have translated their abstract intuitve spiritual percepton. Have we really dealt with the queston? Chakkhupala: I don't think so. Just taking this episode, we have this hazy shadow: was it the Buddha as it were having a Blakean vision, or was there actually an existent Devaputa Mara that the Buddha perceived in an act of percepton? Do you see what I mean?
S: This raises the queston: is Mara a black cloud? No, Mara isn't a black cloud, he is a Devaputra. So the Buddha perceives Mara the Devaputra, but he translates, so to speak, or his mind translates, that percepton into the visual terms of the black cloud. One could put it in that way.
45 1987: STUDY LEADERS VIMALAKIRTI NIRDESA [158]
S: But they are rather miscellaneous. Sometmes I feel people need to think a bit more themselves, or even look things up in dictonaries. I have said this before. There is stll a certain amount of literal-mindedness in the Movement, or in the Order, perhaps. Sometmes a queston is based upon taking quite literally something which sometmes obviously shouldn't be taken literally; the queston arises simply because you do that, and the queston is so to speak answered by not doing that.
Prasannasiddhi: I was thinking of that literalism, and also relatng to the discussion on historicity, I was thinking of Blake's division into single vision, double vision, triple vision and fourfold vision. It's as if a lot of people only exist on the level of single vision.
S: Mm. For instance, you might use the expression 'once in a blue moon' and then someone might ask you 'Why do you believe that the moon is sometmes blue?' Well, you didn't mean to assert that the moon was sometmes blue; you were merely using the expression to convey the meaning of 'not very ofen', because a blue moon is not something you see very ofen; perhaps you never see it.
46 1988: GUHYALOKA QUESTIONS [59]
S: I don't think there are really two alternatves there. I am reminded of what Blake says about the wise man doesn't see the same tree that a fool sees. So, all right: [60] a wise man doesn't see the same tree that a fool sees; put it back into the terms of the queston the wise man contnues to experience the phenomenon of the tree; he doesn't cease to see it because he is a wise man. You could say his interpretaton of his experience changes, or you could say that the experience itself changes; but does that really make any difference? Blake says 'The wise man doesn't see the same tree that the fool sees.' Does that mean that they see two completely different trees? No! There is a common tree, apparently, that they both see; you can either say they don't see it in the same way, or, putng it more vigorously, you can say they don't see the same tree. But I don't think Blake literally means that they don't see the same tree, in the sense that one sees one tree and the other sees another tree. There is something different, but there is something the same. There is the common locus of the experience, but I think it would be true to say that the experience is different in the sense that the interpretaton of the tree each experiences is different. A fool may just see a load of frewood there, but the wise man may see a symbol of life. But it would not be true to say that there were two trees that they see … S: Yes. Because, from many records of martyrs of various kinds and for various causes, who are so absorbed in a way in the signifcance of their acton, and in some cases so overjoyed to be dying for what they believe in, that they don't feel the physical pain that normally they would feel. So, as I say, the signifcance with which they invest the experience, to use that word 'signifcance', even transforms, as it would seem, their actual physical sensaton. So, in the case of the tree, it is as though there is a sort of common object, but different people can invest that common object, which from a common-sense point of view at least is there for both of them or for all of them, with different signifcances, but not to the extent that you have as it were two different objects, two different trees. For instance, you would be looking, say, at the same tree; you see two people standing at looking at the same tree; and you ask one, 'What do you see?' and he would say, 'I see such-and-such', and you would ask the other one, 'What do you see?' He would say, 'I see such-and-such,' he would give a completely different descripton. But you would not have the frst man saying, 'The tree is over there,' and the second man saying, 'The tree is over there.' They would be looking at the same tree, you could see that that they had a common object, namely the tree even though, when you questoned them, they gave completely [61] different accounts of it. Blake said much the same thing with regard to the golden guinea: do you remember that? He said, 'When I see the sun rising, do I see something round, rather like a golden guinea? No,' he said, 'I see the heavenly host, singing and praising the Lord.' That was his actual experience. He didn't see something round and shining, rather like a golden guinea, as a lot of people might have seen. But he would be standing and looking in the same directon, at what seemed to be the same object, as everybody else
47 THE DOOR OF LIBERATION SEMINAR [31]
S: Yes. So one could say that purely conventonal religious art, is religious art, art in which the paintngs, images and so on no longer mirror the higher spiritual reality. In other words in which the paintng is no longer visionary. I mean as Blake said, "All true art is visionary art". The artst sees a higher spiritual reality and he mirrors that in his paintng. You see the Bodhisatva then you represent the Bodhisatva in your paintng. Or at least your teacher saw or your teachers teacher, and the Traditon has come down as to what the Bodhisatva looked like and you try to faithfully reproduce that in your paintng. So that by seeing the paintng, by contemplatng on the paintng you get an actual feeling of what the actual Buddha or Bodhisatva is like.
48 BHANTE ON BLAKE 2: ENERGY & REASON
Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy
Energy is Eternal Delight38
38 Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Plate 4 49 INTRODUCTION This reader draws together all the references Bhante has made to William Blake where he is exploring the twin themes of energy and reason.
The overview begins with a brief descripton of what Blake by energy as a spiritually positve quality, and by reason as potentally a positve structure allowing this energy to fnd expression, but more commonly found in a fallen, alienated form represented by Urizen, or by the Spectre Satan.
The intenton is to make it as easy as possible for the reader to dig down from this overview to the full text of what Bhante was saying in its context.
My belief is that there is a signifcant facet of Bhante’s understanding of Buddhism that he is drawing on Blake to artculate, and that this is very much part of his endeavour to communicate the dharma in a western cultural context.
OVERVIEW
ENERGY AND REASON Blake's quote
Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy39 refers to the positve aspects of both reason and energy, and whilst Blake predominantly treats energy as a positve quality and reason as a negatve one, he does acknowledge both positve and negatve aspects of both.
ENERGY
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE One partcular quote from Blake shows that he does recognize both positve and negatve forms of energy:
To be in a Passion you Good may do,
But no Good if a Passion is in you. 40
On the positve side, “to be in a passion” is to be "completely into something as an individual" 41 whereas when the “passion is in you”, you are “sinking to the sub-individual level … you are just taken over, you cease to exist. The individual is in abeyance"42
There is also a third possibility, which is an absence of available energy. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake “regards the angel as an iniquitous fgure: the angel is one in whom all the energies are under restraint, and that is not a truly spiritual state according to Blake.”43
39 Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 4
40 Blake: Augeries of Innocence lines 111-112
41 1975: Pali-Udana p353
42 1975: Pali-Udana p353
43 1982: Pali-Meghiya Suta p63. See also 1975: Pali-Snake p22, 1979: Tibetan Book of the Dead p234, 1980: Jewel Ornament of Liberaton – Chapter 4 Transitoriness p71, 1986 Nanamoli Chapter 4 p38 50 It is the positve, spiritual dimension of energy that was dominant though, both for Blake and for Bhante: “energy did not belong really to hell, energy belonged to heaven, energy was a spiritual quality, not a diabolical quality. Delight was a heavenly quality, not a diabolical quality"44
AS CREATIVITY Of the fgure of Urizen, who represents reason (usually in its negatve form) as we will see below, Bhante points out that “the disorder which he wants to reduce to order is in fact not disorder at all, it’s just richness and creatvity.”45 and the energetc devils of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell were the image of "the human being who is naturally exuberant out of great inner richness and creatvity"46
AS DELIGHT This richness and creatvity place, Hell, is also depicted as a place of flame, and along with exuberance comes delight in the flames of transformaton. As Bhante puts it: “You’ve got to descend into the flames as Blake would have said and ... transform them ... to walk in ... delight in ... enjoy ... and use the flames, not run away from them"47
AS WILDNESS In additon, there was a quality of wildness in the energy. "Wildness also indicates a certain freedom ... recklessness, also abandon". Exemplifying this, "the young Blake, must have been quite wild. He was very normal and healthy, but quite wild at the same tme"48
AS DISOBEDIENCE Bhante points out that "the devil is associated with the idea of disobedience. He fell, like Adam, because he disobeyed God. Well, one could look upon disobedience, under certain circumstances, as a positve quality."49
AS EXCESS Quotng Blake’s proverb of hell:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.50
Bhante points out that by ‘excess’ “he means a sort of artstc exuberance, an overflowingness. You don't fnd your way to the palace of wisdom by curbing yourself, by restraining and restrictng yourself" so that "the way to wisdom wasn't a sort of careful and cautous prudence. It was a sort of letng yourself go and not being afraid of full excess, not being afraid of exuberance, not being afraid of life and vitality"51
44 1982: Pali-Meghiya Suta p63. See also 1987: Padmasambhava – Cantos 37 & 39 p33
45 1979: Lecture 151 Padmasambhava Day p12
46 1979: Precepts of the Gurus Third Seminar p54
47 1979: Lecture 151 Padmasambhava Day p12
48 1979: Tibetan Book of the Dead p234
49 1986: Nanamoli Chapter 4 p38
50 Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – Proverbs of Hell Plate 7
51 1982: Pali-Parabhava Suta Seminar p91 51 AS VIRYA The positve quality of energy in Blake connects directly with the dharma as a quality of virya: energy in pursuit of the good. This energy or “'desire' was for him a very positve word (akin to) not just virya, but also 'passion' ... intense, outward-going positve emoton"52. Unpacking the Pali phrase dhammakano bhavam hot Bhante talks of “'one who ... loves the Dhamma passionately', 'one who really desires the Dhamma: he grows, he progresses, he advances'" with "desire ... in a Blakean sense"53.
This dharmic quality to the energy Blake advocated makes him a candidate western counterpart to the guardians of Tibetan Buddhism: a "mythological fgure of a western nature that we could use in this way to str up those sort of Dharmapala energies", “a fgure onto which one can in a positve way project that unrealised side of oneself ... become beter acquainted with it ... integrate it in harmony with ... and use it for the advancement of the Dharma."54
REASON
UNFALLEN Bhante summarises Blake's positve take on reason as “the bounding or limitng factor which is necessary for expression, so that the expression doesn’t degenerate into something chaotc and formless.” This is reason as “the natural organic form ... that ... enables the emoton to express itself, it doesn’t sort of cramp it or constrict it”55.
Imaginatvely, Blake symbolizes this positve aspect of reason in the form of the unfallen Zoa Urizen who was “originally the illumined intelligence”56. In the closing secton of The Four Zoas, where Albion, the eternal man awakens at last, Blake describes how
Urizen rose up from his couch On wings of tenfold joy, clapping his hands, his feet, his radiant wings
In the immense: as when the Sun dances upon the mountains57
FALLING Urizen, the Zoa symbolizing the reason of the universal man (Albion) was at home in the “porches of his Palace”58 as “the Prince of Light”59, which is to say 'Lucifer'. When he fell from eternity
Albion walkd on the steps of fre before his Halls … in dreams of sof deluding slumber. He looked up & saw the Prince of Light with splendor faded
52 1982: Pali-Parabhava Suta Seminar p91
53 1982: Pali-Parabhava Suta Seminar p8
54 1980: Milarepa-Rechungpa’s Journey to Weu p87
55 1979: Tibetan Book of the Dead, p9
56 1979: Lecture 151 Padmasambhava Day p12
57 Blake The Four Zoas, 347-9
58 Blake Jerusalem, chapter 2, plate 29
59 Blake Jerusalem, chapter 2, plate 29 52 Then Albion ascended mourning into the porches of his Palace60
This descripton of Urizen, “the Prince of Light” at the beginning of his fall “with splendor faded” echoes Milton's descripton of the just fallen Lucifer: his form had yet not lost All her Original brightness, nor appear'd Less then Arch Angel ruind, and th' excess Of Glory obscur'd: As when the Sun new ris'n Looks through the Horizontal misty Air
Shorn of his Beams61
This parallel of Blake's Urizen with Milton's Lucifer is completed with the completon of the fall in Blake's last prophesies, “Milton” and “Jerusalem”, where the completely fallen form of reason, divided from his emotonal counterpart or emanaton, is revealed as the spectre, Satan.
SATAN: SPECTRE OR MESSIAH Here there is a signifcant shif in Blake's symbolism (which overall is remarkably consistent across his life's work). In his earlier work, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, Satan symbolized not fallen reason, but the unfallen quality of energy:
the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is calld … Satan … the … Messiah is call'd Satan… the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss62
In this earlier work, Blake is drawing on the energy and individuality in Milton's depicton of Satan, so that he described Milton as being
of the Devil's party without knowing it63
In the later prophecies, “Milton” and “Jerusalem”, Blake is drawing on Milton's depicton of Satan as brooding in the lowest recesses of his caverns amongst the solidity of rocks, associatng this with Urizen's exploraton of the caverns of the realm of Ulro that sees only materialism and lacks any spiritual vision.64
In brief, we should read any references to Satan from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” as indicatng the positve aspect of energy, and any references to Satan from the later prophesies “Milton” and “Jerusalem” as indicatng the negatve aspect of reason.
60 Blake Jerusalem, chapter 2, plate 29
61 Milton, Paradise Lost, quoted in Bhante's seminar of 1986: Nanamoli Chapter 4, p74
62 Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell plate 5-6
63 Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 6
64 As Blake says in a leter to Thomas Buts, 1802: “May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep” For Blake, Newton represented a single minded materialist vision devoid of any spiritual vision, and associated with the solid mater of rocks and caverns 53 FALLEN
AS SATAN: THE LIMIT OF OPACITY In the prophesy “Milton”, Blake describes Satan as the limit of opacity:
The Divine hand found the Two Limits: frst of Opacity, then of Contracton
Opacity was named Satan, Contracton was named Adam.65
Here, opacity is the irreducibility of the material world: annihilaton could not go further than material existence. (Adam was associated with the limit of contracton: that imaginaton could not contract from its expansive encompasment of reality beyond the limited imaginaton of the man of nature). In associatng Satan with the opacity of the material, Blake is associatng false reason with materialism. This is also manifest in the descripton of the fall of Urizen, who begins at the highest, most airy plane of the eternal man amongst the porches of his palace, and then falls the furthest, untl he
Silent descended to the Caves … & saw a Cavern'd Universe66
This cavern'd universe is Ulro: the lowest of the four realms of Blake's, which is associated with materialism and the “single vision” of “Newton's sleep”67 He associated Newton, along with the philosophers Bacon and Locke, with a belief in materialism and the “single vision” that is only able to see the literal, and not the spiritual truth.
The upshot of this imagery is that Blake clearly identfed the fallen reason with materialialism, and associated the image of Satan with both.
Bhante describes this partcular delusion from a Buddhist perspectve indicatng how Urizen "falls into duality (and) limits himself" to "seeing the world ... just with his reason and just through his senses" so that "the limitng reason, seeing the whole universe just in terms of the fve physical senses and the ratonal mind" and "tries to bring everything under ratonal control"68
AS URIZEN OR JEHOVA Urizen, who symbolizes reason, is depicted in his fallen form as Satan in the late prophesies ‘Milton’ and ‘Jerusalem’, but elsewhere this same fallen form is depicted as the aged, bearded sky-god of the old testament: Jehova. The equivalence is never explicit, but it is apparent in the descriptons: so for example Urizen is described as creator god, the originator of the ten commandments, and as seated in the heavens:
Urizen! Creator of men! mistaken Demon of heaven69
The fery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands70
65 Blake Milton, Plate 13
66 Blake The Four Zoas Night the Seventh
67 Blake: “May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep” Leter to Thomas Buts 1802
68 1979: Lecture 151 Padmasambhava Day p12
69 Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Plate 5 54 Urizen who sat Above all heavens in thunders wrap'd71
Bhante describes the arc of this relatonship as one in which “the God of the Old Testament becomes the devil of the New" symbolizing the way that "the gods of the ordinary man become the devils of the man who is trying to evolve"72
AS CONTROLLING The motvaton of the fallen reason, represented by the fallen form of Urizen, is a desire for life “to be ratonally intelligible because then (one) can control it": “we like to think we've got everything under control"73. If this fallen reason succeeds in its endeavour “to take over, then your whole life becomes something calculated and worked out and therefore limited and conditoned”74
AS ALIENATION Fallen reason in Blake is represented by the Spectres. These are the alienated intellect, separated from the Emanaton - the emotonal side of the whole man. As Bhante puts it, this is “abstract reasoning out of touch with experience"75, an “external understanding ... dissociated from yourself ... (an) alienated intellect” 76. Bhante describes the character of a spectre as “an intellect contnuing to operate, but there's no person really there... a disembodied intellect, even more than disembodied because there's no soul so to speak there either … such people tend to reminisce a lot, they can be vary dogmatc, very rigid in their ideas they can't learn anything fresh"77
THE SPECTRE OF BUDDHISM He goes on to point out that “you can't understand the Buddhist scriptures ... spiritual teachings ... life itself … with that sort of alienated intellect"78 Furthermore, "from Milarepa's point of view and from Blake's point of view the whole modern Western way of looking at things is deeply alienated" 79 and when this way of looking is applied to Buddhism it sees “something purely ratonal … the spectre of Buddhism … the skeleton naked and unadorned … you can hear the bones ratling”80 Clearly, this is “not Buddhism proper, not real Buddhism, but an alienatedly intellectual presentaton of it"81
70 Blake America A Prophecy Plate 10
71 Blake America A Prophecy Plate 18
72 1976: Pali-Great Chapter Part 1 p49
73 1980: Pali-Dhaniya Suta p52
74 1981: Pali-Dhammapada Chs 14 & 20 Vinehall p165
75 1981: Follow up to Vinehall at Padmaloka p8
76 1980: Milarepa-Heartelt Advice to Rechungpa p8 also quoted in A Stream of Stars p25
77 1981: Mitrata Omnibus Tuscany 81 pre-ord p187
78 1980: Milarepa-Heartelt Advice to Rechungpa p9
79 1980: Milarepa-Heartelt Advice to Rechungpa p9
80 1979: Precepts of the Gurus Second Seminar Tapes 1-5 p40
81 Study Leaders AHEI p98 55 MODERN SCIENCE Following Blake’s "denunciaton of Science, the Spectre, the Alienated Reason, which according to him was insane"82 Bhante describes “modern science” as “based … on … a world view created by an alienated intellect”83
CONCLUSION
Many, perhaps most, of Bhante’s teaching can be seen as an endeavour to correct a perceived distorton or limited view of Buddhism. His emphasis on the importance of energy, with an integrated reason providing the form or structure needed for that energy and desire for the dharma to fnd expression, can be seen as a correctve to the purely ratonal approach to the Dharma that he saw the tendency towards in the West, which he called ‘the spectre of Buddhism’.84
82 1980: Jewel Ornament of Liberaton – Chapter 4 Transitoriness p71
83 1980: Milarepa-Heartelt Advice to Rechungpa p8
84 1979: Precepts of the Gurus Second Seminar Tapes 1-5 p40 56 SOURCES
BOOKS
A STREAM OF STARS [25]
‘External understanding’ is an understanding which is not part of yourself, which is dissociated from yourself. It is that alienated intellect which in Blake’s symbolism is represented by the fgure of Urizen. Not only is one not able to understand the Buddha’s teaching with alienated intellect: one can’t understand anything with it. From Blake’s point of view the whole of modern science is an atempt to understand life by the alienated intellect.
