broadcast: april 9, 2006--from canada to new mexico

"later on
i went and captured
all the forest deer -
all the objects of the universe..."
- from 'verses for memorisation at the tantric college', by the first panchen lama.

he wakes up in an apartment that has begun to feel like home... his sleeping bag rolled out on the floor in the centre of a large rug, and around him a soft arc of books, art magazines, a simple buddhist altar, CDs, papers, little toys (marvin the martian peering over the 'postcard shoulder' of an angel greeting mary in a renaissance painting), a mini dvd player, photographs, bookwraps and bits of clothing. stripped of furniture, the room shines. for only the second time on this trip - and only the sixth time in the last seven months - he's been in the same place for more than two weeks. when there's time and space to unpack there's time and space for silence. otherwise he has to hop the freight-trains of language all day long. time and space, too, for memorisation. its in this room that he memorises dogen zenji's prayer, 'arousing the mind of enlightenment':

"I vow with all beings, from this life on throughout countless lives, to hear the True Dharma; and upon hearing it no doubt will arise nor will I lack in faith; that upon meeting it I will renounce worldy affairs and maintain the Buddha Dharma; that in doing so the great earth and all living beings together attain the Buddha Way.
Although my past evil karma has greatly accumulated, indeed being the cause and condition of obstacles in practising the Way, may all Buddhas and Ancestors who have attained the Buddha Way be compassionate and free me from karmic effects, allowing me to practice the Way without hindrance. May they share their compassion which fills the boundless universe with the virtue of their enlightenment and teachings.
Buddhas and Ancestors of old were as we; we, in the future, shall be Buddhas and Ancestors. Revering Buddhas And Ancestors we are one Buddha and one Ancestor; awakening Bodhi-mind we are one Bodhi-mind. Extending their compassion freely and unlimitedly, we are able to attain Buddhahood and let go of the attainment. Therefore the chan master Lung-ya said: 'Those who in past lives were not enlightened will now be enlightened. In this life save the body which is the fruit of many lives. Before Buddhas were enlightened they were the same as we. Enlightened people of today are exactly as those of old.'
Quietly explore the farthest reaches of these causes and conditions, as this is the exact transmission of a verified Buddha. Repenting in this way one never fails to receive profound help from all Buddhas and Ancestors. Revealing and disclosing one's lack of faith and practice before the Buddha, the power of this revelation melts away the root of transgressions. This is the pure and simple colour of true practice, of the true mind of faith, of the true body of faith."

sometimes all he has is fiction which which to describe the emergence of a new reality. or rather something that doesnt recognise the dicotomy of fact and fiction, a new kind of writing that allows biographemes to float free, illimitable, discreet, almost nothing. the new language: i you he she.

his journeys are beautiful fractal curves, visible from outer space: to meet his teacher in new york city he leaves india and curves through thailand, japan, sweden, england and canada. to meet him again in the desert he will curve out of new york city back into canada, down into new mexico and then finally into arizona. but i'm sure plants turning to face the sun have the same sense of achievement.

once the buddha was walking across a field accompanied by some gods when he suddenly says: "this would be a good place to build a sanctuary." one of the gods plucks a piece of grass, places it back into the ground, and announces "the sanctuary is built." the buddha smiles.

i know how it is: your body, already broken, yet untouched by human hands. the years of indifference, the lakeside visions, the language that they sold you which didnt work in real life situations... there are parts of the body that still have no name after centuries of looking and touching. there are korean monks who climb up into caves behind huge waterfalls and scream for hours when the pressures of their training get too much. you ride city buses in silence and come home each evening to piles of white envelopes, like last year's snow. i see you everywhere: quiet athlete from an unknown country, standing on the podium of everyday life wearing your gold medal of unanswered questions. your national anthem: sadness. this is more than simply the end of biography, this is the spirituality of fact and fiction. i would like us to walk together in silence, side by side, for precisely one hundred steps. (a quantum angel would do the counting - we would just be the lovers of language walking in the nonlocality of love.) and at the end i would like you to realise that language hasnt even started yet on this planet. then i would like to return to the 14th century. there: now you know how the mind of a soft logic monk works...

a poem by saint john of the cross:

IT IS GOD WHO SHOULD ASK

With all humility
I say,

it is God who should ask for forgiveness,
not we, Him.

