broadcast 08.12.04--it's my job

4 (first weeks in tushita, after ordaining – july august)

hi everyone,

This morning there’s a special ceremony at namgyal monastery to mark the start of the annual rains retreat. The start of the rains retreat is one of the three ceremonies recognised by all buddhist traditions – along with the conclusion of the retreat and the bi-monthly confession ceremony – and is very special. Basically it is a commitment to stay within the boundaries set by the monastery for the three months of the retreat – which doesnt mean i have to stay in the monastery itself as the boundary includes all of mcleod, tushita, and the mountain above tushita. (in italy – they do things with style over there – the retreat boundaries of a certain monastery extend 35 miles to include two supermarkets and a beach!) The ceremony is at 4 am, and during the night i listened to the monsoon downpour, thinking we’re going to get soaked on the walk down from tushita, but when i step outside my room at 3.20 am its a fantastic clear night sky that greets me. The walk down is really beautiful – hanging in the sky in front of us as we walk, high over the valley, the full moon is shining, like a letter from a friend. The silence of the mountain blends into the stillness of a sleeping mcleod, though even at this hour there are people at the bus stand, huddled over rucksacks half asleep, waiting for the first bus to wherever. But then we enter the monastery, aglow with soft yellow lights and the sweet wakefulness of hundreds of monks and nuns chanting softly.

In the dalai lama’s inner palace there is a corridor with simple wooden benches lining the wall on one side. Half way along, built into the wall, is an enormous door, which seems to be leaning backwards as if holding back some amazing force. If the door opened and someone stepped out, they would have to step onto the wooden back of the bench and then onto the bench itself before stepping onto the floor. Its the strangest door i have ever seen. I stood in front of it for a few seconds and took my own personal vow, with it as a witness.

at several points in the ordination ceremony we went up to his holiness in groups of three – to have our robes blessed, etc – and on one of these occasions he gave me this huge friendly pat on the shoulder that exploded in my body and mind, an unbelievable force that i really cant describe adequately, but which i interpreted as a "there! now run with it and make it your own!"

The ceremony itself was very smooth and well organised though not without its stressful side (you don’t want anything to go wrong!)– and it was a long, long day, full of prayers and ceremonies and pujas of various kinds, from 4 in the morning to 11 at night. The best part for me was right at the end of the evening: a light-offering ceremony around lama yeshe’s stupa in tushita in the cool of the evening, staying on alone until after 11pm making oceans of prayers of thankfulness for the help i’ve received in this life from everyone connected with me. If I had to say what has been the biggest change in my life over the last few years, its realizing that the language of prayer – aspirational more than petitional – exists and has its effect. We are always gaining or losing languages: in the west we are mastering the language of telecommunications (that achingly sweet blend of precision, cleanliness and isolation) but losing the language of prayer. The alphabet crumbles beneath the weight of computer languages, dictionaries of acronyms and the proliferation of pharmaceutical products. But the old languages can still be heard: it is still possible to hear dante’s ‘commedia’ in the original italian broadcast on short-wave radio while living in an almost empty block of flats that is on fire most evenings, or read descriptions of hastily disassembled houses floating down-river in medieval japan (lower level officials desperately chasing after the imperial court after its relocation from kyoto to tokyo) while waiting in an airport departure lounge. And its still possible to have conversations with infinitely extended perceptions of what we call the ‘world’.

I can stay at tushita for now, for free. So – barring accidents or illness - i wont be coming home this year, though i may have to if i decide to apply for a long term study visa. Its very quiet up at tushita but i still see the bustle of mcleod each day when i come down for class. On rainy days it’s a bit of a challenge walking down, plastic sandals slipping off my feet and my skirt getting soaked (but then today i rescue a beautiful tibetan dance student from monkeys and then we share my tiny umbrella as the rain starts, so its not always grim.) But on dry days it can be very beautiful.