Seminar on the Heartelt Advice to Rechungpa
57 LECTURES
LECTURE 151: PADMASAMBHAVA DAY 1979 [12]
How many of you I wonder have heard of Urizen? Urizen? Students of Blake, yes. Who is Urizen? He’s much the same sort of fgure as this Matarangara, from a somewhat different point of view. Urizen - it’s ‘your reason’ according to some commentators - Urizen originally the Prince of Light, originally the illumined intelligence so to speak, fell. He falls into duality, he limits himself, he contracts and he starts seeing the world in a very narrow, limited sort of way, just with his reason and just through his senses. So he confnes himself, he constricts himself, and he sort of explores simply this constricted, confned existence being all the tme in the dark, and he tries to bring everything under his own control, this is his great feature, tries to bring everything under ratonal control. He prescribes laws. He’s also the sort of God of the Old Testament. He tries to bind everything, hold everything down, limit everything, constrict everything. He doesn’t want anything to be free, he doesn’t want anything to be spontaneous, he wants to have it all bound down. He wants to have it all sort of reduced to order, which is actually disorder, because the disorder which he wants to reduce to order is in fact not disorder at all, it’s just richness and creatvity. So this is Urizen, the limitng reason, seeing the whole universe just in terms of the fve physical senses and the ratonal mind. So he’s much the same sort of horrifc fgure as this Matarangara of the Life and Liberaton of Padmasambhava.
Another fgure that I also think of is one that came to my mind a bit recently, and I’m sure this will be much more familiar to at least some of you than Urizen, and that is the fgure of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Some of you might have been to see that flm of The Lord of the Rings, or of the frst part of it rather, and there in the flm as in the book the fgure of Sauron appears. So who or what is Sauron? He’s a sort of almost cosmic principle of evil that’s just trying to destroy everything good, trying to gain power, trying to gather power to himself He’s a sort of eagle personifed, a sort of cosmic eagle if you like. He’s destructve, he’s negatve, he’s death, he’s poison, for he’s trying to bring everything under his control with the help of the one Ring, which of course he doesn’t get, but anyway that’s another story. Those that know it don’t need to be reminded of it. But you see the sort of thing, you see the sort of fgure, you see the sort of feeling. There are other analogues in Western traditons, but I’m not going into them this evening.
So you can see what it is Padmasambhava, what it is the Guru, or the Buddha or Guru is up against. It isn’t enough to sort of skim the sort of spiritual surface of these things and ignore them, because the flames as it were are licking at your heels and you have to do something about them. You can’t just sort of soar above them. You’ve got to descend into the flames as Blake would have said and you’ve got to transform them. You’ve got to walk in the flames and delight in the flames, enjoy the flames, and use the flames, not run away from them into some vague, ambiguous sort of light, cool and all that sort of thing.
So we see in the Life and Liberaton of Padmasambhava, and reflected also in Western traditon, quite ofen we see these vast, primordial, archetypal fgures and forces as something to be transformed and transfgured, not something to be disowned, something to be brought within the sphere so to speak of the spiritual life and this is what Guru represents. This is what Padmasambhava represents, and again this is why we’re celebratng Padmasambhava Day this evening, or today in fact.
58 SEMINARS
1975: PALI-SNAKE [22]
S: It's as though you have the energy always on tap. If you are not very careful it can of course go in the directon of 'real anger' - otherwise it's not real anger, but that is the sort of risk you have to take. But what is really bad is to be blocked and lifeless and sometmes, though it's not the sort of thing that one says very readily (it's certainly not said in the Buddhist traditon), sometmes to unblock yourself you might have to get really angry (which) is an unskilful negatve thing. You have to be very careful of any self-indulgence but in the long run it could be positve. And sometmes what we call 'good people' are simply people who sat on this allegedly more negatve side of themselves; never sat on and block their own energy. They are just 'good' people in the Blakean sense. They are merely angels. As you've got to unite that demonical energy with the angelicality; the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove.
1975: PALI-UDANA [353]
So really - to relate all that to what we started from - it all adds up to the fact that there is a difference between being completely into something as an individual and just letng yourself go and sinking to the sub- individual level. These two are to be distnguished. They may look alike but they are very different. To quote Blake again, who seems to be coming up quite a lot on this retreat, he says words to the effect that it's all right if you are in a passion, but not all right if a passion is in you. You see the distncton? When a passion is in you, you are just taken over, you cease to exist. The individual is in abeyance.
1976: PALI-GREAT CHAPTER PART 1 [49]
Devamitra: Well, was the Krishna cult already in existence at the tme of the Buddha?
S: Possibly, on a very popular, sort of folk level. But what is God for the ethnic religion is the devil for the spiritual religion, the universal religion. Just as in the case of Gnostcism, the God of the Old Testament becomes the devil of the New.
Chintamani: And in Blake too.
[50]
S: And in Blake, yes. So you can say, even, on another level, the gods of the ordinary man become the devils of the man who is trying to evolve. Do you see what I mean?
1976: PALI-MANGALA SUTA FINAL EDITION Sagaramati: I ofen think that about John - one of the kids who throws stones through the windows of the Archway Centre. He always seems a lot healthier than most of the people who come to the Centre [for classes and lectures]
S: A _devil_ rather than an _angel_ [in the Blakean sense of these terms]
Sagaramati: Yes, with a glint in his eye.
59 1979: PRECEPTS OF THE GURUS SECOND SEMINAR TAPES 1-5 [37]
Devaraja: I think there's sort of certain levels. I've told some people the story before of when I was in Paris once. I met at the Theosophical Society somebody who was a theoretcal physicist, I think in the most advanced branch of physics, and we went to his, he was going blind, and he had a secretary to do all his work to type out his work but we went and had coffee in a cafe aferwards and I found him really fascinatng and warm and he gave me the very strong impression that it was like a spiritual discipline for him, theoretcal physics, and that he actually through his studies, was achieving quite elevated states of mind.
Manjuvajra: I think that's possible with some, just a few people. Einstein was one. So was Dirac.
S: Schrodinger perhaps.
Manjuvajra: Schrodinger as well, yes. Dirac was on the radio the other day, and he gave exactly that impression as well. He was very warm. You had the feeling that quite a lot had happened to him in his life, but I think for the majority of people they never get to those levels. They stay very much on the purely ratonal level. I'm working at the moment with quite a few mathematcians and they are really, they're all crazy. They're really alienated people.
S: Reminds one of Blake's Spectre.
Nagabodhi: I suppose in the past science wasn't a professional feld. It was a cruder science. There was more room for imaginaton, intuiton and alchemy.
[40]
Manjuvajra: A sort of ratonalist.
S: Yes, yes. They tend to see Buddhism as something purely ratonal. So this is what I call the spectre of Buddhism, in the Blakean sense. This is not Buddhism, it is the spectre of Buddhism. So, perhaps, this pseudo- Buddhism as we can call it, this spectre of Buddhism, does correspond to a certain neurotc need in some people, who thereby keep alive and who perpetuate that version, if you can call it that even, of Buddhism. And there are even monks coming from the East who, perhaps, largely unintentonally or unconsciously, also perpetuate, tend to perpetuate that partcular version, because of their very one-sided negatve presentaton of Buddhism, which luckily, in their own country, is supplemented by all sorts of colorful festvals and ceremonies, which it cannot be supplemented in that way in this country, so you get the bare skeleton. In the East, you could say, the skeleton is decorated with a few flowers, but here, it's the skeleton naked and unadorned, and this is supposed to be Buddhism. You can hear the bones ratling.
1979: PRECEPTS OF THE GURUS THIRD SEMINAR [54]
S: You could perhaps say that creatvity is really nothing but the exuberance of the human being. Doesn't Blake say something like that? - exuberance is beauty, isn't it? Or is it beauty is exuberance?
So perhaps one should be more concerned with the cultvaton of that type of human being, the human being who is naturally exuberant out of great inner richness and creatvity, than simply emphasizing the giving up of atachments. This is really, I think, the point. Just ask yourself not, Am I atached to this? Am I atached to that? but, Am I a real human being? Am I a creatve individual? Am I exuberant?
60 1979: TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD [8]
S: D.H. Lawrence, probably as you remember, says something quite valid here about thought. Thought is ‘Man in his wholeness wholly atending’ and that is very good, though it is more than atending, it is sort of creatvely grappling with the situaton or a problem. But of course that means atending frst, frst you look at it. But with the whole man, wholly atending, so that is very good.
Sagaramat: Maybe it’s the nearest part of you as a subject that you can do something objectve. It’s a sort of tool that you strive towards some objectvity with. Blake says it’s the circumference of our energy, or something.
[9]
S: Yes, reason, he says, is the circumference of energy. The bounding or limitng factor which is necessary for expression, so that the expression doesn’t degenerate into something chaotc and formless. But he sees it as the natural organic form, not the form imposed from without by force, as it were. The form that grows with the emoton, which enables the emoton to express itself, it doesn’t sort of cramp it or constrict it.
[234]
Sagaramat: You mean a healthy wildness would be incompatble with a ...
S: I think it would be much more spontaneity and the ability to just drop everything and just take up something new. Or put all your energy into something, be really enthusiastc, really into what you are doing. I think it would show itself more in this sort of way. Not necessarily as in dancing round bonfres and maypoles and things like that, that seems a bit pointless and a bit artfcial.
Devamitra: Being able to be wholehearted about something that you really wanted to do.
S: But more than that, wildness also indicates a certain freedom. Not just a reliable worker, as in wholehearted work, if you see what I mean.
Devamitra: A certain kind of recklessness.
______: Abandon. [386]
S: Recklessness, also abandon, yes.
______: ‘Couldn’t give a damn’ attude!.
______: Now, now!
S: You do occasionally meet people like that.
______: Certainly in the climbing world. They seem to gravitate to that sort of sphere of actvity. Because that sort of actvity does provide an outlet for these energies.
S: But that seems a bit too serious in a way.
______: What?
S: Things like mountaineering.
______: Goodness, it’s the most hilarious actvity you can possibly enjoy!
S: Hilarious? (______: Yes.) I wouldn’t have thought so.
______: Yes! It’s tremendous fun going ...
61 S: Not the sort of associaton I get at all. You think of someone like Lord Hunt in khaki shorts. [Laughter]
______: I’ve actually seen Lord Hunt down in Cornwall and all the other climbers just laughed at him, he is so incongruous. Bit of a [unclear]
Devamitra: The sort of wildness of someone like Shelley?
S: No, no, no, Shelley wasn’t really wild, I would say. No something much more than that, something a bit more heroic than that, if I may say so. Blake, the young Blake, must have been quite wild. He was very normal and healthy, but quite wild at the same tme.
______: Oh I remember, he went down to the tomb in Westminster, didn’t he?
S: I wasn’t thinking of that, that doesn’t sound very wild.
______: A bit different.
S. But you see what Lawrence was getng at when he spoke of man being domestcated. Sort of house trained. Everything being discouraged which didn’t ft into the neat domestc patern. You know what happens to a dog when he is house trained, he is quite different from what he was like when he was running loose in the wild. Well that sort of thing happens to men if they are not.., well it usually happens to them, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. You can see, they have been domestcated, they have been tamed, not to say enslaved. They don’t even dare stay out for the night in case of what their wives say when they get back in the morning,
[235] in many cases. They are accountable to their wives. You don’t fnd that even in India, they’re not domestcated to that extent.
1980: MILAREPA-HEARTFELT ADVICE TO RECHUNGPA [8]
S: Yes, the internal includes the external but the external doesn't include the internal. So external understanding is an understanding which is not part of yourself, which is dissociated from yourself, which suggests that your understanding itself, your intellect, is dissociated from your self, that it's an alienated intellect which is exactly what is represented in Blake's symbolism by the fgure of Urizen. Urizen represents this alienated reason, this alienated intellect and according to Blake this alienated intellect is especially dominant in Newton, Bacon and Locke, the founders of modern Western civilizaton practcally. So you could say that it's not only a queston that one is not able to understand the teachings with this alienated
[9] intellect, one can't understand anything with the alienated intellect. One can't understand life with the alienated intellect. From Blake's point of view the whole of modern science is an atempt to understand life by the alienated intellect. There's recently been a book published on Newton and according to reviews Newton was even technically insane. But the whole of modern science with recent modifcatons perhaps is based you could say on Newton's world view, a world view created by an alienated intellect. The world view of Bacon and Newton, perhaps Locke too to some extent, is the world view that underlies the whole of our scientfcally, industrially, technologically based civilizaton. So you can't understand the Buddhist scriptures, you can't understand spiritual teachings with that sort of alienated intellect and as I said you can't understand life itself with it. But this is what we have for the most part, this is what most people have, a sort of alienated intellect, an intellect which is not a living part of themselves, the intellect which is not a sort of expression of their living selves but something which has become separated from them and which has acquired a sort of facttous life of its own. So you can't really understand anything with that sort of intellect. That's the sort of intellect that
62 one brings to the study of Buddhism and to life itself. So you could call that external understanding as distnct from internal understanding, the internal understanding of course being fused with an emotonal element. So from Milarepa's point of view and from Blake's point of view the whole modern Western way of looking at things is deeply alienated.
1980: MILAREPA-RECHUNGPA’S 3RD JOURNEY TO INDIA [103]
S: No that is life, eternal life. The ankh yes. No it's not energy especially. Not at all.
: In homeopathy they use the word life-force to denote the sort of overall.
S: But life-force most people would understand as just pertaining to ordinary biological existence. They probably wouldn't regard it as including say creatve energy in the more aesthetc sense or spiritual sense.
Sudhana: In 'Star Wars' they use the term 'force'.
S: There have been terms invented like odic force or odic energy.
: Who uses that.
S: I think it was coined at the beginning of the last century. I'm not quite sure by whom but I think in connecton with mesmerism.
: Wilhelm Reich uses...
S: Orgone energy. But then again though that is quite good for covering what we would regard as grosser forms of energy it's no use as regards covering the more refned forms of energy. Perhaps we'll have to search Blake and see if he has something to say.
Kevala: Why can't we just invent a word?
S: All right. Come on then. Maybe we can get a word from the Greek. That isn't impossible perhaps.
[104]
Mangala: What about elan. The French word.
S: Yes. That is quite good actually. It's spirit, vitality, drive, life. That is quite good actually.
Vajradaka: It is also used in some translatons as well.
: It's used as a translaton for vital force.
1980: MILAREPA-RECHUNGPA’S JOURNEY TO WEU [87]
S: Well in the case of Tibetan Buddhism the guardians are mainly, though not exclusively, what we would call mythological fgures, a few come from legend or semi legendary history. So I am saying that supposing we can't respond to these Tibetan fgures well, are there any mythological fgures of a western nature that we could use in this way to str up those sort of Dharmapala energies within others or, are there historical fgures, fgures from western history that we can use in that way?
Siddhiratna: I should have thought things like Vikings or ancient English Kings or Knights, Knights of the Round Table.
63 S: Knights of the Round Table, yes but what sort of inspiraton do you get? It's quite easy to read about the Knights of the Round Table and get a bit strred up but does it last very long or does it have any real deep effect do you think?. Does it really bring out that side of your character in a really effectve sort of way?
Siddhiratna: You mean burning and pillaging? (laughter)
Anandajyot: It seems as though it has to be someone who you personally would connect with quite strongly, the historical fgure that comes to my mind is Blake.