Someday you will know this.

A saint could explain.

he's reading a novel by richard powers, 'the time of our singing': an endlessly emerging description of the beauties of singing and music set against a wider history of twentieth century america. sex, riots, relativity theory, your mom trapped in a burning building - all seen in terms of music, seen as music, not as metaphor but as a newly translated natural language. he writes: "i could send you the chapter titles alone, or an occasional sentence or open-ended paragraph, on postcards sent once a month for three years, and you wouldnt feel distant from me:
"december 1961", "my brother's face", "easter 1939", "my brother as the student prince", "my brother as hansel", "in trutina", "a tempo", "december 1964", "my brother as aeneas", "bist du bei mir", "my brother as orpheus" ... "he feeds off his sister's instruction, the seed that will form his lifelong taste for the small and the light..." "misunderstandings seemed always to leave the harmed one strong enough to comfort the harmer..." "in his line, people keep studying until they die. and maybe even night school, after that..." "he spends his days in feverish activity. he listens to the radio. he took walks, or sat motionless at the music library at columbia. he was trying to race backwards by standing still. a decade later , he'd tell an interviewer that those were the months that turned him into an adult singer. 'i learnt more about how to sing by keeping silent for half a year than i ever learnt from any teacher.' except the teacher from whom he learned even silence..." "she floats into the next lesson beatific. she crosses the room and kisses him on the forehead, in neither forgiveness nor apology. just life in its inexplicable fullness..."
i've only made it through half the book and now its time to move on, but i know it will re-appear one day in another country, like everything else does..."

he's moving through people's lives so fast it feels like time travel. he has five days on average for a place to become home, for the distance between the door and the window to travel back through time, touch childhood and return, 'confirmed', before having to start again in a new place. he grows up overnight in his three day old neighbourhoods and he owns the streets outside his 'home' in the simplest way he knows: a dreamy appreciation. a quiet, unexpectant amazement wrapped in a certain interiority. but in the midst of all this he is nurturing his buddhist universe. he's reading nagarjuna, st teresa, "the fabric of the cosmos", "the time of our singing". buying songs off the internet to offer to the buddhas. a gardener tending his garden, imagining tantra, re-imagining tantra, always arriving.

two weeks ago i was invited to stay a few days at grail springs, a spa in northern ontario, to teach a little and in return enjoy the amazing hospitality of the place: snowshoeing through silent forests and listening to the sound of a stream permeating through a semi-acoustic blanket of snow, enjoying saunas and hot tubs under the stars, mud wraps and massage treatments from the sweetest angels, and amazing raw food dishes by a visiting californian chef. slept in a bed with so many mattresses i had to climb up into it. forget to draw the curtains and wake up looking out over a frozen lake that was just beginning to melt. the owner is a woman with a deep faith in the legend of the holy grail and its fundamental credo of 'i serve'. she wants her guests to have more than just a wonderful time, she wants them to have time itself, now and for evermore... it was wonderful to be there and now its already gone, disappearing at the speed of light. somebody talks about michael ondaatje's 'billy the kid' and then i fly diagonally across the continent to find a guidebook to new mexico on the coffee table of my next apartment, and on one of the pages a picture of billy the kid. "maybe i should re-read 'billy the kid'? maybe billy the kid will help me to understand geshe michael, st teresa, neils bohr?" ... i think i'm finally beginning to understand what the 'homeless' life means. right now i'm in the midst of a high speed spin through five or six different places in two weeks before arriving at diamond mountain. from there, another high speed spin back into and through india. dont imagine i'll have computer access in the desert... so... until next time...

much love.

shenyen

broadcast: march 2006--canada

i'm back in kitchener-waterloo with a month to spend before heading back into the states and down to diamond mountain university for the spring semester. my first night back i'm sleeping beneath the fake tiger skin rug again and this time dreaming clearly of tigers and bears and black-red hearts. second night back i'm hanging out in a bar ("jane bond"!) with meaghan and her friends and one of her friends offers me an apartment for the duration of my stay here, with kitchen bathroom etc. not only that she provides me with artists materials to play with (she knows where i'm coming from - attended one of the talks last month) and a larder full of food, including biscuits from ikea. her partner is a philosophy professor and he has friends who love english football, so that may manifest along the way too. from the balcony i overlook a snowcovered cemetery and watch squirrels hop the intersections between the trees and the rooftops. a mini dvd-player with a three inch screen appears along with more kung fu episodes to watch. prayers and meditation each morning, prayers and mandala offerings each night and, in between, artforum, 'the time of our singing', nagarjuna, minimalism.