Its only two hundred metres higher than mcleod but the temperature drop is noticeable – emphasized probably by the increased intensity of the monsoon in recent weeks. Walking up beyond tushita, onto the mountain where there are some stupas to visit and some serious long-term Tibetans living the meditator’s life, is sometimes to be walking in clouds. But I love the coolness and the breeze and am enjoying the various ways I can wrap my long upper robe around me, creating different degrees of insulation or ventilation. wearing the robes feels very natural on many different levels - when meditating, you realise this is precisely what they have been designed for: you feel like a mountain wrapped in these loose folds of spacious cloth; they are also relatively easy to wear in normal situations too, unlike the thai robes which i had a lot of difficulty with; and here in mcleod it feels totally natural because there are always monks on the street wherever you go (well, wherever i tend to go nowadays; i dont remember seeing any in the soul food cafe...).

I will probably be here until end of November – I will be returning to the village in Thailand where I was a temporary monk for a special funeral ceremony on dec 5^th (the father of my friend john’s partner, and the head of the sweet thai family that made my ordination out there possible). I’m also going out there on a visa run in mid-september, so I’m quite excited… especially since the study materials out there include a cdv of a film about a shaolin soccer team, and the real thing on satellite tv each weekend.

Today visited my old monastery – ZKL – and saw chuden for the first time since I ordained. He was very happy and tells me they still have the satellite connection going…

In a questionaire from an organisation which supports western monks and nuns i was asked why i ordained and what ordination means to me. here’s my reply:

"I wanted to ordain from the very beginning. My first teacher mentioned a belief from the Thai tradition: when you ordain, all your relatives from seven generations back, if they are presently in the lower realms, are immediately reborn in the higher realms. I knew I wanted to act with that kind of immediacy and scope and I knew it wouldn’t be possible within the career structure of Marks & Spencers. I also knew I was going to be a 21^st century monk, though I didnt know what I meant by this. Then two years ago I realised I had done the hard part – I had made it into the 21^st century – so I did a temporary ordination in Thailand.

When Bez (one of the members of the band ‘Happy Mondays’) was asked by a journalist why he took so many drugs he replied simply: ‘its my job.’ That’s how I feel about ordination: its my job. Its my job not to criticize the hunger, addiction and recklessness of our culture but rather to show that there are other, deeper, sweeter ways of being. Its my job to remind people that they are capable of becoming the kindest, most intelligent, creative, beautiful, exquisite creature that ever lived. Its my job to show that studying reality is a holy thing and that everyone can find for themselves a way of studying that feels uncontrived and oceanic. On the back of an envelope, next to a picture of a wandering Zen monk carrying a bowl of incense on his back and accompanied by a tiger, one of my teachers wrote: ‘bring more, carry less.’ Its my job to find out what he meant."

But on a darker note, I’m told that over 50% of western monks and nuns give back their vows at some point – young or old, newly ordained or twenty years down the line, decent souls and wild ones, it makes no difference. There simply isn’t the cultural support to keep people going in this way of life back in the west, and feeling that one has to stay out here in asia for the rest of one’s life has its own stresses. Right now I’m not worried about it (which is not to say that I think I am different in some way, just that I cant think about this right now)– all I can do is do my best and try and keep my inspiration and sense of humour. We’ve been told not to go crazy trying to be the perfect monk or nun – they are the ones who disrobe first! I have interpreted this advice as an open invitation to go back to ZKL once a week and watch the football (saturday: 'pool v spurs!) and walk around the mountain listening to ragga, soul and brazilain chill (get it ready for september, john!)... I hope this is not a misunderstanding on my part, but in any case the italians would understand...

Till next time,

Shenyen

broadcast 07.24.04--brief note

hi everyone

today is the third day of the dalai lama's summer teachings and my third full day as a monk. the walk down from tushita meditation centre (where i'm staying at the moment) in the early morning sunshine is quiet and beautiful. a slow mountain walk gradually runs into the edges of mcleod and then joins the building stream of people heading to the main temple for the teachings. today i forgot my radio so i couldnt listen to the simultaneous translation - instead i just sat and listened to the sweet patterns and rhythms of his voice. when the dalai lama speaks its like you are sitting in a beautiful palace - there is so much space and beauty in his voice, and what he is saying is a beautiful architecture structured to guide you out of delusion and into the natural radiance of your own mind. this is no exaggeration - iu know nothing like it in this world.