S: You mean William Blake the artst or Blake the admiral? (laughter)
Anandajyot: Was there a Blake the Admiral?
Subhut: Which Blake the admiral? [Laughter]
S: Oh yes, there were at least two!
Anandajyot: No the Poet and artst. He was really outspoken the whole of his life, he gets obstacles to what he saw as his own vision in society, he was really indignant and vehement and he didn't stand for any messing about as it were.
Ratnaketu: He doesn't seem to me a very wild fgure. It's more like natural uncontrolled energies which Dharmapalas seem to represent more.
S: It seems as though one requires a fgure onto which one can in a positve way project that unrealised side of oneself and in that way become beter acquainted with it and eventually integrate it in harmony with the Dharma and use it for the advancement of the Dharma both within oneself and, so to speak, in society.
1980: PALI-DHANIYA SUTTA [52]
S: Oh, yes; or they're presented in a pseudo-scientfc sort of way, almost 'Science proves Buddhism'!
Vijaya: A lot of people that I've met seem to waste their mental energy in working out interpretatons of science where, normally you wouldn't bother, you know? If a branch falls off a tree, it sort of means something, (background noise obscured words)
S: This is quite an interestng thing, that people want that everything should have a meaning. But why should it have a meaning? They want it to be ratonally intelligible because then they can control it. You don't want to leave anything meaningless or without explanaton because then you have no means of controlling it; but if you happen to know it is because of so-and-so, well, then you've got the possibility of controlling it. We are like Urizen in Blake's prophetc book: we like to think we've got everything under control. So we don't like these areas of meaninglessness or mystery.
Aniketa: Because if you've got a law that's inevitable then you don't have to do anything about it.
S: Yes, right! (Pause)
Purna: It's not even a queston of control; at least if you can understand the process, it makes you in some way above it.
S: Yes. Right. True.
64 1980: JEWEL ORNAMENT OF LIBERATION – CHAPTER 1 MOTIVE [95]
But do you remember the story, the history of Mr Bounderbee? Was it Mr Bounderbee the self-made man? Do you remember? Didn't he declare that he'd had no advantages at all in his early life? That he'd been thrown out by his mother and spent his early days in the guter, and had raised himself entrely by his own efforts? Did he not make that claim? And was it not shown up eventually to be quite false? And what actually had been the situaton? How had he spent his early life? Voice: He had a mother, didn't he?... (S: He had a mother, yes.) ... and his mother used to come and see him once a year without him knowing.
S: Yes, but that's later on in the story. But had his mother thrown him out? Had he been raised in the guter? No. Apparently she'd brought him up very nicely. (Laughter) And he apparently made out that he'd learned to read and write just by spelling out shop signs and he was a poor litle boy of 6 or 7 working for his own living. But his mother it transpired, had had him carefully taught and had kept all his litle exercise books. (Laughter) So he wasn't by any
[96] means a self-made man. But, you know, this is an example of the same kind of thing, isn't it? You want people to think you've done it all yourself. You've not been helped by anybody; you've done it entrely by your own efforts; nobody has helped you.
And of course, there is the example in Blake of Urizen. He makes this claim that he's done it all himself. That he's self-dependent; that he's indebted to nobody. So this is a sort of human, though not very human, attude; that is, of keeping silent about your teachers – concealing your debts as a human being, your cultural debts - your spiritual debts even and not being honest about them. So this brings them a false, a pseudo-self sufciency, a sort of conceit, an arrogance, a pseudo-independence - not wantng others to think that you even learned anything from anybody.
1980: JEWEL ORNAMENT OF LIBERATION – CHAPTER 4 TRANSITORINESS [70]
S: Well we might be able to do that in Norfolk in the Friends, because the Norfolk educaton authority is the most liberal in Britain it seems and already there are several hundred children in Norfolk who are being educated at home by their parents, and the Norfolk educaton authority seems to permit this. It sends along an inspector every now and then to check that the children are learning the subject they are supposed to be learning. Apparently there is no difculty about that at all. So if we can start a Buddhist school anywhere in Britain it would
[71] be in Norfolk, so this is one of the reasons that we are thinking about it here. We have begun to get the children, I think. (laughter) We have got about two dozen in and around Norwich, which is a start. I am not suggestng that we need any more (laughter) but we have got these, so we might as well I think start some kind of school at least on the most basic level, and then see how we can develop that. Quite a few people are interested we know. But we shall have to face all sorts of problems, all sorts of questons, what is the purpose of Buddhist educaton, to call it that, that is the frst thing that we shall have to face. And maybe we won't fnd quick and easy solutons to all the problems that arise. Maybe our solutons will be very ad hoc and piecemeal and provisional, we may have to experiment quite a bit. But I think it is possible to do something along these lines and of course one of the things that we shall have to decide, certainly at later stages, what is the place of say science in the curriculum, to what extent do we need as individuals [need] to be acquainted with the
65 scientfc world, to what extent is that valid, or to what extent is it the extrapolaton of an alienated intellect? Does the alienated intellect see the world, does it see Reality? I mean in this way you get back to Blake, his denunciaton of Science, the Spectre, the Alienated Reason, which according to him was insane. Well one can begin to see the Truth of that now, when we see what the scientfc spectre has managed to produce. "It is at most ravelling and most insane".
Bonnie: It seems to be so energetc and have so much energy this alienated intellect, it obviously has to feed on something.
S: Right, yes.
Bonnie: It becomes tumultuous and gets out of hand.
S: One notces, I have notced very ofen in the case of, I won't say scientsts, it is more like intellectuals that I have known, especially working in the scholarly feld, even the feld of Buddhism, that very ofen an overdeveloped intelligence, an overdeveloped brain, was accompanied by or backed up by very underdeveloped emotons to an extraordinary extent. Almost infantle emotons. It is really as though the intellect is developed at the expense of the emotons.
1981: CHAIRMEN’S EVENT [5]
Sometmes - I've found this myself in the past - that if there's a lot happening that you're supposed to be coping with, one of the best things to do is to take on more work. Not in the sense of taking on, but just to start doing something just because you want to do it. Not because anyone has suggested it or circumstances require it. You just feel like doing it, and that will add to your sense of initatve and enable you to handle all the other things beter too. I felt something like that was happening with regard to Prakasha when he spoke of the Blake study groups. Because he really felt like doing them and did them for that reason, my guess is that the interest and enthusiasm that was aroused in him by doing that feeds back into the other things, and enables him to keep on top of them, rather than just having to cope with them. So make sure that you are doing something that you are really interested in, and that you even take complete initatve with regard to. As your ideas, not things that you have to do because of the surrounding circumstances.
1981: FOLLOW UP TO VINEHALL AT PADMALOKA [7]
S: Ah, but how was yard arrived at? - it was the length of a man's arm, you see. It is (?)
[8]
______: (?)
S: Exactly, exactly. So how is arrived at? Purely by the exercise of reason, you can imagine a yard. It means something to you - it's the length of your own arm.
______: (?)
S: But a metre means nothing at all.
______: (?)
S: No a metre means nothing at all. I always cite this as an example of what Blake would call Urizenic reasoning. It is reasoning, abstract reasoning out of touch with experience.
66 1981: MITRATA OMNIBUS TUSCANY 81 PRE-ORD [187]
S: It is a bit like that, just like a faculty operatng without a person, a brain contnuing to operate, an intellect contnuing to operate, but there's no person really there... a disembodied intellect, even more than disembodied because there's no soul so to speak there either. I've known such people.
Sudhana: It's sort of self-perpetuatng...
S: Yes, and such people tend to reminisce a lot, they can be very dogmatc, very rigid in their ideas they can't learn anything fresh.
Kevala: Presumably that faculty won't allow them to die, it will keep on.
S: Yes, it will keep on, and sometmes the physical body may be quite strong and healthy, so you get the phenomenon of a person maybe well on into their eightes even ninetes, but you know, they just carry on, this healthy body and this unhealthy brain in the sense of intellect, contnuing to functon together, and not much else. It's quite frightening sometmes, to see this. It reminds me of Blake's descripton of the self or the Spectre.
Sudhana: Do you feel senility is liable to happen to someone who's practsing as much as someone who isn't?
S: Yes, in a sense, it will equally appear to be senility, but in their case they may be withdrawing into relatvely speaking, dhyana states, not into a drowsy, sleepy sort of state.
1981: PALI-DHAMMAPADA CHS 14 & 20 VINEHALL [165]
You see Blake went into this whole queston of what he called Reason and Energy. It is as though what he called Reason is the expression of just one limited part of oneself, the danger is that it takes over or tries to take over the whole. For instance the genuine Reason is that aspect of oneself which can examine the facts and draw conclusions and forecast the future and see what you ought to do in the light of certain possible consequences, this is all Reason, but that is not the whole of one's life, but if Reason tries to take over then your whole life becomes something calculated and worked out and therefore limited and conditoned and this is what Blake was protestng against.
1982: PALI-MEGHIYA SUTTA [63]
S: Well, even in the Catholic Church, to do them justice, they do have something to say about heaven, but they seem to let themselves go much more when talking about hell, so one gathers; it's as though their heart's more in the job in that particular ... (amusement)
Murray: That's what Blake said about Milton in "Paradise Lost".
S: Well, that was a bit different one could say, yes,
S: (cont.) (Lost at beginning of tape) ... a rather different sort of sense.
Prasannasiddhi: Maybe the Christians feel they've got their hells and heavens mixed up, maybe some of the things they've got down there in hell actually should be up there in heaven.
S: Well this was one of Blake's big points; that energy did not belong really to hell, energy belonged to heaven, energy was a spiritual quality, not a diabolical quality. Delight was a heavenly quality, not a
67 diabolical quality. He regards the angel as an iniquitous figure, the angel is one in whom all the energies are under restraint, and that is not a truly spiritual state according to Blake.
Prasannasiddhi: Well maybe even that ... he was sort of pointing out something but maybe he went to the other extreme.
S: Well, even Blake said in a sense the devils are the real angels, and the angels are the real devils! Anyway, if we go into angels and Blake there'll be no end of it and we won't finish this particular Sutta.
1982: PALI-PARABHAVA SUTTA SEMINAR [8]
Then it says: dhammakamo bhavam hot, dhammadessi parabhavo, which is absolutely clear in the Pali. So, dhammakamo: now this is quite interestng because here again we've got a word used in the positve sense which later in Buddhism, even as represented by the Pali canon, or a later strata of the Pali canon, has a more negatve sense: the word kama. Kama usually means 'desire' in a rather negatve sense. For instance, you've got the kamaloka, as distnct from the [9] rupaloka and arupaloka. You've got kama in the sense of lust. You've kama in the sense of craving, in the sense of sensuous desire, even sexual desire. But originally it was just desire in the broad sense, neither negatve nor positve, just desire. It could be the one, it could be the other. Not even just desire, that's a very strong term. It's got almost the connotaton of passion, or even love, you could say.
Kulananda: A Blakean sense of desire?
S: Yes, in a Blakean sense. So, dhammakamo bhavam hot: 'One who' you might say 'loves the Dhamma passionately', 'one who really desires the Dhamma he grows, he progresses, he advances'. So one could say quite a lot about Dhamma. Perhaps it isn't really necessary to say very much. Dhamma is the moral law, the spiritual law, the Buddha's teachings, the Truth, whatever helps you to evolve spiritually; that is Dhamma. So one who really desires the Dhamma, one who loves the Dhamma, he is the one who grows, he is the one who develops. And dhammadessi parabhavo. So, dessi is 'hate'. It's also not just hate, there's another word: detests. 'He who hates or detests the Dhamma, he declines, he deteriorates, he suffers downfall'. You can almost make your own translatons out of this. Perhaps you should try it!
[91]
Sumitra: What about? there's a quotaton from Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell one of the proverbs ...
S: 'The path of excess is the way to the palace of wisdom.' Yes, but what does he mean by 'excess'? I don't think he means excess in the moral sense. I think he means a sort of artstc exuberance, an overflowingness. You don't fnd your way to the palace of wisdom by curbing yourself, by restraining and restrictng yourself. I think he uses the word 'excess' in a highly positve sense here. I don't think he means that wine, women and song are the way to the palace of wisdom. I don't think he means it in this sense. I think what Blake was getng at was that the way to wisdom wasn't a sort of careful and cautous prudence. It was a sort of letng yourself go and not being afraid of full excess, not being afraid of exuberance, not being afraid of life and vitality.
Prajnananda: There's that other one: 'Sooner kill a baby in its cradle than nurse unacted desire', which is getng at the same thing really.
S: I'm sure he didn't mean indulge in or give expression to every unskilful mental state, as we would call it. Don't forget the word 'desire' was for him a very positve word.
68 [92]
Kulananda: Akin to virya.
S: Well, not just virya, but also 'passion' in the positve sense: intense, outward-going positve emoton. He meant by that litle proverb that wisdom is not something sort of cold and calculatng. (Pause) I think that what the Buddha is saying in this verse is that dissipaton in the strict sense as represented by such things as womanizing, alcoholism and addicton to gambling are a source of decline; abandoning oneself, throwing oneself away on these essentally negatve pursuits; just giving up, just letng the conditons pull you in, draw you in, suck you in, in its most extreme form, its most negatve form, through, perhaps, your craving for excitement and stmulaton.
1983: PALI-SIGALOVADA SUTTA [156]
S: Well, the intensity of the interest. If you want to go all out for Blake, say, for a few months, well, that rather puts the meditaton in the shade for the tme being. But later on you may feel like devotng yourself, with the same degree of intensity, to meditaton for a while. Some people functon best like that, it would seem.
[157]
S: I wouldn't say that you would necessarily be, to use the same example, more into Blake if you kept up your daily meditaton practce. Not necessarily. You might be, but on the other hand I think you might not.
1986: NANAMOLI CHAPTER 4 [35]
Ratnaprabha: Could you see any place, in considering Mara, for looking at him in the way that Blake looked at Satan that is, to see him as a sensual and harnessable force, if you see what I mean?
[36]
S: Well, yes and no, because in order to do that I think you would have to put Mara within perhaps the purely Vajrayanic context or perspectve; and perhaps this is what happens in the case of the wrathful deites; perhaps they have got, in a sense, some external features or atributes of Mara, but they have been transformed. Well, it is said in the Vajrayana that Kilesa is Bodhi; the fve skandhas are the fve wisdoms, and so on. Mara is Buddha; I believe that is actually said. So, yes, one can regard him as a harnessable energy except that then one is regarding him more as just Kilesa Mara. But there is the Devaputra Mara, too, which I think shouldn't be sort of psychologised away too easily.
Ratnaprabha: But do you think that is what Blake was doing with Satan psychologising him away? Wasn't he, in a sense, seeing him as a real being?
S: No, if Blake psychologised him away, he wasn't seeing him as a real being. Buddhist traditon doesn't deny that there is a psychological state that can be regarded as a person such as Mara; but that does not mean that there is [not?], apart from the psychological state so personifed, an actual person in the cosmic hierarchy, who is Mara. Do you see what I mean?
Ratnaprabha: Yes.
S: I am not so sure whether Blake did completely psychologise the fgure of Satan. Perhaps he also believed in an objectve Satan?
69 Ratnaprabha: If I understand The Marriage of Heaven and Hell correctly, he seems to be saying, in a sense, that human beings can be divided into two classes, which you may call angels and devils; and that he feels that the devils have as much, if not more, to contribute to society, human culture and so on, as the angels do.
S: I doubt whether the Buddhist traditon would take that view that the Maras have as much to contribute as the devas. It seems a different point of view, one might say. The background of Christanity is quite different. But one could say, from a Buddhist point of view, that just as you can have human beings who are embodiments of unskilful rather than skilful mental states, can you not have non-human beings, of a deva-like nature, who are the embodiments of unskilful rather than skilful mental states?
[38]
Utara: So, like in the dreams I had, maybe it's a case of I was getng in touch with my own potental to be evil, to feel it's a sort of going down to a level of the human
S: It's not just that. It's more complicated than that, because under this concept of the devil, or evil, in the West, we've included some things which might be regarded actually as positve rather than negatve, as good rather than bad. Do you see what I mean? For instance, the devil is associated with the idea of disobedience. He fell, like Adam, because he disobeyed God. Well, one could look upon disobedience, under certain circumstances, as a positve quality. Blake regarded the devil as representng basically energy, and the angel as representng that which repressed energy, which held it down. So we wouldn't necessarily regard energy per se as evil. I mean one can make an evil use of it, but energy by itself is surely not evil? So we have to bear in mind that the devil is a quite complex sort of being, or concept in Christanity. It does include what we would regard as unskilfulness from a Buddhist point of view, but perhaps it includes other elements which, if not actually skilful, are at least not unskilful. So, if you do have a sort of dream experience and you encounter the devil or a devil, you are not necessarily just in contact with pure evil; you can also be in contact with those forces or energies which traditonally Christanity regards as evil and as associated with the fgure of the devil.