back in the slower pace of k-w i'm also finally able to check out the web site that has just surfaced on the net, expressing concerns about the way geshe michael is teaching. it was quite a powerful experience to read, having just returned from the high energy tenderness of being immersed in his community during his new york teachings. its not a tacky site - its polite but very critical - but they dont say who they are unfortunately (just vague sketches meant to underscore the credibility of the various critics), which detracts a little from the gravity of their stance. the site is www.diamond-cutter.org

however, given that quite a few people who receive shenyenradio have studied with me and/or know how deeply i admire geshe michael, i feel its my duty to point out the website and also to try and express how i have incorporated the experience into my own trajectory.

i read it through from beginning to end - it took a while and it was almost all critical, and as i said, coming after the immense sweetness of being within his community in new york it was quite a shock, but after digesting it i actually feel clearer about why i am going to diamond mountain and what i'm expecting from there, and clearer about how to go there. i realised, in the aftershock of reading the site from beginning to end, that i had slipped into thinking about geshe michael very one-dimensionally, very selfishly - purely in terms of whether or not he was going to become 'my' teacher (my my my my my wonderful teacher for wonderful wonderful wonderful me). now i realise that i need to think about him in a total way - as a prospective lifelong teacher, as the wonderful heart-teacher of the last five years that he already is and, last but not least, as a potential casualty of our high-pressured world's hunger for celebrity-gurus, a sweet shining but crashing soul... if you love someone in this world its your duty to imagine the possibility of them crashing, even as you love them with faith.

... actually i had been thinking in this space often over the last two years, ever since i returned to dharamsala in 2004 and encountered several times among people there a dismissal of who he was and where he was going, but the new york experience had been so sweet that i had recently let go of that side of the picture. but as i said, for most of the last two years my mind has stayed open to the possibility, even as i lapped up recording after recording with joy and faith, that he may indeed be spiralling out of control the way people around me kept telling me he was. just because i had no feeling in my own mind that he might be crashing doesnt mean it was impossible. my love for him doesnt have to preclude the challenge - the beautiful wild challenge - of imagining him totally crashing while at the same time feeling the joy in what he is trying to do continually deepen inside me. i dont have to close my eyes to that or any other possibility.

i know he is controversial. the whole of buddhist history is littered with controversial teachers - we love it when its in the distant past, in the accepted hagiographies of characters safely mummified within the centuries and the pages, but when it happens with real people from our own time - and a westerner too! - we find it hard to accept. we lap up the 'marpa milarepa' soap opera from the 16th century with a lazy isolated pseudo-faith, smiling lazily at milarepa's tortures knowing how the story ends, but we cant accept even the tiniest challenge to the pre-conceived version of our own world and identity from a liviing breathing teacher in the 21st century.

and i know teachers can crash - especially here in the hyper-electric late-twentieth century western lands. its happened many times before, both to westerners and tibetans. its part of the energy of the situation, of trying to wrestle with the whole energy pattern of a powerful and crazy culture and transform it into something pure, something visionary. it is not easy.

so within these two parameters my job is to remain open, disciplined, attentive, unfearful. to walk in the dark in my best clothes.

in spring 2004 i had the chance to go to toronto and attend the kalachakra given by the dalai lama, and from there maybe meet up with geshe michael for the first time, and - who knows? - maybe even ordain with him.. or go to india and do the six month buddhist logic and debate course. two wonderful choices and i was totally stuck about which to choose. my friend matt did a divination for me and the result was india, so off i went. at the time i didnt know that three months later i would be ordaining with the dalai lama, and when i first arrived in india i remember feeling a bit sad about missing the toronto option. but when the chance to ordain with the dalai lama came up and i took it, and the new path that opened up immediately felt so clear and true, i felt so glad. and then, from my new position as a monk ordained by the dalai lama, i had a realisation: i thought "even if geshe michael crashes, i can be a witness of all the good he did beforehand, i can say to the world that this guy was the one who woke me up and made me want to go all the way, and i can say it as a monk within the dalai lama's lineage not as someone already immersed in geshe michael's community." this, i think, is the kind of open, clear-eyed love for a teacher i want to develop: to be deeply thankful for the teachings they give me while at the same time able to keep my balance and thankfulness even should they fall. "i love you when you arrive, i love you when you leave." and of course i can only have the teachers that my karma can 'afford', (and how many in this world have the karma to have perfect lifelong teachers in the room next to them day after day, year after year?)... so love has to be generous, even when the loved one is crashing - actually, especially when the loved one is crashing...