since my application was so late (a day later and it would have been 'no'!) the five days before ordination were absolutely hectic and exhausting - all kinds of sweet chaos: frantic telephoning to my mum's house to get formal permission, one hour before the office closed here at his holiness's temple ("she's at the shops! she'll be back in half an hour!"); fruitless conversations with non-english speaking tibetan tailors; oceans of aspirational prayers. i started to fall ill - mainly exhaustion lowering the body defences - the night before, but it is lifting now and underneath the dispersing exhaustion i can feel a sweet peacefulness and lightness.

my new name is shenyen, which translates roughly as 'the friend who leads you to virtue'. its so sweet that the first person to speak my new name was the dalai lama himself. the way i've written it should make it easy to say. the syllabic strucure is actually she-nyen, but writing it like this may lead people to pronounce the first part with a strong 'e' (as in the english word 'she'). of course i will still be martin to lots of people but that's not a problem.

the robes are so comfortable and i cant imagine going back to lay clothes now - though i am pragmatic about how it might be when i visit england. but i will at least try and wear them in england when i come back.

people have asked me various questions which i will try and cover now. its been suggested that the first five years of your ordained life should be spent in a monastery, and i will be looking at options over the coming months, but i will still be able to travel occasionally, no problem. in any case, if i decide to stay here for five years i will need to come back one time to apply for a study visa from inside england.

as a novice monk the vows arent too difficult to stay within, and the tibetan tradition is very relaxed (within a soft deep dedication to the spirit of the vows, the intention to simplify one's life to a pristine and concentrated degree). i can stay with people no problem should i visit home, and even eat in the evening if it becomes necessary.

i'll try and write more at a later date.

till soon,

best wishes,

shenyen.

broadcast 05.18.04--first weeks

"i smile when i'm angry, i cheat and i lie.

i do what i have to do to get by.

but i know what is wrong and i know what is right,

and i die for the truth...

...in my secret life"

- leanoard cohen

settled in nicely now. i'm in a little monastery about ten minutes walk out of macleod ganj, along the bagsu road. walking into macleod each morning for breakfast i have a beautiful view down the side of the mountain as it spills out into the vast plains of india. it even looks hotter down there... but the nightlights of mccleod spilling down the mountainside in the evening adds to the coolness. temperatures are very high though, even up here in the mountains, but not enough to stop me hiking up the moutainside at midday every wednesday and thursday to watched delayed 'live' broadcasts of premiership games in a little cafe where the owner lets me use the tv.

my schedule is quite busy - or rather, 'intense' rather than busy, since there's no feeling of being rushed. i'm doing both of the courses in buddhist philosophy on offer: a course in logic and debate on tuesday thursday and saturday afternoon, and the abhisamayalankara course on the other three days (sunday is free). mornings i slip inside my cd player and listen to geshe michael roach's teachings - compacting five years of weekly two hour classes into 8 months of daily classes, with homework and meditations and memorisation requirements. evenings i usually teach english to one of the monks here (who tells me tales of his roughneck eastern tibetan family and fights over women, and comes up with example sentences like 'yesterday i caught a rat in the manager's office so i took it to a restaurnat in bagsu'), and sometimes watch movies or chat with people on the street in the cool of the evening.

i love the 6pm movie showing - you walk in off the sunlit street, dive into the movie, then come out again and the street is dark, and the contemplative darkness of the cinema and the emotional impact of the movie accompany you into the street. the streets here are lit up the way i remember childhood streets - maybe its because of the lower wattage used here, the bare bulbs and lack of neon, and of course the indian way of making all of space quietly dramatic, which creates the accompanying sense of dream. the last two movies i've seen (and even the book i'm reading at the moment - about a woman who wanders through the realms beyond death for five days and recounts what she saw) have both had people in comas - 'kill bill' and 'talk to her'. i'm tempted to use the 'old' language and talk about possible meanings, about cinema's attunement to the 'emergency' of our culture, its 'speechlessness', but more and more i find it better to just observe such things, leave them floating in the text of a quiet message, almost missable, like the sound of a police siren twenty blocks away on those summer nights when you sleep with the window open. ultimately 'coma' can mean anything.