[74]
S: Yes, the ambiguites of this or the possibilites of misunderstanding here. Perhaps it would be safer to just speak in terms of seeing their potental. It reminds me of Milton's descripton of Satan, or Lucifer, afer his fall: what does he say? Who's a Milton scholar? 'Not less than an archangel' what is it? Anyway, he goes on to give this famous comparison with the sun, 'shorn of his beams', that the archangel, afer his fall, is stll glorious, but to some extent he is shorn of his glory, just like the setng [sic] sun, which is 'shorn of its beams', as it were; you can sort of look at it. Yes, 'the excess of glory obscured', he says. 'Not less than an archangel ruined,' he says; so there are those two as it were contradictory ideas. Lucifer is stll an archangel, but he is a ruined archangel. That is also, or very nearly, the ttle of a biography of Coleridge, isn't it? Damaged Archangel. So you should think of yourselves in those sort of terms; you are wounded angels, as it were. There is a paintng by a Finnish painter which I saw in an art gallery in Helsinki, quite an impressive paintng, called The Wounded Angel, and there is this poor angel, with his head bandaged and his wings rather torn and he is sitng on a sort of stretcher, and he is being borne along by two men, rather sadly! So perhaps that is a beter way of looking at people, especially one's own friends, because you can't ignore the blemishes but you mustn't lose sight of the potental of the person, or mustn't lose sight of their good qualites that exist even now, despite the blemishes by which they are accompanied or by which they are overlaid. Some people, unfortunately, are so
70 susceptble and even defensive that if you just point out a tny blemish they think that you are critcizing them as a person or rejectng them even totally, or disapproving of them totally. That makes things rather difcult.
[actual quote reads:]
his form had yet not lost All her Original brightness, nor appear'd Less then Arch Angel ruind, and th' excess Of Glory obscur'd: As when the Sun new ris'n Looks through the Horizontal misty Air Shorn of his Beams Ratnaprabha: I don't know if this would add anything to it, but in trying to understand the queston I was looking up to see what Blake had to say about it. I found that he does make a
[75] defnite distncton, as it were, between people's evil qualites, if you like, their faults, and their good qualites. There is a short passage in Frye, which I could read out to see whether this does correspond to your point if you think that would be appropriate. He says (this is Frye paraphrasing Blake): The real enemy is the spirit that looked out of Hayley's eyes' (this is Blake's friend and enemy, if you like, Hayley) 'when Hayley was angry, that is Hayley's selfood or spectre, the Satan in him that hates and tries to destroy all the imaginaton it fnds. It is a weakling's charity to say that we must love our friends in spite of or including their faults. Their faults are their diseases, and to love a man's diseases is not very friendly to the man.'
S: Yes, right: pimples!
Ratnaprabha (contnuing): 'All men are composed of imaginaton and selfood, and , all men should cherish the former in themselves and love it in other men, while hatng all selfoods and trying to annihilate their own.'
S: Well, that does just about sum it up, doesn't it? Only one must understand exactly what Blake means by 'selfood'. I mean he uses that expression in that purely negatve sense, sometmes corresponding to something more like egotsm or self-centredness. Yes, that does sum it up. But it's no sign of friendship to condone your friend's weak points, or even his evil qualites or his blemishes. This is why one speaks, presumably, of ferce friendship; not a sort of cossetng friendship.
But, before you can be a ferce friend, you've got to be a friend. If you are ferce with somebody, that other person has got to be convinced that you are his friend, otherwise it will just be taken as an atack on him, so you must be quite sure that the friendship is frmly established before you start introducing that element of ferceness. One shouldn't do that prematurely; there must be strong mutual trust for that sort of ferce friendship, that sort of critcism, to be possible.
1987: PADMASAMBHAVA – CANTOS 37 & 39 [33]
Punyamegha: Would you say that Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a litle bit sort of similar to the Vajrayana approach?
S: A litle bit, perhaps.
Punyamegha: Sort of like the devil being well, he's a devil but he is inspiraton as well.
71 S: Well, no, it's not quite like that. Blake's view is that the devil, in a sense, is not really the devil. The devil represents energy, and energy, according to Blake, is a good thing. But, according to Blake again, Christanity, due to its repressive attude, has come to regard energy as bad. Blake is saying energy is not bad; energy is eternal delight, he says.
STUDY LEADERS AHEI [97]
Virananda: To some extent, Bhante, this queston has been answered by what you have said so far, so there might not be much to be said on it. You say that there is a tendency to over-generalise when it comes to spiritual practce, and also that a vague intenton to develop is not enough. You therefore emphasize the importance of knowing psychological types in order to decide upon specifc method. How do you rate the usefulness of other, non-psychological, less scientfc, more imaginatve, classifcatons of human types, such as William Blake's three classes of man - of the Four Zoas - in providing help for deciding upon specifc methods? And in partcular, why do you rarely, if ever, menton the value of astrological types (laughter), especially as now we have at least one astrologer in the Order?
S: Well, as regards Blake, I must confess I have rather neglected Blake of late, because one can't keep up with everything. Nonetheless, I do think that Blake's imaginatve classifcaton - I'm not sure whether it's a classifcaton of character types; it's a classifcaton, or analysis, if you like, of the different aspects of - what would one say? humanity? You know, with the fgure of Urizen representng alienated reason; there's Luvah representng - what it is Luvah
[98] represents?
___ Passion and emoton.
S: Passion and emoton. There's Tharmas representng ...
Voice: Sensaton.
S: Sensaton, the body. Well, I've gone into this a litle and tried to te it up with Buddhism in my litle artcle on Buddhism and William Blake, haven't I? So, yes, I am quite [114] aware of the fact that there is this sort of material in Blake, and it could well be of utlity. I think at the tme that I gave this partcular lecture it was many, many years since I'd read Blake (I reread him subsequently) and, probably for that reason, I didn't make any reference to Blake. But, yes, one could have a workshop on Blake's classifcaton. We could go round the circle. We could say, you know, whether (of) any person ( ), people felt that he was predominantly Urizenic or Luvah-like or Tharmas-like, or whatever. It does seem a bit general; perhaps it's a litle too general, but it might be interestng none the less. I think it's of great imaginatve value. One can't help thinking that the fgure of Urizen, you know, really dominates the world in many ways.
I once had the idea of giving a lecture - I might give it yet called 'Buddhism and the Spectre of Buddhism'; 'spectre' in Blake's sense, because Urizen represents in a way, or corresponds to, the spectre, the alienated intelligence or alienated reason. So by 'the spectre of Buddhism' I would mean not Buddhism itself - not Buddhism proper, not real Buddhism, but an alienatedly intellectual presentaton of it, which would in fact be a big (veil). I think some presentatons of Buddhism fall into this category. I think, for instance, ( ? )'s 'What the Buddha Taught' to some extent falls into this category.
Suvajra: The spectre.
72 S: It's the spectre of Buddhism rather than Buddhism itself. But perhaps I won't give that talk, so I'll just menton now that I did have the idea. You can see the sort of ideas that I might have expressed in it.
73 BHANTE ON BLAKE 3: IMAGINATION
Man is All Imaginaton. God is Man & exists in us &we in him.85
The Eternal Body of Man is The Imaginaton, that is, God himself…. It manifests itself in his Works of Art (In Eternity All is Vision).86
Vision or Imaginaton is a Representaton of what Eternally Exists, Really & Unchangeably.87
I know that this world is a world of imaginaton and vision … Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportons; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imaginaton, Nature is Imaginaton itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers … To me this world is all one contnued vision of … imaginaton.88
85 Blake. Marginalia to Berkeley p219: The Writngs of Willian Blake, ed Geoffrey Keynes, Vol 3 p356 86 Blake. Laocoon Aphorisms: The Writngs of Willian Blake, ed Geoffrey Keynes, Vol 3 p358 87 Blake. Vision of the Last Judgement p69 : The Writngs of Willian Blake, ed Geoffrey Keynes, Vol 3 p145 88 Blake. The leters of William Blake (1906) from a leter to Rev. Trusler 1799 74 INTRODUCTION
This reader draws together all the references Bhante has made to William Blake where he is artculatng the theme of imaginaton.
The overview begins with a brief descripton of what is meant by ‘imaginaton’ –distnguishing it from the lesser faculty that Bhante, following Coleridge, calls ‘fancy’. Following this, we review how the imaginaton is seen in the context of a higher spiritual faculty, or the whole man, including the ethical dimension. The imaginaton is seen to connect us with the archetypal realm, midway between everyday sense experience and “truth in a more ... ultmate sense”89 and able to communicate that truth.
The intenton of this reader is to make it as easy as possible to dig down from this overview to the full text of what Bhante was saying in its context.
My belief is that there is a signifcant facet of Bhante’s understanding of Buddhism that he is drawing on Blake to artculate, and that this is very much part of his endeavour to communicate the dharma in a western cultural context.
OVERVIEW
DISTINCTION FROM FANCY Bhante consistently uses the word ‘imaginaton’ compatbly with Coleridge’s defniton, included in full at the end of this reader, where he partcularly distnguishes it from ‘fancy’90. The more limited capacity of fancy relies on memory to provide ‘counters to play with’91. As an example of this, Bhantepoints out that “you can combine the head and trunk of a man with the body of a horse: in that way you get a centaur”92.
Blake chooses different words, using ‘fancy’ synonymously with ‘imaginaton’, as for example
To me this world is all one contnued vision of fancy or imaginaton93
He describes the lesser faculty as ‘fable or allegory’, but makes the same distncton that the lesser faculty is bound up with memory whereas imaginaton is not.
Fable or Allegory is Form’d by the daughters of Memory. Imaginaton is Surrounded by the daughters of inspiraton94
Imaginaton has nothing to do with Memory95
In contrast to fancy’s play with the counters of memory, imaginaton is more creatve. In Coleridge’s descripton ‘It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible,
89 1979: The Precepts of the Gurus – second Seminar Tapes 17-end p312 90 1986: Women's pre-ordinaton retreat on GFR p22 91 Coleridge BiographiaLiteraria 1817. Everyman’s Library Editon 1906 p160 92 1979: The Precepts of the Gurus – second Seminar Tapes 17-end p312 93 Blake. Marginalia to Wordsworth p374-5, The Writngs of Willian Blake, ed Geoffrey Keynes, Vol 3 p378 94 Blake. A Vision of the Last Judgement plate 68 95 Blake. Marginalia to Wordsworth p374-5, The Writngs of Willian Blake, ed Geoffrey Keynes, Vol 3 p378 75 yet stll at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.’96Bhante describes this imaginaton as ‘the image making faculty’97 that ‘puts us in contact with the archetypal realm’98 so that ‘image ... stands between sense experience and truth in a more ... ultmate sense’99. In this way, Subhut points out that “Sangharakshita invests the term 'imaginaton' with frmly Dharmic signifcance, as the vehicle of the Dharma life, the faculty by which we come to know the truth of things”100
IMAGINATION AND INTUITION
UNITY IN A HIGHER SPIRITUAL FACULTY Bhante sees imaginaton as ‘a ... faculty of … creatng images in such a way that they are able to reflect a higher truth’101. Further, he sees this as a part of ‘a higher spiritual faculty which has these two aspects ... intuiton ... or Insight ... and imaginaton.’ ‘When this higher faculty uses concepts we call it the intuiton ... When it uses images we call it the imaginaton’102
The unity of this higher spiritual faculty is suggested by the unity of beauty, apprehended by the imaginaton, and truth, apprehended by insight. As Keats put it:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know103 As Bhante puts it: “"imaginaton is that higher ... spiritual faculty... which apprehends beauty"and as "you cannot altogether separate beauty from truth," so "in your imaginatve response to beauty there is an element of ... aesthetc appreciaton and ... an aspect of insight, of intuiton"104
UNITY IN THE WHOLE MAN Blake takes this unifcaton further, so that "for Blake the Imaginaton is not a faculty, but the operaton of the whole man or woman, with reason and emoton fully integrated.”105 Hence the quote:
Man is All Imaginaton.106
As Bhante points out, there is a subtle “process of alienaton”107 at play when we “take distnctons as real differences”108, moving from Man to a faculty of man, to imaginaton as one way of functoning of this faculty.
96 Coleridge BiographiaLiteraria 1817. Everyman’s Library Editon 1906 p159-160 97 1979: The Precepts of the Gurus – second Seminar Tapes 17-end p312 98 1986: Buddha from Mitrata Omnibus p13 99 1979: The Precepts of the Gurus – second Seminar Tapes 17-end p312 100 2010: Re-imagining the Buddha p12 101 1979: The Precepts of the Gurus – second Seminar Tapes 17-end p312 102 1980: Milarepa-Heartelt Advice to Rechungpa p20-21 103 Keats. Ode on a Grecian Urn 104 1980: Pali-Kalama Suta p12 105 Wisdom Beyond Words p259 106 Blake. Marginalia to Berkeley p219: The Writngs of Willian Blake, ed Geoffrey Keynes, Vol 3 p356 107 1980: Milarepa-Heartelt Advice to Rechungpa p22 108 1980: Milarepa-Heartelt Advice to Rechungpa p22 76 In partcular, to “posit” this spiritual faculty as “something higher in a more abstract sense” which may not be “functoning in either of those two ways” may “represent a start in the process of alienaton”109
RELATIVE MERITS In some places Bhante can be read as suggestng that the conceptual mind is further from the truth than the imaginaton. For example, of the image “Tyger, Tyger burning bright” from Blake’s Songs of Experience, he says these are “very powerful images so you mustn’t ... lessen the imact by giving them a very limited conceptual meaning which is accessible to the ratonal mind”110. However, in the seminars he clarifes that “one can speak of a higher reason and a lower reason, the lower intellect and the higher intellect, even a lower imaginaton and a higher imaginaton” but that he would “rather call the so-called lower imaginaton fantasy and keep the word imaginaton itself with a capital ‘I’ defnitely for the higher faculty”111.
So the more quotdian side of the conceptual mind, that one might call the lower intellect, plays with the counters of remembered ideas on a similar level to fancy’s play with remembered images, whilst the higher intellect is themore creatve actvity of the same higher spiritual faculty that, “When it uses images we call ... the imaginaton”112
ETHICAL DIMENSION The aspect of imaginaton as a capacity to appreciate beauty brings out that "there is an ethical element also, in as much as your whole being is tuned in to that experience of the beautful through your imaginaton, you yourself are transformed, at least you are refned and sensitsed"113. Shelly brings this out in a poem Bhante quotes in The 10 Pillars:
The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identfcaton of ourselves with the beautful which exists in thought, acton, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own114
A HIERARCHY OF EXPERIENCE In positoning the realm of the imaginaton as standing “between sense experience and truth in a more ... ultmate sense"115Bhante is alluding to a three-fold hierarchy with the archetypal realm taking the intermediate positon between on the one handmundane consciousness, associated with fancy and the play of memory, and on the other, the ultmate truth.
Bhante saw Blake’s visual images as “a sort of intermediate between the experiences that one has on the level of ordinary waking consciousness and the levels that are represented by say the Buddha and Bodhisatva
109 1980: Milarepa-Heartelt Advice to Rechungpa p22 110 1980: Milarepa-Rechungpa’s Departure p91 111 1980: Milarepa-Heartelt Advice to Rechungpa p21 112 1980: Milarepa-Heartelt Advice to Rechungpa p21 113 1980: Pali-Kalama Suta 114 Shelly, A Defence of Poetry quoted in Sangharakshita, The 10 Pillars p58 115 1979: The Precepts of the Gurus – second Seminar Tapes 17-end p312 77 fgures”116, so that whilst they don’t have the explicit dharmic signifcance of the Buddhist traditon behind them, they do none the less serve to take us to that level of beauty and truth found in the archetypal realm.
In additon, Blake’s poetry and visual images do authentcally connect us with “the imaginaton (which) is that faculty which sort of uses images to apprehend reality”117 so that “imaginaton ... does reflect just a tny gleam of reality”118. Though not itself the level of ultmate truth, the imaginaton does enable us to apprehend it, so that the “imaginatve creatons of poets” can furnish us with “the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth”119
MINUTE PARTICULARS In Wisdom Beyond Words, Bhante says that “it is through imagery, symbols, myths, and metaphors that the Imaginaton, the whole man or woman, is able to apprehend or respond to or experience reality as minute partculars in their totality".120Here, he is referencing a partcular phrase of Blake’s: ‘minute partculars’.
Blake contrasts the ‘minute partculars’ of actual sense experience with abstract generalisatons. At his most strident, he says:
He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Partculars General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite flaterer: For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Partculars And not in generalizing Demonstratons of the Ratonal Power121 The obvious opposite of the sensory reality of ‘minute partculars’ are Plato’s universals, or ideal forms, and indeed Blake had litle tme for Plato122but Bhante offers a more conciliatory view, that “Plato seems to have experienced these universals not as abstract concepts but more as archetypes, so his experience of reality is not necessarily to be set in contradistncton to that of people who, like William Blake, experience reality as ‘minute partculars”123. A key difference being that an archetype is an image where an abstract generalisaton is a concept. Taking the “totality” Bhante refers to in the above quote as an archetypal image, perceiving this with the imaginaton is in line with what Blake describes in the opening to Auguries of Innocence:
To see a world in a Grain of sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infnity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour124 As Bhante goes on to say: "If you do this ... you are seeing all aspects of reality, not just on the surface, but in their depths"125. Here there is no hierarchy implied between surface and depths: both are aspects of reality. As an aspect of reality, “the surface” represents the ‘minute partculars’ of the texture of lived experience, not a
116 1980: Milarepa-Rechungpa’s Repentance p369 117 1980: The Jewel Ornament of Liberaton seminar Chapter 21 Buddha Actvity p30 118 1980: The Jewel Ornament of Liberaton seminar Chapter 21 Buddha Actvity p39 119 1980: Alternatve Traditons p44 120 1993: Wisdom Beyond Words p259 121 Blake: Jerusalem Plate 55 122 In Vision of the Last Judgement plate 68, Blake says: “Plato has made Socrates say that Poets & Prophets do not know or Understand what they write or Uter … this is a most Pernicious Falsehood.” 123 1993: Wisdom Beyond Words p259 124 Blake: Auguries of Innocence lines 1-4 125 1993: Wisdom Beyond Words p259 78 superfcial conceptual understanding, nor the play with memories that characterises fancy. Imaginaton encompasses both the direct apprehension of these ‘minute partculars’ of immediate sense experience, and the percepton of archetypal images that serve “to idealize and to unify”126.