so, expecting nothing, blaming nothing and no-one in my world, i am able to learn from whatever teachers come my way. if they shine like a star i can try and learn from them how to do that, and if they crash, consumed by hubris, i can learn what that is like too - a thunderous close-up lesson in darkness! and i know one thing: in my millions of future lives i am bound to crash myself many times, so that will be a valuable lesson to learn, a valuable lesson to receive, should it manifest.

the fact is though, i really dont know what the 'true situation' is - all i know is my own deep love and joy in what he is trying to do. and i take responsibility for this joy and faith. i personally feel safe in ways i cannot describe - partially because i have deep faith in the buddhist teachings on karma, that nothing and no-one is to blame for anything in my world, and partially because of the trust i feel in my own motivation. but i feel its my duty to inform everyone who has encountered geshe michael through me that he is being strongly doubted, and to remind them that we have to reach our own decisions and take responsibility for our own decisions as we move through this fantastic mysterious world, this unrepeatable, endless world. for my part, i will continue to present my own encounters with geshe michael and his community as openly and accurately as i can.

but one thing i am radiantly clear about - the geshe michael i will connect with will be different from the geshe michael perceived by the critics on that website. the buddhist teachings tell me clearly that i will always and everywhere perceive my own world - the marriage of karma and emptiness. or as we chant in the thai temples: "i am the product of my karma, born of my karma, the heir of my karma, abide supported by my karma, whatever karma i create, for good or for ill, of that i will be the heir..." all i've ever wanted is for geshe michael to succeed in his wild, sweet vision of what is possible for a human being on this planet, at this time, out of thankfulness for the teachings i have received from him. even though i dont have the knowledge to judge his vision from some objective (?) or higher perspective and so cannot comment on the controversies that surround him. all i can say is that, controversies aside, this vision of his touches all the essential points of my understanding of the buddhist path, and the deeper patterns of my emerging faith in the buddha-dharma. it doesnt even matter if he succeeds but i miss out on being a part of it; and if he fails that's ok too. i will perceive and experience whatever i have the karma to perceive and experience. there is no fixed 'geshe michael' or 'shenyen' or 'world'. but whether he is shining from within an oceanic plenitude and a wild sweet holy transformation, or shining because he is on fire and spiraling for just a few more seconds through an empty sky, my job (one of them, anyway) remains the same: to never forget who helped me and when, who spoke to me and when, who invited me and when - invited me to try in my own way to shine.

the last six weeks over here in north america have been so amazing. so much more than i ever anticipated has already happened. and i'm really looking forward to going to diamond mountain with this wide-open non-judgmental gaze, this loving gaze that sees beauty but doesnt demand that it lasts or stays the same (i, too, dont last or stay the same...) whoever geshe michael is and is not, i will always appreciate him, and smile when i think of him. if you want a spiritual teacher in your life you must be totally open and totally unsentimental at the same time. and a hundred other qualities too. the radiance of discipline and an endless openness to the mystery.

so, till next time,

shenyen

broadcast: last days march 2006--NYC

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

broadcast FEB 27th 2006--NYC

she shows a rose to a young girl and asks: "is it beautiful?"
"Yes."
she places the rose behind her back and asks: "is it still beautiful?"
"yes, it is."
"beauty is in the mind, not in the rose. and that's what i paint."