sometimes i take geshe michael out of the cd player and listen to a music cd: leonard cohen or fernando alvarez - talking about the same things as geshe michael but in different languages. two nights ago i sat on the mountainsideside in the evening listening to brian eno while reading the abhisamaylankara for the first time. the abhisamayalankara is a text dictated by maitreya (the future buddha) to the 2nd century monk asanga (or as western scholars put it: written by asanga). it is 50 pages of highly condensed, incomprehensible text that requires years of study with a lama to unpack the 'code' and appreciate its meaning. essentially it describes all the stages along the path to buddhahood. before studying it the monks memorise the entire text, and before they begin their study of the text (in about their 3rd or 4th year of study i think), the monks spend six months just praying to have enough virtue to understand it. isnt that beautiful? - i mean is there anything in our culture that we would spend six months praying to understand or appreciate? i've seen some amazing football matches on tv over the years but i cant imagine sitting in front of the tv for 6 months before turning it on - at least, not with the european championships only 5 weeks away. no wonder someone once called tibetan monks 'athletes of devotion'.

not sure if i will go to nepal to watch the european championships and renew my visa early, during course recess - there are reports of the border being closed. so i will just have to go in september in mid-course. i can watch the football here of course.

email is really bad i'm afraid - sometimes it crashes unexpectedly, erasing everything. sometimes when it comes to sending something it just disappears at the moment of sending. i've lost this message twice like this! so forgive me if my mailings are rare.

shenyen

broadcast 06.06.04--the object that isnt there

afterwords

We say 'tree'

for the object that isn't there.

We say 'I love you',

acknowledging the failure

of whatever there was

to speak for itself.

We say 'God did it';

we mistrust everything.

You read these lines,

you think of something profound,

you pay too much for the ticket

and miss the plane.

- Dan Gerber

a bewildered-looking, cross eyed young boy, led by the hand by his mother, smiles with a mix of confusion and joy as an old man greets him on the street.

passing two girls talking on the street i hear a fragment of their conversation - "yes, my ex-boyfriend is thinking of doing that too..." suddenly it hits me how sad and inadequate the term 'ex-boyfriend', 'ex-girlfriend' is, with its dismissive, blank prefix. i wonder if our language might evolve a beautiful word for someone who has been in our lives in some way that has affected us forever and who still resonates deeply and sweetly in our minds.

one of the beggar women i see every day puts her palms together in greeting - just the stumps, with no fingers. big smile on her face.

i love the names of israeli women. a few nights ago, after the late film, sharing a taxi home with a woman called 'yel'.

the soft logic lineage begins to unfold... i told the manager of the monastery where i am staying that i planned to move out for three weeks to watch the european championships in a hotel room with a tv. his reply? - "no, this isnt necessary. we put cable in your room. we have tv in monastery nobody is using, satellite connection ok. just pay monthly rental fee. no problem." the electricity man is coming in a couple of days...

you could walk the length of mcleod ganj - about 1500 metres - and take a photo every five metres, and every one would be complete in itself, would be 'lookable at'. the same thing in london would inevitably have stretches of blankness - 100 metres of desolate subway passage or office block facade etc. and actually walking through these streets makes the contrast stronger: each little space is the centre of a story, a 'drama' in the traditional sense of the word, somebody's life being lived out. the streets here are just as 'busy' as london, but in a totally organic way - unlike the stretches of 'busyness' in the big cities back home, where people are sometimes just passing through 'dead space' between, say, 'home' and 'work', every metre is lived and filled and settled and dramatised. i never tire of walking these streets.

the debating class is so beautiful. yesterday, walking into class, it actually felt like a holy thing. when i think about what we are doing in this class - learning to think clearly about reality, and the objects and people and phenomena within it (which, being the focus of the torrent of all our likes and dislikes, are the source of all the suffering we create for ourselves) - i feel so thankful to be doing this. what amazes me is how much we believe we already understand reality. as my faith in the teachings increases, and my appreciation of the logic and architecture of its worldview becomes wider and sweeter, i can feel it actually pulling away from me, emphasizing the gulf between what i think i know and reality itself. as if it trusts that i am strong enough in my faith to have a glimpse of just how deluded i am in reality, without thereby becoming dismayed or discouraged. i struggle to find an image for this, of the feeling of everything beautiful and true presenting itself to me by moving away from me. in the logic class we are studying the second (second lowest) of the four schools of buddhist philosophy, each one deeper and more accurate (more comprehensive) than the previous one. in the highest school, objects become incredibly gentle and tenuous - more like évents than objects - still real, but incredibly tenuous. i've been studying the biography of je tsongkapa, the 16th century tibetan saint, who spent fourteen years studying to understand completely the highest school's view of how objects, people and phenomena exist - he studied extensively, conducted purification practices including three million prostrations, had face to face teachings from an emanation of the buddha of manjushri (you dont get that at a british university!), did extensive retreats... did all these things for fourteen years, before he finally understood. and i sometimes delude myself into thinking i've got it just through a couple of years of vaguely focussed buddhist practice within the ambience of a casually structured life! i must be crazy. but as i watch my understanding of even these simple, initial rudimentaries of debate practice and buddhist logic float in and out of focus, with days of confusion mingling with days of clarity, i appreciate more and more where it is going. and if i can feel this happy just standing outside the outer courrtyard walls mumbling my limited comprehensions, i cant help wondering how blissful it will be to be sitting in the central palace, understanding reality completely.