CONCLUSION
In artculatng a form of Buddhism intelligible to Western culture, Bhante is drawing on the imaginatve poetry and engravings of Blake to illustrate the way that images can engage a higher spiritual faculty present at least in potental in all of us. This connects us both with the ‘minute partculars’ of lived experience and the unifying images of the archetypal realm, and in doing so, it can “reflect just a tny gleam of reality” which “gives to the Fine Arts a sort of signifcance ... They give one a glimpse into a higher world”127.
126 Coleridge BiographiaLiteraria 1817. Everyman’s Library Editon 1906 p159-160 127 980: The Jewel Ornament of Liberaton seminar Chapter 21 Buddha Actvity p39 79 SOURCES
BOOKS
1980: ALTERNATIVE TRADITIONS [44] My own difference with Dr Werner relates to his implied disparagement of poetry. Speaking of the Rig Veda, which he describes as an extensive collecton of hymns comprising ‘the reactons of the Indian mind to its encounters with experienced reality, both external and internal’, he objects to the view of Western scholars like Macdonell that the Vedas are ‘imaginatve creatons of poets’ (p.23). But is that view really so very far from the truth? According to Shelley a poem is ‘the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’, poetry ‘the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds’, and poets themselves ‘the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiraton’. If this indeed be so, then surely there could be no greater praise for the Vedas than to say of them that they were the imaginatve creatons of poets -especially when one considers what the word imaginaton meant not only to Shelley but also to Blake and Coleridge. Afer all, poetry is much more than versifed fancies.
1993: WISDOM BEYOND WORDS [259] Plato would have said that reality does indeed reside in such universals, rather than in partculars, and it might well seem that abstractons are large and embracing and whole, while partculars are bity litle separate things. But Plato seems to have experienced these universals not as abstract concepts but more as archetypes, so his experience of reality is not necessarily to be set in contradistncton to that of people who, like William Blake, experience reality as ‘minute partculars’. When William Blake speaks of the experience of reality as being that of ‘minute partculars’, he is speaking about the operaton of the Imaginaton, and for Blake the Imaginaton is not a faculty, but the operaton of the whole man or woman, with reason and emoton fully 9. And it is through imagery, symbols, myths, and metaphors that the Imaginaton, the whole man or woman, is able to apprehend or respond to or experience reality as minute partculars in their totality. If you do this, you are not just experiencing reality in one aspect, which leaves you sliding on the surface, nor are you just sliding from one aspect to another; rather, you are seeing all aspects of reality, not just on the surface, but in their depths.
COLERIDGE: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA 1817. EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY EDITION 1906 [159] The Imaginaton then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imaginaton I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human percepton, and as a repetton in the fnite mind of the eternal act of creaton in the infnite I AM. The secondary Imaginaton I consider as an echo of the former, co-existng with the conscious will, yet stll as identcal with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operaton. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet stll
[160] at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentally vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentally fxed and dead.
FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fxites and defnites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated form the order of tme and space; while it is blended with, and
80 modifed by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of associaton.
81 SEMINARS
1979: THE PRECEPTS OF THE GURUS – SECOND SEMINAR TAPES 17-END [312] Padmaraja: In the connecton would you say something about the imaginaton.
S: That's quite difcult. I mean imaginaton being again a very vague word, not properly defned. The imaginaton is the image making faculty, this is the literal meaning. And it's as though the image in a very broad sense, stands between sense experience and truth in a more abstract, or perhaps I should say more ultmate sense. And it's the image with which the arts, certainly the representatonal arts, certainly poetry is concerned very much with the image, paintng is concerned very much with the image. So the imaginaton is that faculty if you like to use that term, which is capable of producing or creatng images. Perhaps it's difcult to say much more than that. It requires a really thorough treatment. I don't think can be given in this sort of way with just an off the cuff statement. Coleridge has in England been the one who has started a more serious consideraton of what imaginaton is, especially in the BiographiaLiterariawhere he goes into it, and one of his great contributons was to distnguish imaginaton from fancy. He says imaginaton is not simply the same thing as fancy as people generally thought in his day. Fancy merely recombined things in a rather whimsical arbitrary sort of way. For instance supposing you know there is such a thing as a horse and you there is such a thing as a man, well you can combine the head and trunk of a man with the body of a horse, in that way you get a centaur - according to him this is just fancy at work. It is not imaginaton. Imaginaton is you could say a sort of faculty of reflectng truth in images, creatng images in such a way that they are able to reflect a higher truth. And he goes into this in a famous chapter in the BiographiaLiterariaon the imaginaton.
So for the Romantc poets in general the imaginaton is a sort of higher faculty which functons in terms of images but images which are able to reflect a higher truth, a truth higher than discursive reason is able to atain, according to the Romantcs usually. Blake had this sort of idea of the imaginaton. According to him imaginaton was the whole man. It's the sort of total faculty. It is not this or that faculty or this or that aspect of the human being. It's the faculty of the whole man. The whole man naturally sees things in terms of images, not in terms of abstract concepts devoid of content. Blake was very much against what we would call abstract ideas, therefore he was a poet and an artst, not a thinker in the abstract, as it were scientfc, sense, like Berkeley or like Hume or like Kant or Locke. And also he was against science for this reason or at least the scientfc way of thinking.
1980: MILAREPA-HEARTFELT ADVICE TO RECHUNGPA [20] S: Well if one uses Insight, the term Insight as I said one can think of this as something just intellectual so the intellectual uses concepts. The
[21] imaginaton uses images. So one can say that there's no more reason why reality should not be mediated by images than by concepts. Concepts in themselves are no closer to reality than images. You get images for instance in sutras like the Sutra of Golden Light and the Pure Land Sutras and these are no further from reality you can say than the more conceptual method of say the Perfecton of Wisdom sutras. So you could say there is a higher faculty which is much more integrated than anything we usually experience. When this higher faculty uses concepts we call it the intuiton or even the higher intellect. When it uses images we call it the imaginaton. You could say something like that. But here one is using imaginaton much more in Blake's sense, not imaginaton in the sense of fancy of course. Using it in Coleridge's sense, the romantc sense.
82 Clive: Would you say that fantasy is a product of the alienated intellect.
S: Or even alienated imaginaton in a sense you could say, yes you could say that. Fantasy is alienated.
Abhaya: I thought you said somewhere that the imaginaton was a higher faculty.
S: Yes a higher faculty in comparison to the alienated reason and alienated emoton, yes. Again I must have been thinking of it in the English romantc sense. The sense in which the term was used by Blake and by Coleridge.
Abhaya: How can this be relatng it to what you call this higher faculty which can use either concepts or images to mediate the reality ( ) intuits. How can we bring it down to imaginaton versus reason. How could imaginaton be a higher faculty in that sense?
S: I think it's a queston of words really because one can speak of a higher reason and a lower reason, the lower intellect and the higher intellect, even a lower imaginaton and a higher imaginaton. I'd rather call the so-called lower imaginaton fantasy and keep the word imaginaton itself with a capital 'I' defnitely for the higher faculty in so far as it uses images. In so far as it uses concepts one could call it Insight.
Clive: So we're saying that this higher faculty has a conceptual side and...
S: I haven't said it has a conceptual side, one could say that. I've said it is capable of using the conceptual medium which you could also say means it has a conceptual side and it's also capable of using the medium of images which means it has an imaginatve side.
Clive: In itself it's beyond both of them.
S: Again you could say that but again don't make it alienated. Don't take distnctons as real differences. When one says well there is this higher faculty which can use concepts or it can use images well then one is tempted
[22] to think well it exists apart from those two functons, as it were. So you make it in a way something abstract. This is something that the alienated consciousness can do very easily but it has to sort of stop itself and maybe it's sort of ( ) to stop and just think of a higher spiritual faculty which just has these two aspects, you could say intuiton and imaginaton or Insight rather and imaginaton. There's no need to sort of wonder what it is like without those two things and to posit something higher in a more abstract sense which is not functoning in either of those two ways. One can do that but how real is it or does it not represent a stage in the process of alienaton itself.
1980: MILAREPA-RECHUNGPA’S DEPARTURE [91] S: Or if for instance you read Blake's "Tyger, Tyger burning bright". If you say, well, here you say Blake is addressing his own wild, untamed nature, which he is personifying as the tger. Well that sort of mentalizes and intellectualizes to a point where you just don't feel the impact of the poem any more. So perhaps you just have to feel, or try to experience what Blake meant by "Tyger", "burning" - a very powerful word - "in the night". "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright" what is it? "In the ...
___: .. in the forests of the night."
S:"In the forest of the night." They are very powerful images so you mustn't try to lessen the impact, or in effect lessen the impact, by giving them a very limited, conceptual meaning which is accessible to the ratonal mind.
83 1980: MILAREPA-RECHUNGPA’S REPENTANCE [246] Simon: I kind of see where this sort of, what you can relate to is perhaps sort of imagery that people in the West have used. Perhaps, the sort of, using the imaginaton in a way that somebody like Blake did. He created a whole sort of hierarchy. [247] Bhante: A whole mythology. Simon: Right, I mean, perhaps if you can't relate to that mythology, you know, perhaps even create your own. [248] Bhante: Mm. I also think, therefore, it’s very important that images that we have say, on theshrine, to use that term, should be aesthetcally appealing and quite a number of Buddhaimages originatng in the East are not emotonally appealing and not really atractve. And they're not inspiring.
Jayadeva: I think it’s going to be, I mean, in a way it’s a long term problem. It's not going to, sort of, suddenly. Given that we live in culture that’s so alienated. Untl we've created our own society. Untl we've got people being brought up within the movement that will be able,have people immediately responding to shrines with images that are European in...
Bhante: I think one does fnd that people respond quite strongly and quite positvely to Blake’s images. That they are immediately intelligible without much in the way of, you know, conceptual explanaton
[369] : I wonder if I could visualise some of Blake's images. Use them
S: Well one could try. Afer all he has depicted them in his paintngs and illustratons.
Devaraja: I just cannot see why one would choose to visualise a Blakean deity – in preference to a partcular Bodhisatva. I'm just trying to fnd a reason why... Well, there's something that maybe you respond to. I rem- ember Dhammadinna said that when she was doing a Tara practce she would quite ofen get another Tara that she had never seen before and I think you said that's o.k.
S: It is a queston also on the level on which they arise. I think you could say that one of the advantage of say Blakes images is that they are a sort of intermediate between the experiences that one has on the level of ordinary waking consciousness and the levels that are represented by say the Buddha and Bodhisatva fgures. It's rather difcult to get right upthere so Blake might be a sort or half-way house. Provided of course he does appeal to you naturally and spontaneously and there's something in your feeling and your emoton that naturally latches onto those fgures. You cannot sort of reason yourself into it. If they, if Blake leaves you cold well that's it. I doubt if there is anything you can do about it. [370] Simon: That is Exactly what I feel about some of Blake’s symmetry. It's like he speaks, he's a living example of the heroic human being He really strs my imaginaton. I don't know much about him but it is the human content. Not anything else, really. Well I don't really see what else there could be apart from a rather old academic appreciaton.
84 1980: PALI-KALAMA SUTTA [12] Manjuvajra: You make a connecton there between the beautful and the imaginaton. I've not heard that before. Why is the beautful connected with imaginaton?
S: Well what is it? What faculty is it in one that appreciates beauty? If in the object you have beauty, well, what do you have corresponding to that beauty in the object in the subject? What's the word for it? I use the word imaginaton following in a way Blake and Coleridge one could say. You can say the aesthetc sense, but aesthetc is a much broader term; it can refer to ordinary sensatons, it's much too broad perhaps, but imaginaton is that higher as it were spiritual faculty - if you like to use the word faculty - which apprehends beauty or responds to beauty, experiences beauty.
But again it is not that it's just aesthetc so to speak. There is an element of actual insight in that imaginaton which is not necessarily reducible to intellectual terms. Just as there is in the beauty also the truth, perhaps not quite in the Keatsian sense, but you cannot altogether separate beauty from truth or from goodness. The Dharma, as we've seen, is all three. So in your imaginatve response to beauty there is an element of - yes - aesthetc appreciaton and response in the highest sense, an aspect of insight, of intuiton. Beauty does give you some clue to the nature of reality, you could say, and also there is an ethical element also, in as much as your whole being is tuned in to that experience of the beautful through your imaginaton, you yourself are transformed, at least you are refned and sensitsed. Shelley says something of this sort in 'A Defence of Poetry' you may remember. I quoted it in 'The Religion of Art' so you'll be able to read it when 'The Religion of Art' comes out. But anyway this is all to underline the fact that the Dharma, in as much as it is described as
[13] kalyana which is not only good but lovely, the Dharma itself must be thought of as the beautful as well as the good and the true. So this Dharma is kalyana in the beginning, kalyana in the middle, kalyana in the end.
1980: THE JEWEL ORNAMENT OF LIBERATION SEMINAR CHAPTER 21 BUDDHA ACTIVITY [30] S: Well, just to give an example - supposing someone asks you - "well, what is spiritual life?" Well, you can reply in terms of concepts, you can give an analytcal idea, but the spiritual life means developing yourself as an individual, developing awareness, positve emoton etc. etc. You can say that.
Well, you can paint a picture, you can do like Blake did in one of his pictures, a deep blue background, stars in the sky, a spiral and fgures at different points in that spiral, - the ones higher up had got wings. You need not say anything, just point to that. That's an image of spiritual life - you use your imaginaton, not just abstract ideas, not just concepts.
It's images which have their own direct appeal, so the imaginaton is that faculty which sort of uses images to apprehend reality, truth and to communicate. So imaginaton is a very powerful thing. In most cases we don't use our imaginaton, we don't have imaginaton. [31] They're sort of starved. This is Blake's great point that reason has taken over from the imaginaton.
Paloma: The thing is - Dhammadinna said that sometmes images come to you – sometmes you can be somewhere and all of a sudden you have this feeling of all these fgures, or you even see quite vividly some strange things and then, well, I wonder is it real or is it...?
S: Well, you could say that of anything - well, are our thoughts real? Are ideas real? Are emotons real?
85 Dhammadinna: I think when you are in touch with the imaginatve realm, you actually experience it as more real, than this when you compare it. It's more vivid. Maybe it's got more conscious ...
[39] If one wanted to extend this one could say, 'whenever there is a degree of purifcaton of the Mind, especially when it's a queston of the imaginaton, there's a reflecton of something, and you could say, well, this is a reflecton in the last analysis of the - if not of the body, of the Buddha, at least of a tny litle bit of the Buddha's Mandala. There's a sort of almost Platonic idea. That imaginaton, in whatever form it takes, however it manifests itself, does reflect just a tny gleam of reality.
This gives to the Fine Arts a sort of signifcance. This is the sort of signifcance the Romantcs gave to the Fine Arts, especially to poetry. They didn't just have a social functon - they weren't just entertainment. They didn't just convey moral lessons. The signifcance wasn't purely didactc. They gave one a glimpse into a higher world, and one certainly does feel that with some of the visual work and some of the poetry of people like Blake and Coleridge and Wordsworth and so on.
1986: BUDDHA FROM MITRATA OMNIBUS [13] So there's a parallel between, say, imaginaton in the lower sense and the ordinary kind of dream, which is put- together bits and pieces from our waking experience to make something which is sort of new; imaginaton in the sense of fancy does just that. But imaginaton in the higher sense puts us in contact with the archetypal realm. I think it's important to distnguish between those two usages of the term imaginaton. Perhaps we should use Imaginaton with a capital I for the second; that's rather a clumsy way of distnguishing them, but at least it does make it clear.
I think in modern tmes that distncton has been lost. I don't know if you are familiar with that magazine called 'Temenos', edited by Kathleen Raine? Well, this is her whole point, as it were: she is speaking in terms of the imaginaton, following HonoreCobain(?), the great French Islamic scholar. And she is arguing or working for arts, including poetry, which are based on and derive their inspiraton from archetypes in the higher sense, or from imaginaton in the higher sense; which of course is going completely against the current of art and literature at the present tme. This is what she is trying to do, and this is why she ataches so much importance to Blake ... I think she calls it 'A Magazine of the Imaginaton', doesn't she?
1986: WOMEN'S PRE-ORDINATION RETREAT ON GFR [22] But yes, speak in terms of Imaginaton with a capital 'I', by all means, but make clear what one means by that. I think Imaginaton in the Coleridgean sense, as I sometmes say, is a very useful term indeed. I think in Blake's sense – Blake uses the word Imaginaton in a quite meaningful sense, doesn't he? Certainly not as meaning fancy. Can anyone think of a quotaton from Blake, using the word Imaginaton? I'm sure there are quite a number. (Silence.) No one! [Laughter] We can always look it up in the Blake Dictonary.