in this city you tend to bounce as you walk, and you tend to walk through walls - one minute you're sitting in a supersize starbucks in downtown manhattan (to my left, a young black guy is watching a kung fu movie on his mini-laptop, making beautiful 'still' gestures with his hands - like blessings - and i can tell he's smiling; to my right three girls wearing different shades of pink hats... i keep getting caught by the rhythm of the editing of the kung fu movie, reading it as patterns of information with open references - the pattern emergence that combines the rhythm of brushstokes, attention spans, and market share in the career path of an emerging artist... a history of manhattan land price shifts over the last thirty years... or models of lost words incurred when translating from japanese into english. i'm trying to read nagarjuna - and succeeding - but suddenly listening to marvin gaye's "what's going on?" for the first time in years) and then you're on the midnight train to brooklyn and walking through windswept streets of rubbish, past the huge tower blocks of the bushwick projects before slipping into the artists' lofts building where i'm staying. on the subway a gentle oldish black guy sings great soft-edge soul songs accompanying himself on a keyboard, in the train a seriously hyped up guy talks to himself before answering his phone and mouthing off at the caller, back in the loft a neighbour explains how his state of the art figure-modeling program works. crazy guys in cafes rant to themselves about how 'you shouldna shot him man, you shouldna shot him...' and in galleries artists talk about the beauty of the mind. i'm everywhere.

on a train an old black woman puts away her bible into a carrier bag carrying the words "forever 21." she is vajrayogini. and just as she passes through my world, so i pass through others' worlds. i walk through other people's worlds, partially dissolving with each stroll along the sidewalk. i dont have to speak to speak anymore - i just walk: one more hallucinatory sight-line, one more absolutely perfect three-second edit manifesting in other people's lives, in this city made up entirely of such things.

on the seat behind me a young girl sings a beautiful funny excited song over and over - "new york, new york, new york CITY!" her mom gets a little embarassed and asks her to stop but a guy sitting nearby starts to talk about the song with her. she made it up herself, dreamt it in fact, and so she has to sing it. high up on a building a poster shows a suitcase covered in flowers and beneath it a tagline which cant be read properly cos its first portion is cut off by the edge of the roof. they are advertising forgetfulness, the impossibility of getting complete messages in this city. this is an important message to receive and not everyone receives it. and then later that night, returning from geshe michael and christie-la's teachings the daughter of another student tells me sleepily i read a book about you... there's no need to try and 'understand reality', you just have to enjoy being real, the whole crazy dreaminess of the thing.

i'm writing this message on a computer in apple's superstore in manhattan. there are no internet cafes here - everyone has their own computer and the cafes provide ports to plug into the internet - so i have to imagine buying a computer in order to write to you. to write, you have to pretend to be imagining buying something. and i like it like that - for now, in this precise moment of this journey's trajectory, its a way to be a soft logic monk. a way to be.

Shenyen

broadcast canada - usa feb 2006: semi-mythical

"it was semi-mythical. it was the

natural next step. it would never

happen. it was happening now..."

canada

i'm here in north america - small cities circling toronto in ontario, canada - the first definite step towards geshe michael...

and its happening so fast, so beautiful - "first of all let's change the landscape..." and whoosh, its snow everywhere...

the magic of 'empty' cities... my image of north america is so strange: everyone i meet is either a yoga teacher or dharma practitioner or kung fu student or monk or composer... people walk to work along disused railway tracks, some restaurants have meditation halls attached to them, and there are things i can name but not explain: my first ever quantum-mala for example, given to me by a student at the university...

the days usually begin with a visit to some delicious but inexpensive resataurant, and after that anything can happen - a visit to a university to receive a massage in a high tech chair that emits subsonic sound (the first in canada and open to the public for one day only) followed by a visit to an institute for theoretical physics to just hang out there and maybe get into conversation with one of the 'long term guests' as they are sweetly labelled on the residential board... as it happened it was friday and they were already gone, but the building was lovely to look at, exquisitely simple and complex, and touched by playfulness - an arts program that included some cutting edge contemporary musicians (including a superstring quartet!) and brief synopses of future lectures of beautiful complexity and modesty. i think i'll just write a soft logic letter to them when i get the time. there have been lots of yoga sessions with wonderful teachers. i've also given a talk at a high school and a dharma centre, enjoyed a three hour childhood memory marathon watching episodes of david carradine's 'kung fu' on dvd, had long conversations about 'organised sound' with jascha, watched soccer matches in matt's place or sat in on long car journeys with him to pick up world-wandering nuns with the car full of playful magical conversation about dakinis...