"a little music, played every now and then, sounds so full, so alive" (- from a friend's email). i remember the silent cassettes i made during the hulme years in the 1980s: C90 cassettes with just three or four songs on, separated by 20 minutes of silence. i'd put one on and forget it was on as i wandered around the flat, then suddenly be 'visited' by some beautiful song... i havent listened to music much over the last five years: mainly because when i came back from japan i came back with nothing, and havent settled in england long enough to have bought into a 'music collection' mindset, but also for other reasons too, 'difficult joys' that i would probably struggle to express properly right now. but last year, after i ended my two month stint as a monk and left the silence of the jungle, my friend john lent me a cd player to listen to on the way to bangkok, and some cds from south america, and it was the most beautiful thing to be listening to music again, and i realised it was coming back into my life. a few days ago i was thinking about my mp3cd player: there's just over 300 hours of recorded material on the discs i have, and 98% of it is buddhist teaching - just a half dozen hours of music. but once a week the teachings come out of the player and leonard cohen or fernando alvarez go in, amazing me with their warmth and sadness. the vietnamese monk, thich nhat hanh, now living and teaching in france, says how important it is for westerners to bring as much of their western culture as they can into the ambit of their emerging love for the buddhist teachings.

i guess the manager of my monastery thinks this way too... five days to go. fantastic.

till next time...

shenyen

broadcast 02.04.05--bodhgaya

bodhgaya...

after dharamsala, chiang mai and 'el balcon' this place feels like the wild west - dusty roads lined with temporary restaurants for the thousands of pilgrims; crowds of beggars - some of them obviously performance artists, creative, brisk and efficient - working the spaces around the main temples; and occasional murders. being a burglar - never an easy job at the best of times - is even riskier here. on the one hand you dont want the police to arrive too soon and catch you, but on the other hand, if it all goes wrong, you want them to arrive before the angry village mob lynches you. in a recent article in the 'Times of india' on the yearly crime statistics for the area, police arrests just outnumbered lynchings as the main means of crime prevention.

my friend matthew has arrived from canada, along with his friend meagan, and the three of us are having a beautiful time preparing for the forthcoming retreat, meandering between oceans of prayers and meditations and relaxed hours of daft and serious chat. we're staying at Root Institute, an idyllic retreat centre just on the edge of town. breakfast is always outdoors: under a tree or on the kitchen rooftop. after breakfast we head off across the flatlands surrounding Root, zigzagging around rice fields to visit an 80 ft statue of a seated buddha. then some study or reading, either side of lunch. late afternoon we go to the mahabodhi temple / stupa - the number one pilgrimage site for buddhists the world over - to do a cycle of of sweet oceanic prayers. it kind of reminds me of waterloo station - of any old, big city train station - except that no-one is hurrying to or from work. the hum of activity here is the glow coming off hundreds of people doing all kinds of devotional practices: prayers, prostrations, mandala offerings, flower offerings, circumambulations, light offerings... the fact that everyone in this place is feeling totally natural having conversations with beings that a western scientific-materialist worldview doesnt even recognise is what makes the place so amazing.