1986: NANAMOLI CHAPTER 4 [77] S: Yes, the ambiguites of this or the possibilites of misunderstanding here. Perhaps it would be safer to just speak in terms of seeing their potental. It reminds me of Milton's descripton of Satan, or Lucifer, afer his fall: what does he say? Who's a Milton scholar? 'Not less than an archangel' what is it? Anyway, he goes on to give this famous comparison with the sun, 'shorn of his beams', that the archangel, afer his fall, is stll glorious, but to some extent he is shorn of his glory, just like the setng [sic] sun, which is 'shorn of its beams', as it were;
86 you can sort of look at it. Yes, 'the excess of glory obscured', he says. 'Not less than an archangel ruined,' he says; so there are those two as it were contradictory ideas. Lucifer is stll an archangel, but he is a ruined archangel. That is also, or very nearly, the ttle of a biography of Coleridge, isn't it? Damaged Archangel. So you should think of yourselves in those sort of terms; you are wounded angels, as it were. There is a paintng by a Finnish painter which I saw in an art gallery in Helsinki, quite an impressive paintng, called The Wounded Angel, and there is this poor angel, with his head bandaged and his wings rather torn and he is sitng on a sort of stretcher, and he is being borne along by two men, rather sadly! So perhaps that is a beter way of looking at people, especially one's own friends, because you can't ignore the blemishes but you mustn't lose sight of the potental of the person, or mustn't lose sight of their good qualites that exist even now, despite the blemishes by which they are accompanied or by which they are overlaid. Some people, unfortunately, are so susceptble and even defensive that if you just point out a tny blemish they think that you are critcizing them as a person or rejectng them even totally, or disapproving of them totally. That makes things rather difcult. [actual quote reads:]
his form had yet not lost All her Original brightness, nor appear'd Less then Arch Angel ruind, and th' excess Of Glory obscur'd: As when the Sun new ris'n Looks through the Horizontal misty Air Shorn of his Beams [78] Ratnaprabha: I don't know if this would add anything to it, but in trying to understand the queston I was looking up to see what Blake had to say about it. I found that he does make a defnite distncton, as it were, between people's evil qualites, if you like, their faults, and their good qualites. There is a short passage in Frye, which I could read out to see whether this does correspond to your point if you think that would be appropriate. He says (this is Frye paraphrasing Blake): The real enemy is the spirit that looked out of Hayley's eyes' (this is Blake's friend and enemy, if you like, Hayley) 'when Hayley was angry, that is Hayley's selfood or spectre, the Satan in him that hates and tries to destroy all the imaginaton it fnds.
It is a weakling's charity to say that we must love our friends in spite of or including their faults. Their faults are their diseases, and to love a man's diseases is not very friendly to the man.'
S: Yes, right: pimples!
Ratnaprabha (contnuing): 'All men are composed of imaginaton and selfood, and , all men should cherish the former in themselves and love it in other men, while hatng all selfoods and trying to annihilate their own.'
S: Well, that does just about sum it up, doesn't it? Only one must understand exactly what Blake means by 'selfood'. I mean he uses that expression in that purely negatve sense, sometmes corresponding to something more like egotsm or self-centredness. Yes, that does sum it up. But it's no sign of friendship to condone your friend's weak points, or even his evil qualites or his blemishes. This is why one speaks, presumably, of ferce friendship; not a sort of cossetng friendship.
But, before you can be a ferce friend, you've got to be a friend. If you are ferce with somebody, that other person has got to be convinced that you are his friend, otherwise it will just be taken as an atack on him, so you must be quite sure that the friendship is frmly established before you start introducing that element of ferceness. One shouldn't do that prematurely; there must be strong mutual trust for that sort of ferce friendship, that sort of critcism, to be possible.
87 PAPERS
2010: RE-IMAGINING THE BUDDHA [5] What then is the imaginaton? Sangharakshita uses this term and its synonym, the'imaginal faculty', sometmes capitalised, as key elements in his exploraton of what the Dharma life consists in. His invocaton of it is inspired especially by his reading of the English Romantc poet and literary critc, S. T. Coleridge, whom he considers arguably England's greatest thinker, although crippled by his inability to think beyond Christanity. The more unequivocal poetcs of William Blake has also greatly influenced his vision in this respect.128
Coleridge was concerned to understand the creatve process, of which he had had such powerful experience, and to rescue it from the mechanistc and deterministc psychology then developing. Imaginaton, to him, could not be captured by such reductve theories and to make this clear he contrasted it with what he called 'fancy'. Fancy is the mere routne assembling of images into new combinatons without any deeper signifcance or real underlying connecton. Imaginaton, however, modifes and gives unity to the images it blends, discovering in them moral and spiritual meaning. Coleridge saw imaginaton as a vital creatve force that expressed itself most characteristcally in the artst, but that was '...a repetton in the fnite mind of the eternal act of creaton in the infnite I AM'.129 [12] Whilst owing inspiraton to the English Romantcs, especially Coleridge and William Blake, Sangharakshita invests the term 'imaginaton' with frmly Dharmicsignifcance, as the vehicle of the Dharma life, the faculty by which we come to know the truth of things – come to know it and, as it were, become it. We could speak of what Sangharakshita has said on this topic as developing a new Buddhist theory of imaginaton. But it should be clear that 'imaginaton' does not translate any partcular Buddhist term, although several basic Buddhist concepts could be included under its heading. The need for such a term arises because of the special circumstances of the contemporary world in which the signifcance, even the reality, of that faculty has largely been lost because of the growth of materialism, with its glorifcaton of the physical senses. This necessitates the identfcaton of a different way of knowing.
128 See Sangharakshita, Alternative Traditions, 'Buddhism and William Blake'. 129 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, BiographiaLiteraria, I, Ch. 13, pp. 304-5. 88 BHANTE ON BLAKE 4: DAKINI AS SANGHA REFUGE
When in Eternity Man converses with Man they enter Into each other’s Bosom (which are universes of delight) In mutual interchange. and frst their Emanatons meet Surrounded by their Children. if they embrace and commingle The Human Four-fold Forms mingle also in thunders of Intellect. But if the Emanatons mingle not; with storms and agitatons Of earthquakes and consuming fres they will roll apart in fear For Man cannot unite with Man but by their Emanatons
Which stand both Male & Female at the Gates of each Humanity130
130 Blake: Jerusalem Plate 80 89 INTRODUCTION
This reader draws together all the references Bhante has made to William Blake where he is comparing Blake’s Emanaton with the Dakini as esoteric Sangha refuge.
The overview begins with a brief descripton of what is being compared. Firstly, of Blake’s concepton of the universal Man as many-fold, and of the Emanaton as the feminine aspect of this diversity. Following this, there is a brief descripton of the Dakini in Vajrayana Buddhism, and how the Dakini fgure consttutes the esoteric sangha refuge. From here there follows a summary of the references Bhante makes on the overall theme of the correspondence between Blake’s Emanaton and the Vajrayana concepton of the Dakini as esoteric Sangha refuge, grouped according to the partcular points he was making at the tme
The intenton is to make it as easy as possible for the reader to dig down from this overview to the full text of what Bhante was saying in its context.
My belief is that there is a signifcant facet of Bhante’s understanding of Buddhism that he is drawing on Blake to artculate, and that this is very much part of his endeavour to communicate the dharma in a western cultural context.
OVERVIEW
BLAKE’S CONCEPTION OF THE UNIVERSAL MAN AS MANIFOLD Blake’s prophecies recount the journey from discord towards harmony between the disparate parts of a Universal Man called ‘Albion’. There are a number of ways in which Albion is a composite fgure. Firstly, he represents all the peoples of Britain: Albion being the oldest known name for the island of Great Britain. 131 Sometmes this connecton with the peoples of Britain is represented by his sons and daughters: the children of Albion.132
Secondly, there is a mandala like representaton in which Albion is comprised of ‘The Human Four-fold Forms’133 of the Four Zoas134: Urizen representng reason, Luvah representng emoton, Tharmas representng sensaton, and Urthona representng imaginaton.
Lastly there is the division of an integrated ‘Man’ in to a masculine ‘Spectre’ and a female ‘Emanaton’ – indicatng that Blake uses the term ‘Man’ to refer to an integrated human being rather than to denote a masculine gender. The female Emanaton could be the emanaton of the whole universal man, as with ‘Jerusalem. The Emanaton of The Giant Albion’ the full ttle of Blake’s last prophecy – or it could be of one of the four Zoas. The division of the Zoas from their emanatons consttutes the fall of Albion, the universal man, as described in the opening of Blake’s prophecy ‘The Four Zoas’. In this passage, frstly Tharmas is divided from his emanaton Enion135, then Los – the not quite fallen form of Urthona – is divided from his emanaton Enitharmon136. Afer this Luvah and his emanaton Vala “flew up from the Human Heart Into the Brain” 137, completng the fall by usurping the place of reason, leaving the fourth Zoa, Urizen, an alienated intellect,
131 htps:nnen.wikipedia.orgnwikinAlbion 132 The daughters of Albion feature in Blake’s prophecy: Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Both sons and daughters feature in Jerusalem. 133 Blake: Jerusalem Plate 80 134 Blake: The Four Zoas, a prophecy 135 Blake: The Four Zoas, pages 4-5 136 Blake: The Four Zoas, page 9 137 Blake: The Four Zoas, page 10 90 divided from his emanaton Ahania and believing “The Spectre is the Man the rest is only delusion and fancy”138
BLAKE’S CONCEPTION OF COMMUNICATION THROUGH EMANATIONS In the fallen state, the universal man is asleep, and his many aspects - Zoas with their emanatons and children – are in disharmony. In the unfallen state, the universal man is awake and foremost, and the many aspects are in harmony. Not submerged, stll distnctly present.
The opening quote from Jerusalem is the principle source Bhante is drawing on. It describes the nature of communicaton between universal men in the unfallen state. Where there is a meetng, the Emanatons meet, embrace, and commingle frst, then the four Zoas, of which they are emanatons ‘mingle also in thunders of Intellect’.139
There are two signifcant points being made. The frst is that the nature of Man is diverse. The unfallen state is not a singularity but a state of harmonious integrity amongst this diversity. It is this diverse nature that allows for the commingling of real communicaton. The second is that it is through the meetng of Emanatons, which is to say the developed and integrated emotonal side, that communicaton is enabled. Effectve intellectual exchange follows this.
THE DAKINI The Dakini is a type of archetypal being found in Vajrayana Buddhism. As Bhante describes it, “when Tantric texts were translated in to Tibetan, Dakini was rendered as khadroma, which is usually translated “sky-walker” or “traveller in space”. Empty space represents absence of obstructon and therefore freedom of movement. This is not, of course, literal movement within space. Space or sky also represents mind in its absolute aspect; so the dakinis represent the free-moving energies of the mind itself – they are the thrills or tremors of emotonal energy that pass quivering through the mind, bubbling up from its very depths.” When depicted in Tantric symbolism, “the Dakini is naked. She is concerned only with direct experience, reality, truth. She has nothing to hide. She is completely open, completely honest. Nakedness is a prominent feature of Tantric symbolism, to underline the importance in the Tantra of being direct, unveiled, radical. .. The nakedness is, of course, spiritual nakedness, nakedness of one’s being.”140
THE DAKINI AS THE ESOTERIC SANGHA REFUGE Vajrayana Buddhism describes esoteric forms of the three refuges: the Guru being the esoteric Buddha refuge, the Yidam the esoteric Dharma refuge and the Dakini the esoteric Sangha refuge141. As Bhante explains the last of these: ”in the context of the esoteric refuges, the Dakini signifes something like spiritual companion … someone whose company you fnd spiritually stmulatng and energizing, and who therefore helps to release, to spark off, your energies, to free them for the living of the spiritual life.”142
BHANTE’S ASSOCIATION OF THE DAKINI AS SANGHA REFUGE WITH BLAKE’S EMANATION Bhante refers to Blake’s Emanaton and Spectre as the “emotonal … and the intellectual side … (which) can be either alienated or integrated”143, partcularly associatng the Emanaton with the Dakini as esoteric Sangha
138 Blake: The Four Zoas, page 12 139 Blake: Jerusalem Plate 80 140 Sangharakshita, Creatve Symbols of Tantric Buddhism, p127 141 Padmasambhava, Dakini Teachings p21 – The Inner way of taking refuge 142 Sangharakshita, Creatve Symbols of Tantric Buddhism p??? 143 Seminar: 1978 Order Conventon [18] 91 refuge,144 or “that part of the Sangha with which we have a real living spiritual contact”. 145 Though Blake’s depictons of Emanatons differ from traditonal depictons of Dakinis, being peaceful and willowy rather than ferce and strong, there is a hint of a parallel in Blake’s illustraton to the prelude of the First Book of Urizen.
146
This shows the Emanaton Enitharmon in the sky, drawing to her the infant Orc: the reborn, fallen form of Luvah, Zoa of passion and emoton.
Bhante indicates that “What the Dakini really represents is the higher, more refned emotonal side of one’s own being”147 or “the illumined mind itself”148 and that “within the context of the spiritual community … our
144 The Vajyrayana teaching of the esoteric refuges of Guru, Yidam, and Dakini are described in Padmasambhava’s Dakini Teachings, chapter on Taking Refuge, secton on The Inner Way of Taking Refuge 145 Lecture 137 p12 146 htps:nncommons.wikimedia.orgnwikinCategory:Media_from_the_William_Blake_Archive#nmedianFile:Book_of _Urizen_copy_G_plate_02.jpg 147 Lecture 137 [12] 148 Seminar: 1975: Pali – Snake [57] 92 communicaton with one another is … with the help of our own higher emotonal natures. We cannot communicate just with the intellect.”149
This draws out the connecton with Blake’s descripton of how the Emanatons mediate converse between universal men.150 It is a theme Bhante returns to a number of tmes, pointng out that “unless you can establish some sort of emotonal rapport with the other person no communicaton can take place”,151 and “your emanaton has, so to speak, to put out the feelers so that you don't impinge on one another too dramatcally and forcibly, because that might prevent certain aspects of yourself from entering into the communicaton”. 152 There are also collectve examples of the process, as where the womenfolk smooth communicaton between families in India153
One’s practce then involves “the developing … experiencing … and integratng within oneself … that emanaton”154 so that it no longer manifests as a separate and opposing Female Will 155 but as the Dakini in the sense of the forces of inspiraton156 and ultmately as the female atendant Bodhisatvas which, in the Eastern realm, “seem … like an unfoldment of the emanaton … of Akshobya”,157 the Female Buddha.158
CONCLUSION
Though the Emanatons and the many-fold aspect of the universal man are features that run though all of Blake’s prophecies, Bhante is drawing on a very partcular passage in Blake’s last prophecy describing the converse between Universal Men to make a parallel with the Dakini as esoteric Sangha Refuge – a litle known aspect of Vajrayana Buddhism. Yet it is a topic that Bhante returns to a number of tmes in the seminars, and in one of the lectures, and when he does he talks about it at length, so he clearly considers this a point of some import.
In a nutshell, the teaching is of the vital importance of developing an artculate, integrated emotonal side in order to communicate effectvely and hence in order to experience sangha. Along with this, the references to Blake draw out the nature of the integrated, unfallen state as a harmonious congress of diverse aspects rather than a single isolated fgure.