and i'm happy to say that the first opportunity to teach buddhist philosophy and worldview with a soft logic feel has been given me at meaghan's yoga centre, where i was able to teach accompanied by silent cds and teddy bears. (people asked "why the cuddly toy?" and i told them of an idea i came across recently that struck me deeply, about not trusting altars which are disturbed by the presence of a cuddly toy...) it went very well, and jascha - the sound man who set up his laptop to play ambient songs at random intervals to open up the teaching spaces and give people time to reflect and dream - managed to make me a cd of silence and songs for use in mandala offerings - which i used for the first time at the national ballet school while waiting for a friend to finish her ballet class; little nine year old ballerinas looking on curiously before going into their classes.

seriously, everyday feels like this. everyone is smiling or laughing or just being totally cool, passing me on to the next person, the next floor, the next opportunity for something sweet to happen, driving me ten hour round trips to get a cheaper flight to new york.

i feel like i've stepped into a wonderful mandala where everyone is quietly pushing me through my usual 'drunken astronaut' vagueness into the heart of geshe michael's community. they even packed me off to new york city (with a yoga mat strapped over my shoulder: i feel just like david carradine!) for seventeen days of teachings instead of the three i was intending to do....

new york city

my goodness! it just gets deeper and deeper... i cant believe this is the new york city i've heard so much about - its much more relaxed than i ever expected. but again, that's the magic of 'empty' cities... i'm surrounded by geshe michael students each morning and each evening, and every time i go into a 'subway' sandwich shop tibetan monks and refugees appear behind the counter and we talk about dharamsala.

every morning its off to the three jewels centre for tibetan heart yoga classes, then my sandwich, then a run around galleries. gazing in awe at the skyscrapers, cruising on the gentle buzz of the streets... it feels like home here, like i've lived here before. and then comes the evening - what i've been dreaming of for years: wonderful teachings by geshe michael and christie-la. the atmosphere is electric, sweet. and new york orchestrates things so fast and close and accurate: you step off the manhattan sidewalk into a little india of chanting at the jivamukti yoga centre where the teachings are being held. everyone is happy and open within the buld up to the teachings. and then finally in they come, geshe-la leading his consort christie-la by the hand (it is a part of their practice to never be more than ten metres apart from each other) and onto the stage for three hours of such heartfelt teachings. there are amazing images etched in my mind, pure blessings of seeing beyond limited conventional reality - its hard to explain. i'm talking about seeing with love and seeing love.

and i finally got the chance to say hello to him and ask for his blessing. he placed his head against mine for a few minutes and held my hands. that was all i needed. my faith is such that i now know i can continue on my way, beyond the limitations of my own rationale, trusting in the radiance of my own path, this soft logic path into a natural, semi-invisible, 21st century buddhism. he's so busy, so in demand, and i dont know when i will get the chance to talk to him again. but i trust more in the emergence of things than in the planning of things now.

everyone who has made this trip possible - and the list of credits flows out into infinity of course - i want to thank right now. i can start at some sweet arbitrary place - lets choose that sweet magical place of tushita in dharamsala, cos it was there, while teaching the various courses there last year, that i ended every course that i helped to teach with my appreciation of geshe michael's teachings and announced my plan to go to america one day and meet him, and so many people made prayers for me to make it happen. and then there are all the people who have helped me on this long crazy journey out of the himalayan foothills to new york city - via japan, thailand, sweden, england and canada! - people who have given me places to stay, paid for tickets, given me teaching opportunities (it felt so much more energised being here in america and teaching at the same time) - i cant name you all and its wrong to try in a way: silence is the only reality. but i just want you all to know what you've done for me, so that hopefully you can smile beyond the limitations of your own rationale and begin to sense that the world is an open, playable place.

i'm running out of time and internet access is hard here, believe it or not (everyone has their own computer i guess, so no cafes like in india) but i will write when i can.

now for some more new york....

shenyen

Broadcast: 4 Feb 2006

"You have to remember that he is a writer: that is, someone who loses their words precisely..."
- from an obituary for Jacques Derrida, by Judith Butler

In dharamsala a young tibetan boy walks in front of me with a backpack bearing the words "down & out". At a bus stand in north-east thailand another boy's t-shirt bears the incredibly powerful yet limitlessly open phrase "we are". and now the sweet language chaos of japan - `tough military`, `bard jail` and the wonderful `never stop exploding` which resolved itself a few minutes later into `never stop exploring` ...