we have a little hindu shrine room all to ourselves each night. its beyond my ability to descibe, with an air of sacredness and squalor combined, obviously dirty but quietly clean, like somehing out of tarkovsky's "stalker". with no windows and a small ornate door only one metre high it allows us to recite together without the various recitations from outside drowning us out. just outside the door are a few tibetan monks doing mandala offerings, and the soft repetitive 'shush' of handfuls of little stones or grains of rice landing on the mandala bases has a calming and even cleansing effect. every night we come out of our little room electrified by the energy of the place, the craziness and deep naturalness of this site of multiple practice.

afterwards we go to mohammed's restaurant for an hour or so before the ride back to Root by cycle rickshaw - a journey which begins with a hair-raising roll downhill culminating in a ninety degree turn into a busy area, but then settles down into a slow steady ride beneath the stars and the various phases of the moon, past temples with tables of flickering butter lamps and the ramshackle chaos of indian pavement stalls.

a long walk across a wide dry river basin and through pristine villages still outside the electricity web, to visit some caves in a rocky outcrop about three hours walk from bodhgaya, sweet songs from those final weeks in england suddenly re-appearing ("her name is yoshimi - she's got a black belt in karate..."), and this time even football is appearing: we saw arsenal versus wolves - on a tv bought for his holiness the dalai lama.

tomorrow i go into retreat for one month - my first proper retreat as a monk. i know i'll be fine at a basic level (and right now i'm in a very happy blissful space after six weeks here), but say a prayer for me that there will be no obstacles during the retreat and that i will come out of it stronger (lighter) and wiser (kinder).

i'll write again in march, from varanasi.

best wishes to you all,

martin

broadcast 03.19.05--Notes from the field (india/nepal)

hi everyone

the retreat is over and i'm back in the chaos of india - varanasi. and after the silence and minute-by-minute accuracy of the retreat routine its kind of soothing to be in the midst of such breathtaking chaotic detail: labyrinths of lanes, wood piles, burning bodies, wandering cows, the steps leading down into the river ganges, and fantastic architecture where even the collapsing buildings are amazing to look at.

the retreat was essentially about establishing a mindfulness practice, and of understanding its value. but mindfulness as dependent arising was the overall theme that emerged for me - the realisation that nothing needs to (or can) be forced, its just about putting the causes and conditions into place and then letting the transformations naturally occur. and of course the causes and conditions for anything are oceanic and extend beyond even our perceptual time frames, so the importance of faith and trust in the teachings, of long term goals that transcend this present life, combined with 'goal-lessness': a willingness to sit and study and practice without any sense of waiting for something to happen - a willingness to 'walk in the dark in our best clothes' as the zen teachers say. with a sense of silent creativity that transcends anticipation. or as the taoist assassin in "all tomorrow's parties" puts it: 'anticipation of outcome invites, if not failure, an absence of grace.' living life is not the same as assembling a bookshelf: it's not something that can be viewed as a 'problem' with a 'solution'. there is only one way to assemble that bookshelf but a million ways to understand your life. it is beyond technique, and even beyond memory and biography.

a woman asked a rabbi: "how can i make sure that i find the right person to marry?"

and the rabbi replied: "its more important to be the right person than to find the right person..."

off to nepal now to renew my visa...

(.......)

on the overnight bus to sonauli (the border town that will let me into nepal), with a sick friend at my side and a visa in my passport that will expire five hours before we make it to the border crossing. anxious thoughts about how the immigration officials will treat me - a perfect situation for backsheesh demands and me in no position to bargain. but with the retreat still fresh in my mind i'm able to just watch the thoughts come and go and drop them for something neutral and sweet like watching the breath flowing in and out of the body.

5 a.m. - we wake up the immigration office in the middle of the night, in the midst of an electricity blackout. sleepy guard checks our documents by candlelight and either doesnt notice or doesnt care that i'm a day late - i go through without a hitch.

now in katmandu awaiting new indian visa. suddenly there's music everywhere, good food, western comforts of all kinds (the kind of things that you in the west probably dont recognise as comforts anymore)...

the longer i spend out here the more i have to settle for a kind of silence in the face of the sensory overlaod, a willingness to just look and see, to pass through landscapes and cityscapes without trying to translate them into memory, into biography. on the computer next to me an achingly sweet indian pop song is playing and i know i will probably never hear it again, and more and more of my life feels like this. the common name for this is "beauty".