149 Lecture 137 [12]. A similar point is made in Seminar: 1980: Milarepa-Rechungpa's Journey to Weu [86] 150 Blake: Jerusalem Plate 80. Bhante describes this in most detail in Seminar: 1979: Tibetan Book of the Dead – Final Editon [169-171] 151 Seminar: 1979: Tibetan book of the Dead – fnal editon [169] 152 Seminar: 1982: Noble Eightold Path Tuscany [82] 153 Seminar: 1980: Pali Dhaniya Suta [40] 154 Seminar: 1979: Tibetan book of the Dead – fnal editon [124] 155 Seminar: 1980: Milarepa-Rechungpa’s Repentance [260-261] 156 Seminar: 1982: The Buddha's Law among the Birds tapes 04-06 [8] 157 Seminar: 1979: Tibetan book of the Dead – fnal editon [173] 158 Seminar: 1982: The Buddha's Law among the Birds tapes 04-06 [8] 93 SOURCES
LECTURES
LECTURE 137: LEVELS OF GOING FOR REFUGE [12]
And then, the Sangha. We go for Refuge to the Sangha. But the Sangha consists of millions of individuals, both mundane and transcendental, past, present and future. We can’t possibly have contact with all of them. We can’t go for Refuge to the whole Sangha. That’s impossible, incredible, inconceivable. We can have contact with only a very limited number of Sangha members. So therefore we go for Refuge, actually, in practce, in our own experience, only to a very limited number of members of the Sangha, the spiritual community. Perhaps only to two or three, or even one. One’s the minimum, and this is the Dakini. The Dakini is that part of the Sangha with which we have a real living spiritual contact, and the Dakini Refuge is therefore the esoteric form of the Sangha Refuge. But, I must warn you here, there’s some possibility - in some cases even actuality - of misunderstanding. The word ‘Dakini’ happens to be in the feminine gender and therefore Dakini or the concept of Dakini is sometmes interpreted as a sort of female partner, a sort of pseudo-spiritual girlfriend with whom one allegedly practses the Dharma. [Laughter] But it’s not that at all! The Dakini, and there is a masculine form of this name - Daka - the Dakini is any member of the spiritual community with whom one is in close personal contact, who sparks one off spiritually, even inspires one. That’s what is meant by Dakini. But there’s another way of looking at Dakini, perhaps even more important and more profound. The Dakini, in any sense is not really even anyone outside one at all. Afer all, one should be able to spark oneself off. The commited person who’s an integrated person should be able to do this. What the Dakini really represents is the higher, more refned emotonal side of one’s own being. That’s what the beautful fgure of the Dakini represents. The Dakini represents friendliness, befriending. The Dakini is compassion. The Dakini is sympathetc joy. The Dakini is peace and tranquillity. The Dakini is faith and devoton. And all these, higher, more refned, more spiritual, positve emotons are to be developed within oneself. Does this then mean that the Sangha Refuge can be dispensed with? Does it mean that spiritual fellowship is unimportant, because you just go on sparking off yourself apparently? Does it mean that communicaton is unimportant? No, it doesn’t mean that. It means that you cannot go for Refuge to the Sangha, to the Dakini, unless you have your own Dakini within. We may say that Dakini goes for Refuge to Dakini. We may say Dakini communicates with Dakini. In other words, within the context of the spiritual community, the spiritual fellowship, our communicaton with one another is through our own higher emotonal natures, or with the help of our own higher emotonal natures. We cannot communicate just with the intellect. You cannot really communicate just through ideas or through concepts, only through, or with the help of, your own higher, more spiritual, more refned, emotons. In other words only through your own personal - which means your integrated - Dakini, addressing as it were the Dakini of the other individual.
So Dakini more or less corresponds with what our own English William Blake calls the ‘Emanaton’. I don’t remember Blake’s exact words but he says something like that in the perfect state - perhaps in the state of eternity - individuals converse with one another through their emanatons. And what does this mean? It means that without genuine spiritual emoton there is no communicaton. If you are merely intellectual, no communicaton. You may talk for ages, talk the hind legs off a donkey as we say, but there’ll be no communicaton. You’ll just be talking, and you’ll feel very dry and barren and dusty, as it were, as though there was dust in your mouth at the end. If you only communicate through the medium of concepts, if you only talk philosophy in this dry, academic pseudo-intellectual way, there’ll be no communicaton. It’s just the dry bones of concepts rubbing up against one another and generatng, kindling, no spark, no warmth whatsoever, and leaving you rather dull and dry and dissatsfed aferwards. No. Genuine communicaton is only through or with
94 the help of emoton, warmth, friendliness, and in the spiritual context - context of spiritual community - only with the help or through the higher, spiritual, emotons, and this is what is meant by the Dakini Refuge.
SEMINARS
1975: PALI – SNAKE [56] So, Dhaniya stll returns to the atack. Not only this fellow has got no cows, he's not even got a wife. He is just on his own in the world as it were. And in orthodox Hindu society, I mean, not to have a wife was practcally not to exist. So he produces almost his trump card. 'I have got a wife.' Not only a wife, she is a good wife - she is well-disciplined, she is very steady, she is very reliable. 'We've lived together a long tme. According to the commentary he is quite an elderly man, but the text doesn't actually say anything about that. And 'I hear no evil of her' - she has a good reputaton, she is a very moral sort of woman. So he is boastng about his wife and triumphing in the fact that he's got a wife of this kind. So, what does the Buddha say? The Buddha returns the atack and he says 'Obedient is my mind and freed'. Thus spake the Master in reply. 'Long hath it been well quickened, tamed. No ill is found or known in me.' So the Buddha says 'All right, I too have got a wife, my wife is my own mind.' I mean you're boastng about your well-disciplined wife, what about my well-disciplined mind - that's even beter, as it were? To have a well-disciplined mind is even beter than having a well-disciplined [56] and loyal wife. So that is the Buddha's reply to that.
There are one or two interestng terms here. 'Long has it been well-quickened.' 'Well-quickened' does not really represent the force of the original word, which is 'paribhavitam'. 'Parabhavitam' can be regarded as meaning 'well-developed' though that is not the literal meaning. The literal meaning does not seem very clearly connected with the metaphorical meaning. The literal meaning is more like 'pervaded'. But the actual meaning is more like 'developed' - developed all round; even encompassed, even protected - 'parabhavitam'. If we say a well-developed mind, that will give more or less the meaning as 'sudantam' - well-controlled.
___: What word do they use for 'mind'?
S: 'Citam'. Do you think this is at all signifcant or has any sort of psychological basis that the mind is compared to the wife, or contrasted with the wife?
___: It seems like the Christan idea of soul as being the (?)
S: It's occurred to me that it's a bit like Blake's emanaton.
___: What is Blake's emanaton?
S: Come on Luvah. How would you describe or defne the emanaton? Briefly, just a few words, sentences.
Luvah: A female counterpart of the male in the symbolism of the male-female. So it's the projecton, it's everything that a man projects or creates.
S: Not just a projecton in the modern psychological sense, it's also producton. Your emanaton is all the things that you create. If you are a poet, your poems also are the embodiments of your emanatons as it were.
___: (?)
S: For instance if you are a poet and you produce so many poems, the poems are as it were also your emanaton, your emanaton actually embodied in objectve works. Also your ideas, your ideals, your dreams, your aspiratons, these are also your emanatons.
___: I wonder if that's why 'well-quickened' is used here. I mean something that has come very much in mind ...
95 S: Yes, it's well - though it's actually - the original does not mean 'well-quickened' in that sense. Quick suggests life that is not in the Pali word. The Pali word means much more like 'developed', though it is the same order of thought one could say.
Jinamata: That is the same kind of idea, like the 'fertle mind', something that is ...
S: It is, yes indeed.
___: It reminds one of the Muse.
S: The 'Muse', yes, that is true.
[57] ___: It's very much that contrast, very much gives the idea of integraton.
S: Right! It's as though in the case of the worldly person there is the wife as a separate personality, a separate individual, a separate being. But in the case of the enlightened person, the place of the wife is taken by the illuminated mind itself; the controlled and developed mind itself. You don't need an outside wife because you have your own 'wife' as it were within.
And this is what in Tantric symbolism the Dakini symbolizes. Sometmes the so-called sexual symbolism of the Tantra can be misunderstood because you see, or you think you see, two fgures. But they are not two fgures. Well, they are two fgures in art, but spiritually they are one being. There is one enlightened individual with those two aspects of himself in perfect fusion and harmony.
Jinamata: So, that's a sort of inspiraton and also emotonal energy?
S: Yes. You actually experience that in the fullest possible way, at the highest possible level. So what Dhaniya is looking for outside, in the form of a wife, the Buddha has realized within Himself, in the form of his own mind. The emanaton is not split off from the man. The emanaton is an integral part of the man himself and the fully developed emanaton at that. In Blake's symbolism, when the emanaton splits off - well, that is disastrous. That's an aspect of the fall and you are looking for your emanaton in someone or as someone outside yourself, which only prolongs the split.
So this juxtapositon in these two verses of wife and mind is very signifcant. 'Mind', here 'Cita', is not mind in the rather mental, Western sense. 'Cita' is also translated as 'heart', is more like the 'psyche' in the Jungian sense. And 'psyche' is of course as a word feminine in gender. (Pause.)
96 1978: ORDER CONVENTION [18] It was the dakini who represented that aspect of higher emotonality through which one communicated with others within the spiritual community and which was therefore the esoteric form of the Sangha refuge. The daka though technically occupying a place and being named was really superfluous.
So this is why the term dakini can be applied to the higher emotonal nature of either a man or a woman. So if we look at it, in say Blakean terms, what you've got basically is the individual. The Individual, maybe with a capital I, irrespectve of physiological sex, an individual and this individual, again in Blakean terms, has two primary aspects: emanaton and spectre, or the emotonal side, the higher more refned emotonal side, and the intellectual side or the reasoning side. So these can be either alienated or integrated. What usually happens, that if the, what Blake would call the fallen individuality is physiologically male then the tendency is to be alienated from the emanaton and to identfy with the spectre. If on the other hand the fallen individual is physiologically female the tendency is to be alienated from the spectre and to identfy with the emanaton. So when you're alienated in this way, if you are identfed with, say, a spectre you tend to look for your emanaton outside you, if you are identfed with your emanaton you tend to look for your spectre outside you. So you can see the possibilites. But if you are an integrated individual, whether physiologically male or physiologically female, you have an integrated emanaton and an integrated spectre that is to say, you're an emotonally and intellectually whole and complete person and relate to others whether they, in turn, are physiologically male or physiologically female, through your dakini, that is to say, your higher emotonal nature, regardless of whether you too, are physiologically male or physiologically female.
97 1979: TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD – FINAL EDITION [124]
Sagaramat: But how important is it to satsfy your instncts?
S: Well, the whole queston of instnct is rather obscure. In fact some psychologists say that instnct is a myth and the term itself should be scrapped. For instance, people speak of hunger as an instnct. They speak of animal instncts, the nest-building instnct, the huntng instnct in the case of men. But it does seem as though this whole concept of instnct is quite unsatsfactory.
So perhaps it’s beter just to ask what, say, is the place of hunger in the spiritual life, and I think we have dealt with that, haven’t we? There’s nothing incompatble with spiritual life in healthily satsfying your natural hunger. So that might apply to all the so-called instncts, to the extent that they are analogous with the so- called instnct of hunger.
Sagaramat: There again, talking about single-sex communites, what you are doing, or what I have done is you cut yourself off from an instnct which is parallel to the eatng one. It’s like going to a place where there is no food. Do you see what I mean?
S: But what is projected in the case of projecton, say on to the opposite sex is an emoton not an instnct. So if you could keep your instnctual life separate from your emotonal life there would be no harm in your associatng with women, it would not impede your spiritual development or your development as an individual in the sense of your incorporaton of that feminine element into yourself consciously. But it is because, more ofen than not, we cannot separate, we cannot keep separated the instnctual and the emotonal that when we get instnctually involved, so to speak, we also get emotonally involved, i.e. start projectng. But instnctual satsfacton, which is kept separate from emotonal projecton, is not incompatble with individual development in the sense of the developing within oneself and experiencing within oneself and integratng within oneself that - what shall I say - that feminine counterpart, let us say, that emanaton in Blake’s terms.
So it would seem as though a measure of instnctual non-satsfacton is in a way the price that one has to pay - that’s putng it a litle negatvely perhaps - for the possibility of true emotonal integraton; in the case of some people, those who are not able to keep their instncts and their emotons [213] properly separate. I think, though, that on investgaton many people will fnd that a large part of what they thought of as the instnctual was in fact the emotonal. So actually the situaton is not as bleak or as bad as it sounds.
98 [169] S: Receptvity, well, no, it’s stronger than that, even. It’s a certain emotonal quality. Unless you can establish some sort of emotonal rapport with the other person no communicaton can take place. So we ofen fnd, rightly or wrongly, and I must stress this - rightly or wrongly - that the female symbolises the emotonal as distnct from the intellectual, let us say. So again from this point of view the female is more suited as a symbol for the principle of communicaton. Because unless you have some sort of emotonal rapport with people, some sort of emotonal link, even some sort of emotonal te, no communicaton is possible.
So if you want to be an integrated person it’s not enough to leave the business of communicaton to your wife, you must develop your own emotonal side, your own so-called feminine side and communicate yourself with the world and with other people through that. This seems to be the signifcance of Blake’s fgure of the emanaton, she seems to symbolise that. Blake in fact explicitly states this, that one communicates with other men, other individuals, through one’s emanaton, that is to say through one’s own emotonal aspect. You fnd that if men meet together and they are all one-sidedly masculine, all quite intellectual, in a way hard-edged, not much real communicaton, if any, will take place. They have to be emotonally open with one another, or in Blake’s terms they communicate through their emanatons, through mingling of emanatons, he calls it. Do you see what I mean? In the usual, alienated, social situaton, as I said, you leave the business of communicaton to your wife. But if you’re an integrated person, since you have developed from within yourself your own emanaton you are responsible for your own communicaton.
Devamitra: That extends itself into business circles, doesn’t it? Female receptonists.
S: Yes, I think it does, yes. Reassuring, soothing, there is no compettveness involved. And also perhaps why you have couples going out for dinner together, meetng, and it’s husbands and wives. If you perhaps only had the men there wouldn’t be the necessary smoothness to it, it’s the functon of the wives to keep the wheels so to speak smoothly oiled. Do you see what I mean? Because as it were the men have delegated or handed over that functon to their wives. I’m taking relatvely extreme cases, of course, but you see the sort of thing I am getng at. The presence of women keeps things a bit friendly and a bit nice and a bit smooth. If the men were just on their own together, assuming that they are men who are a bit alienated and over- masculine, so to speak, perhaps they wouldn’t get on together quite as well, not in the ordinary social situaton. If they are working together that might be different. But if the presence of women is needed in that way it means that there’s a defnite imbalance or lack of development, lack of integraton in the case of the men. They sofen up the atmosphere, as it were. But it shouldn’t be necessary to rely upon women to do that.
Buddhadasa: You do see it in meetngs at Sukhavat and places like this, it’s not untl somebody actually starts to express his emoton in the meetng that the meetng actually starts to take off. (S: Right, yes.) And people say that they have enjoyed that meetng. It takes us a litle while for us to get up to that level, or down to that level, I am not quite sure which.
S: Well along to that level. [Laughter] A queston of lateral expansion. So Blake says men communicate through their emanatons. Perhaps I will read what Blake means by emanaton. I have got it in my Blake dictonary, I keep quite handy, all the litle quotes together. I have touched upon this sort of thing before. [All capital leters used are emphasised by Sangharakshita in the following quotaton] ‘The emanaton is the feminine porton or “counterpart” of the fundamentally bisexual male. In Eternity where the Individual is complete again there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage as the sexual division no longer exists there.’
There are references given for these various statements, I won’t bother you with those. ‘Not that the emanaton is annihilated, she is absorbed into the individual of whom she is stll an actve part, though without a separate will. “In Eternity, Woman is the Emanaton of Man, she has NO WILL of her own, there is no such thing in Eternity as a Female Will”.’
Do you see what I mean, this is a really profound statement? There is no such thing in Eternity as the Female Will.
99 ‘But without her the brotherhood of man would be impossible. “When in eternity man converses with man they enter into each other’s bosom, which are universes of delight, in mutual interchange and frst their emanatons meet surrounded by their children. If they embrace and commingle the human fourfold forms mingle also in
[170] thunders of intellect. But if the emanatons mingle not with storms and agitatons of earthquakes and consuming fres they will roll apart in fear. For man cannot unite with man but by their emanatons which stand both male and female at the gates of each humanity”.’
You see, it is very clear, isn’t it? ‘The emanaton’ - this is the dictonary maker speaking - ‘is necessary for the union with god as well as man’, a bit of theism creeping in here. ‘“Man is adjoined to man by his emanatve porton who is Jerusalem in every individual man. And Jerusalem is the bride of the lamb, this is the mystc union of the emanaton in the Lord." It will be noted that the emanatons when they achieve a separate existence and get names of their own, which the spectres never do, exhibit all the characteristcs of the personae of the split personality which modern science has discovered. They seek for dominaton, can be dangerously destructve and fght re-integraton which seems to them like annihilaton. But the moment they are reabsorbed their voices cease at once. In Eden however, which is the ideal life on this earth, the male and female when reconciled co-operate. The male labours in the felds while the female works at the loom, but at the noon rest and again in the evening the emanaton unlooses the horses and refreshes the male.”’
‘The emanaton bears children which are the male’s secret loves and graces, his infant loves and graces, his infant thoughts and desires. These expressions of the constant play of his imaginaton are also called emanatons.’ I’ll skip a bit here. ‘But the division of the emanaton from the individual is a split in the personality, a stage in the fall of man, symbolised in Genesis by the extracton of Eve from the side of the sleeping Adam. etc., etc. The separated emanaton takes the female form, an event which horrifes the eternals. Man is lef a dark spectre, or perhaps only his spectre’s power, worse yet the emanaton acquires a will of her own, which by defniton is turned against her consort.’ etc. etc. I’m skipping quite a bit more here. ‘The emanaton’s self-centred pride’, that is to say the separated emanaton, ‘seeks dominion over the male, she is jealous of all his actvites and seeks to stop them by denying her husband his freedom, Jerusalem. She drives all females away from him, invents the theory of sin and the sense of guilt and curbs him with the laws of chastty. She denies herself to him, feeing his embraces.’ This is the emanaton, not the female as such.
‘She murders all his innocent pleasures not knowing that she herself is the mother of these emanatons, she is even jealous of her husband’s labours which take his atenton from her, so she prevents his working. Meanwhile the male’, that is to say the individual alienated from his own emanaton, ‘is lef a selfsh and ravening spectre, his ratonal power unchecked by his lost emanaton dominates him, he denounces all delights as sin and condemns Jerusalem as the mother of sin. His only remaining pleasure is what he imbibes from deceiving a victm. To save the marriage’, there should be inverted commas here of course but there aren’t, ‘the emanaton must renounce her thirst for dominion and sacrifce her selfshness just as the male must also kill his selfood and sacrifce himself to be absorbed in the brotherhood which is Jesus.’