I’m reading a piece of writing by an American living deep in the wild-lands of Montana. Its wonderful reading someone write about phenomena that they love clearly and dearly, and are a part of a wider web of love and attunement. His descriptions of snow are so personal, so complex and true. they are a model of how to see, how to love and apperciate. here are some passages:

“The girls and I wander out onto the marsh to go for a ski while the moon is still full. The clouds are gone and the night is cold. Due to some random sequence of the frost-thaw cycle – warm snow followed by repeated nights of intense cold and, who knows, perhaps even influenced by the solstice, the eclipse, and other rare phenomena – the snow out on the marsh has rearranged itself into a flat skiff of broad plates, each snowflake now recrystallised into a perfectly planar structure. The entire snowscape before us appears to have been converted into a land of fish scales, three feet deep, each one silver-blue in the light of the moon. The re-formed flakes are arrayed in all directions, bristle in the cold, leached of all moisture, dry as fossil fish scales. And though most of them are one micron thick, and lying parallel to the ground and the pull of gravity, enough of them tilt upward, as if in strange geological yearning, so that they sparkle and glint like huge sequins in the blue light. The entire world ablaze with shimmering coronas and prisms cast by the fish scale flakes..."

"Through snow as loose as sand, the blades of our skis cut across these fish scales, making music as if we’re crossing sheets of glass wind chimes…”

“… it seems like something from a fairy tale – such a soft, heavy, calming snow. What if the world doesn’t end in fire or chaos, but in snow? All the despair through the years not merely hidden but transformed, covered with beauty, converted to beauty…”

“… the snow comes down. Not as some meteorological phenomenon, but as if some dense and infinite reservoir has opened up…”

“… on some mornings, with new snow across the cabin roof like the warmest quilt in the world, I’ll work for two or three hours before the ice-skin between tin-roof and snow becomes slick, viscous. Suddenly the whole shittaree releases, and the curve and arc of rooftop snow cascades past my window, followed immediately by a sparkling shower of smaller ice crystals in the big slab’s wake, crystals as shimmering as fairy dust…”

and then this paragraph, with its beautiful opening sentence:

“You stare at things longer in January. Seen from the window of my writing cabin, the frozen gray limbs of the alder are a maze…”

that opening sentence struck me so clear, got me remembering japan and its literature: sei shonagon’s eclectic lists (“things that make the heart beat faster”) and the endless sadness of ‘genji monogatari’.

also, i got this from my friend andrew. thought you may like it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/04edgehed.html http://www.edge.org asks leading scientists and philosophers to consider, at the end of every year, "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" A few notable responses... Alison Gopnik Psychologist, University of California, Berkeley; co-author, "The Scientist in the Crib" I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces. -------------------------- David Buss Psychologist, University of Texas; author, "The Evolution of Desire" True love. I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love. While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it. -------------------------- Donald Hoffman Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine; author, "Visual Intelligence" I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being. The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival. If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience. -------------------------- and yourselves? answers on a postcard to tushita - or by email if you're really living that fast... my address is: tushita meditation centre, mcleod ganj, dharamsala, kangra district, HP 176 219. put my name in top left corner (shenyen or martin). i hope to be back at tushita by april 1st. plan to stay there six months, and then i have to make some decisions - decisions neither big nor small in the grand scheme of things but nevertheless exciting and unnerving and open and blind ... where to go, how to live.... till next time, shenyen.

broadcast 03.20.05: (another's) self portrait

a poem sent to me by andrew, whose life involves listening to english football on the

radio, downloading the digital edition of the guardian to read later in his tipi, and

riding his horse to peyote ceremonies somewhere in america

Self Portrait

It doesn't interest me if there is one god

or many gods.

I want to know if you belong or feel

abandoned.

If you know despair or can see it in others.

I want to know

If you are prepared to live in the world

with its harsh need

to change you. If you can look back

with firm eyes

saying this is where I stand. I want to know

if you know

how to melt into that fierce heat of living

falling toward

the centre of your longing. I want to know

if you are willing

to live, day by day, with the consequence of love

and the bitter

unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even

the gods speak of god.

-David Whyte

"humans may live forever, and the gods can become mortal, but not both at the same time..."

- best wishes from shenyen

shenyenradio nyc, last days march 2006

he says "if you have any sense at all of being a caterpillar about to turn into a butterfly you should protect this feeling and nurture it..."

the teachings go later and later, i'm exhausted but very happy. two a.m. train back to brooklyn, amazing soft-edged 'unstressed' rap music coming from high up in a tower-block, a heavy but gentle locomotive rhythm, everyone in the party chanting or maybe its just the record, i'll never know. in the street a young black woman pirrouettes awkwardly across the road in a wheelchair. spanish rap coming out of dusty beat-up old cars with broken suspension, young black guys asking if i'm a monk, smiling with admiration, and then telling me about life in brooklyn. and right now, in the apple shop again, a charming looking 'bad' guy puts rap on the computer next to mine and starts doing a kind of hands-on healing kind of dance in front of the screen. and its always 'right now' here...

some nights i get back to my room and there are new paintings on the wall - rufus has been in and doing some work. its so sweet to live in such a space, and it feels like a kind of echo from the future telling me that the sleep project will naturally come to realisation one day...

he talks about love. there are three kinds of love we need to develop, each one higher than the last. he starts talking about the lady who runs the little ice-cream counter at the gasoline station in bowie, arizona, the nearest place to diamond mountain university, a tiny place in the middle of nowhere. the first level of love is to think, like, 'i hope she doesnt hurt herself while she's serving me...' and the second is to realise that she is giving three minutes of her valuable, irreplaceable time, three minutes that are taking her closer to her death and can never be replaced, to serve me ice cream. like, she gets maybe four dollars an hour but really you cant put a price on it, you cant put a price on a few minutes of life, its immeasurable... and then the third level, which is to think that my whole world is a projection of my karma, and if i had been kinder in a previous lifetime i wouldnt see her standing here now in this sun-baked metal box in the middle of nowhere, she's here and not in paradise because i havent done the work yet of seeing my whole world and everyone in it as a paradise inhabited by angels.

buddhism is about doing that work. on the one hand its very delicate and mysterious (understanding reality and the emptyness-openness-unfinished nature of all phenomena) and on the other its very simple and clear (karma: be kind to everyone, be generous and open towards every situation)...

i'm in the islamic wing of the metropolitan museum in front of a turkish miniature painting entitled: "after accidentally killing a youth, a king tries to make amends to the bereaved mother by offering her either his own head cut off or a bowl filled with gold" its a fantastic logic. everything is immeasurable and yet we have to act, we have to make amends, we have to offer something... so the way to keep the immeasurability open is to make a double offer and let the other choose. a fantastic logic, with space for generosity and imagination, the extreme and the simple.

also in the met, i suddenly encounter a huge hall with a reconstructed fragment of an egyptian temple installed in it - amazing in itself, but pushed into even more amazing spaces by the presence of an entire wall of windows overlooking a snow covered central park that sings 'quotation' over the whole scene. and finally in the medieval room, walking past suits of armor and suddenly laughing as i realise how secure and protected i feel in my robes.

a psychologist talking about happiness, about how after spending nearly forty years studying happiness he doesnt have a definition of it. the nearest he has is to say that it is a state of mind where one is not wanting to be doing something different from what one is actually doing at that time. this is a beautiful definition - it places mindfulness as the key to happiness, within a world entirely chosen by oneself. within this high-speed disappearing life, this moment by moment disappearing life, what do you want to do? what do you really want to do?

and then turning it around through all 360 degrees of your world, so that it includes what everyone else wants to do too. or as they say everytime i enter a shop here: "how can i help you sir?"

got to dash now, leave this sweet high tech store for the last time. back to canada in a few days time. geshe michael's community just keeps pushing me further down the road towards what i want but wont approach: i've been offered a yurt to live in at diamond mountain for the next semester (it took them a mere three minutes to overcome my vagueness!) so i'm going to go back in on a three month visa waver in a month's time, and from there return to india for some teachings that geshe michael is going to translate for (in kullu, june 24th - july 7th). i keep wondering "when will it end?", but also i'm starting to train myself to stop thinking such thoughts. for the sake of the ice cream woman in bowie, arizona, and all the people around me in my own world, i have to stop thinking any kind of negativity that will delay the transformation. could talk for hours more on this, and i will, one day.

till next time,

with much love

shenyen