This is quite illuminatng, isn’t it? And you can see its connecton with the symbolism of Tantric Buddhism.
Kuladeva: Would Blake have been familiar with Tantric symbolism and the yab-yum?
S: Apparently not, I don’t think it was known in his day. He was familiar with some engravings of Hindu divinites, some of them with many arms, and he seems to have been slightly influenced by some of these in some of his own drawings. But as far as we know he wasn’t acquainted with anything connected with Tibetan art.
100 So, ‘The feminine principle automatcally opens out, she provides the exit or actvaton of the whole thing, the element of communicaton from solidness into a fowing, living situaton.’ So you can see what the female counterpart represents here and what Blake’s emanaton represents. It’s the whole emotonal, communicatve, so-called female, feminine aspect of our own nature through which we relate to others more freely but which only too ofen we’ve denied, identfying ourselves in a very one-sided fashion with our own so-called masculine aspect.
And this tes up with what Buddhadasa was saying, that you only start communicatng in a meetng when people start getng a bit emotonal and saying what they really feel as well as what they think. And in ideal communicaton the two are the same. Where there is one-sidedness you either express thought without, apparently, any emotonal content, or you just get emotonal without there being a very defnite intellectual content. People can see that you are emotonal, or getng emotonal, but they are not at all sure what you are getng emotonal about, you are just splutering, as it were.
[171] Devamitra: Could you look at it in terms of being supportve?
S: You could indeed, because the Earth Goddess who appears when the Buddha taps the earth bears witness to the fact that he has in fact performed all those Bodhisatva deeds, that he has practsed the paramitas for so many lives and that he is worthy to sit on the vajrasana, the throne of all the Buddhas of old. And also she herself has supported him because all those Bodhisatva deeds have taken place on the earth, the earth has seen them because they have taken place on the earth, because in a way she has supported them. And even now she is supportng him by bearing testmony to what he has done, she is sort of backing him up or backing up his words when Mara challenges his right to sit on that throne. And the whole way in which she is represented represents a sort of supportve attude; she comes bearing a vase in her hands, a vase which is the symbol of the Earth Goddess, it is receptve and at the same tme pouring out. And her whole attude, a sort of prayerful respectul attude suggests reverence and supportveness. So yes, you could say that Ksitgharba represented something of this sort too. Supportveness, which is again, to make another connecton, a sort of feminine characteristc. In some representatons of this calling to earth episode you get the Earth Goddess pressing her head against the soles of the Buddha’s feet, so this represents supportveness par excellence, as it were.
You could say, again going back to what were talking about a litle while ago, that the feminine, the emanaton, represents not only the principle of communicaton but the principle of supportveness. It’s the functon of the woman, so to speak, not to compete with the man but to support what he does, Blake makes this clear. And this is true of men and women literally to the extent that they are, as it were, separate or even alienated from each other and are the bearers of those respectve qualites.
______: The Earth Goddess was the medium of communicaton between the Buddha and Mara, in a way. Or is that stretching it too far?
S: I think that’s probably stretching it a bit too far. But she was certainly supportve of the Buddha in that dispute with Mara, she didn’t take Mara’s side or try to manipulate the situaton to her own advantage. She just supported what the Buddha said as she had been supportng his Bodhisatva deeds for thousands of years.
101 [173] All right, so Then there are the female Bodhisatvas: Lasya is the bodhisatva of dance or mudra, she is more performer than dancer, the ofering goddess who displays the beauty and dignity of the body; she shows the majesty and seductveness of the feminine principle. And Puspa is the goddess of fowers, the bodhisatva of vision, sight, the scenery.
S: Here you could say they are more like Blake’s Imaginaton. They’re the products of both the Individual and his emanaton. Do you see what I mean? There’s the sort of family developing - one should really watch this family symbolism, but you know what I mean.
So, ‘Lasya is the Bodhisatva of dance or mudra, she is more performer than dancer, the offering goddess who displays the beauty and dignity of the body; she shows the majesty and seductveness of the feminine principle. And Puspa is the goddess of flowers, the Bodhisatva of vision, sight, the scenery.’
Well, this doesn’t really require much explanaton, it sort of communicates its own feeling, doesn’t it? The offering goddesses generally, who are of course associated with the eight offerings to the honoured guest, you get the further embodiment of the principle of supportveness. In fact more than supportveness, actual devoton, too. The goddesses, these Bodhisatvas - they are ofen called goddesses rather than Bodhisatvas, I think - usually embody that sort of principle.
It’s almost as though all these Bodhisatvas, male and female, are different aspects of the female counterpart Buddhalocana. They’ve all got a certain sort of feminine quality, haven’t they, whether they are regarded as being in masculine form or feminine form. They all seem more like an unfoldment of the emanaton, let us say, of Aksobhya. They seem predominantly feminine in quality. [Pause]
‘Puspa is the goddess of flowers, the Bodhisatva of vision, sight, the scenery.’ One ofen thinks of flowers as feminine, doesn’t one? And a garden is somehow sort of feminine rather than masculine. In Catholic Christanity the Virgin Mary is called the ‘Hortus inclusus’, the enclosed garden. Sometmes the feminine is compared with the earth, there are the associatons of tllage and cultvaton. The male as it were cultvates the soil of the female because he plants the seed there. So the female becomes a sort of fertle feld, becomes a garden of one kind or another. So you get all those sort of associatons.
Sagaramat: You could almost say the environment. With communicaton there has got to be the right environment, really for communicaton.
S: Yes. You could say the environment is feminine.
102 1980: MILAREPA-RECHUNGPA'S JOURNEY TO WEU [86]
The dakini corresponds to some extent with what Blake calls the emanaton, and he says one communicates through one's emanaton. That is to say without emoton there is no communicaton. There is no such thing as a purely ratonal, purely logical communicaton, communicaton in the full sense. One communicates with others, one empathises with others through the more developed more refned emotonal side of oneself.
1980: MILAREPA-RECHUNGPA'S REPENTANCE [260]
Abhaya: What about the Dakinis? I've never quite been able to fnd an emotonal correlatve in my own mind. The Dakinis are talked about, but it doesn't, like, quite make the connecton.
Bhante: You mean a connecton with something in the Western Traditon?
A voice: The muses?
Abhaya: Well, yes, somehow.
Bhante: Yes the muses cover part of it. Blake's emanaton. Mra?
Abhaya: But I thought Blake's emanaton will get .. .that’s a sort of split off and because it’s become split off then its alienatng from
Bhante: Well no, it isn't, no it isn't necessarily split off. You know, Blake uses the term
[261] emanaton, as far as- -I remember, both for the split off and for the not split off female counterpart. Sometmes he refers to, or under certain circumstances, you know, in certain conditons he refers to the split off emanaton as the 'Female Will'. Capital F, capital W But he can speak, I think, of the fallen emanaton as well as the unfallen emanaton.
Abhaya: So which are the unfallen,... who is the unfallen emanaton in the form of equivalent of a Dakini in Blakean ? mythology?
Bhante: Well in Buddhism, of course, there is no fall. Yes? In the Christan sense. So, I mean, Blake, so far as I recollect, has the same names for the fallen and unfallen aspects, broadly speaking. For instance those Los and Enitharmon, they are called Los and Enitharmon both before and afer their fall. Enitharmon being, the emanaton of Los. Jerusalem is the emanaton of Albion. (Long pause). But I think there isn't really a proper equivalent, you know, in Western Traditon to the Indo-Tibetan concepton of Dakini. It's a very rich and er, what-shall I say, poetc and spiritually signifcant concepton or symbol. And also quite ambiguous as ofen, you know, er you know, symbols are. It can mean a rather lively, vital, human woman. It can represent a sort of fairy, a sort of female angel. The forces of inspiraton. The muses. A female Bodhisatva. A female Buddha. That is, a Buddha in female form. A Bodhisatva in female form. It can represent all those things.
103 1980: PALI-DHANIYA SUTTA [39]
S: Right. This is what I was thinking of. This is what came up at the last conventon, the queston of the 'dakini'. Because you remember ... how did it come up? ... yes - the 'dakini' being the esoteric, so to speak, Vajrayanic form of the Sangha, you see? The 'dakini' being the spiritually inspiring 'partner', so to speak, in whose company you lived the spiritual life. And we also made the point, via William Blake, that you related to other people, so to speak, through your 'dakini', through your 'Emanaton', through your more emotonal side, through your integrated emotonal side, you see what I mean? So, here also, we fnd the same sort of analogy of the 'mind' and the 'wife', as it were. Do you see what I'm getng at? Not only can you not be an integrated person, an enlightened person, unless you bring your own mind, so to speak, 'under control', but you can't even relate to other people, because you relate to people, as Blake said, through your 'Emanaton', through your more emotonal side, as it were, through your empathy and feeling. So, if these are not developed and integrated, well, you've no means of communicaton, you're just cut off from people, you're just cold and dead.
[40]
So, this is why the 'dakini' is the esoteric form of the 'Sangha refuge'.
Udaya: Did you make (??) of the sort of 'dharmapala' aspect?
S: I don't remember. So, therefore I also said, in order to take refuge in the 'dakini', you have to develop your own 'dakini', so, the 'dakini' has to take refuge in the 'dakini'. Do you remember, those of you who were there? Or those who heard it on tape?
: (??)
S: So, you fnd this a litle bit in social life, certainly in India. I'm more familiar with Indian social life than English social life, because there isn't really any sort of structured social life in England, as you might say. In India, if it's any queston of a social thing, especially with the queston of marriage - how is it all arranged? The women get together and they sort it out and then tell their husbands. You see what I mean? It's not just that the women are sortng out their own affairs between themselves. No. Because the women are also married women, they are also part of a family, so it's a queston of the relatonships between whole families: this is very ofen done through the women. You see what I mean? They are, as it were, the channels of communicaton. So, in the same way, when you relate to other people, your channel of communicaton, whether you are a man or woman, is your, as it were, integrated 'woman' within you: that side of your nature, the more developed emotonal side of your nature. So unless you have developed that within yourself, you cannot relate to it in others (to 'relate' to it as distnct from 'projectng' it of course). So, unless you have your own 'dakini' within, you can't relate to the 'dakini' without, so therefore, I said, 'Dakini has to go for refuge to Dakini'. You can't go for refuge to the 'dakini', as it were, but your 'dakini' can; but then, of course, that 'dakini' is an integrated part of you. So, one has all these sort of reverberatons, it seems, in these two verses. (Pause) SO~ 'No ill is found or known in me' - that suggests, that when we do go off the rails a bit, and we do get a bit of a bad reputaton, it is because, usually, our emotons have got out of hand in some way or other. It's not because of mistakes of intellectual calculaton usually (chuckling).
Purna: It's the te-up between 'anima' and 'animosity'.
Anjali: What's the te-up?
S: Mm. What's the te-up?
104 Purna: Oh. What's the te-up - The word, the same root, one being for 'ill-will' and one being for the 'feminine' aspect (ed. within the man's psyche).
S: Ah! It's not quite as simple as that, because it is 'anima' - feminine; 'animus' - masculine; but when you say you've got an 'animus' against anyone, what do you mean? So the te-up seems to be more on the masculine side (chuckling). See what I mean? Though 'animosity', yes, is connected with that word in its undeclined form. Maybe there is more connecton with 'animus' than 'anima'; though, of course, when your 'anima' gets out of hand, yes 'she' can become an 'animas' (Laughter). So, unfortunately, what you see in the case of many people, is a sort of juxtapositon between a 'skeleton', a 'spectre', in Blake's sense, and the alienated 'emanaton' - it's between the 'spectre' and the 'trull' - this is what you get in most people; a
[41] sort of combinaton of 'spectre' and 'trull', instead of being, like Dhaniya, living happily with his obedient wife, or the Buddha enjoying his own enlightened mind. (Pause) To go a litle further: in the Tantric symbolism you get the 'yab-yum' fgures, what the Tibetans call the 'father-mother' fgures, that is to say, the male and female fgures actually represented in sexual union, meaning the perfect interpenetraton of these two aspects, as it were, of the mind, the psyche, at the very highest possible level, that is to say, the level of Enlightenment, where they become Wisdom and Compassion respectvely. (Pause) But this whole queston of, so to speak, making the mind, the emotons, the irratonal part of oneself obedient, is very, very important, and requires a great deal of tact. I don't think you can go about it directly by means of control. This is one of the points that came up very strongly in the course of the recent women's study seminar, the really crucial importance of 'meta'; 'meta' representng the sort of archetypal positve emoton - that unless you could develop strong 'meta', there was really hardly any queston or real spiritual life, or even ordinary human development. That seemed really crucial; and that is associated with this whole side or one's mind. It's the emotonal, the non- ratonal. So, it isn't so much a queston of bringing the irratonal under the control and subduing it, it is much more a queston or developing 'meta'. If that is done then there will be less and less a conflict within the mind. (pause) It's as though 'awareness' represents the, so to speak, more 'masculine' aspect, and 'meta' represents the more 'feminine' aspect, and you need both. You can't do without either of them. (Pause)
105 1982: NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH TUSCANY [81]
Dhirananda: Yes, the esoteric Refuges - the dakini represents the Sangha. I was wondering whether it's a female fgure symbolizing the Sangha.
S: I think I did go into this on one Order Conventon. I think I explained it with reference to William Blake; I think I referred to what Blake calls the emanaton. The emanaton is, so to speak, the more feminine side of the human individual; the emanaton is the more emotonal side of the human individual. In the unintegrated human individual, the emanaton is separate, and is even experienced as a separate person - even as a hostle person; but in the integrated person, in the integrated human individual, the emanaton is not separate in that way. But the point that is relevant here, the point that Blake makes, is that human beings mingle or communicate through their emanatons: that is to say, you communicate through the as it were more feminine, more emotonal, part of yourself - that man communicates with man through his emanaton, or men communicate through their emanatons.
There is something in it. In ordinary social life, you very ofen fnd it's the women who look afer the social life. Maybe you get to know things - what's been happening - through your wife; she's got together with somebody else's wife. So your wife is usually your in a way alienated emanaton; that's why you've got a wife at all. If your emanaton wasn't alienated, you wouldn't need a wife. So if you're integrated, if your emanaton is, so to speak, an integrated part of yourself, you don't need to communicate with other men via your wife; you communicate with other men via your own emanaton. You communicate with other men through your emanaton; your emanaton communicates with their emanaton. So there is a more direct communicaton.
So the emanaton is female, and the dakini, it would seem, as the sort of symbol of the third esoteric refuge, the Sangha Refuge, would seem to be feminine for much the same reason. Do you see what I'm getng at? This is briefly what I explained on that occasion. It is all taped, I think.
So one must not think of the dakini as an objectvely existng female partner, a sort of glorifed, transmogrifed wife - nothing of that sort.
Let me just say a few more words about that. One knows that if one tries to communicate with other people,
[82] especially other men, simply or exclusively through one's so-called stronger, more masculine side - if you've just got these two masculinites bumping against each other - you may not get very [117] far in communicaton. You need to bring in the so-called sofer, the so-called more sensitve, the so-called more refned aspect of yourself, and communicate with the other person, with the other man, through that. This is the sort of thing that Blake is getng at when he says 'Let men communicate with each other - let human beings communicate with each other - through their emanatons.' It's through their more sensitve aspects, through the more sensitve aspects of themselves. Not that you necessarily put your strength to one side when you start communicatng, but it's as though your emanaton has, so to speak, to put out the feelers so that you don't impinge on one another too dramatcally and forcibly, because that might prevent certain aspects of yourself from entering into the communicaton.
106 1982: THE BUDDHA'S LAW AMONG THE BIRDS TAPES 04-06 [8]
Alright, let's take the word 'dakini'. It's a very important word in the Vajrayana and therefore in Tibetan Buddhism generally. At the very highest level, the Dakini is a Buddha in female form, or a Buddha depicted in female form - that is a Dakini. You could say a Dakini with a capital 'D'. And then, there is dakini in the sense of, er - hmm... well it's almost like a sort of angelic sort of being or creature, except that it's female. usually dakini in this sense represents sort of forces of spiritual inspiraton... welling up within you or forces with which you're in contact or feel you're in contact, rather like a spiritual equivalent of the Muses.
[9]
Dakini represents that. It's these dakinis who are represented as flying through the air, flying through the sky. They're like ripples travelling across the surface of the, sort of, ocean of higher consciousness, one could say. (pause)
Aryamitra: That could be equivalent to Blake's emanaton?
S: One could say, yes, provided one didn't try to establish too close a parallel, but something like that.
And then, thirdly, dakini means an actual human being, a woman, with certain unusual, very ofen spiritual characteristcs. A woman who's out of the ordinary, who even has perhaps certain physical characteristcs which are unusual and who is especially devoted to the Dharma, she just doesn't seem like an ordinary woman at all. Such women, of course, are quite rare. The Tibetans have a popular saying that all women are either dakinis or devils. The dakinis in this sense are said to be in the minority. So there's dakini in that sense. And then dakini in the lowest, in the most debase sense, that is, dakini as an immoral woman, even a prosttute. Conze has taken that fourth sense. He's ignored for some strange reason, these other senses.
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