"If you take your deepest questions into the core of your being, into your very blood and marrow, one day, quite naturally, you will understand the connection between thought and action. I am not speaking of discursive thought, but of taking your deepest questions into your very soul, of engaging your emotions, your dreams, and all of your experiences, the things most difficult to express in words and concepts..." (Thich Nhat Hanh - 'Fragrant Palm Leaves')

for many years, whenever i close my eyes, there has been a fourteenth century zen monk walking in my imagination. I say 'fourteenth century' but that's just my way of naming him: what i really mean is something immeasurable and precise. I dont know whether he is past, present or future. I dont even know whether he is 'me' or not, which in itself is the most beautiful thing. He's always walking, he never speaks, and i love him so much. For me this is what 'koan' means.

got to keep this short - in japan and moving fast - tomorrow off to zen temple - but here:s an essay (attached below) i wrote for cornerhouse, the art gallery i worked at 20 years ago and celebrating its 20th anniversary.

hope you enjoy.

Shenyen

broadcast dec 2005 jan 2006--UK Impossible

'impossible'

"Meditative, and predominantly a writer, everything for him begins by being 'impossible'... "

on the underground i pass through a station called 'temple' and suddenly there is a wonderful moment of cognitive dissonance. i see some tibetan monks in a poster for a mobile phone company and it just looks like a picture of tibetan monks (i dont 'read' it in any way), not some brief, sparkling manifestation of the West's endlessly churning image-repertoire. a truck drives past with 'diamond cutter' on the side and its like the emptiness teachings are as ubiquitous as, say, plumbing.

my eyes are so tired from being able to read all the signs. and all the signs are so mundane, so exhaustedly clever or charming or sincere or brash. i'm missing the walk from tushita to the stupas...

why is it possible to sit on the beach for hours listening to the unending sound of the waves, engrossed and energised, yet two minutes on the london underground is enough to make you want to vomit? because the rhythm of the assault on the underground is relentlessly monotonous - every poster is precisely 32cms by 19cms (or whatever) and each one the exact same distance apart. as brian eno once put it in relation to the same problem with computers: "there's no 'africa' in computers".

"what the modern movie lacks is beauty: the beauty of the wind moving through the trees." (do you want to try and put an approximate date on that quote? i'll tell you at the end..)

attended a weekend of teachings by sogyal rimpoche a few weeks ago. as he passed by me on the way to the teaching seat he asked me where i was from and i immediately replied 'liverpool and dharamsala', which got smiles from the audience.

he's preparing his entire worldwide community for a three year retreat beginning this july - most will do it more 'in spirit' than in the traditional isolated way, remaining at home and simplifying their life as well as they can. but its interesting to see it happening. another confirmation from the world around me that what we do over the next few years is very important: that a window of opportunity, an energy pattern for the entire planet, is going to be in place for a while and we must use it. you have to do what your conscience is telling you to do, not what your hopes and fears are telling you to do. you have to be ruthless - ie totally clear and gentle - beyond all hope and fear.

you dont need to stress, you just need to very gently decide not to waste any more time. you dont necessarilly have to 'get things done' - a lot of the work actually consists of dreaming. you may look lost, confused, vague, lazy - that's ok. so long as you are honest and gentle and totally ruthless.

have been back in england for a month now and i'm glad to say that wearing robes here hasnt been difficult (though my mum wouldnt let me go out the house in kirkby (liverpool), fearing for what the hooligans would do to me). london especially feels totally natural, probably because of it being such a cosmopolitan city.

strangers talk to me. there are six billion of them. they come and go, beyond biography, so clean. so fast, so gentle. i walk on the heath, or around the tate, sometimes with no sense of where i am. "like the bird in Kafka (she says) searching for its cage, not in order to imprison itself but to feel its caginess along with its freedom..."

gertrude stein: "i write for myself and strangers."

i practice for myself and strangers.

i've seen most of my friends and family, although i feel like i hardly spoke to anyone (even writing this has been unusually difficult). but its enough just to see them and to let the micro-perceptions flood through. i knew i had to come back 'home' at some point, and having done it i can feel inside that it's done, even if i cant say what it is that's been done. so much happens at a subterraenian level nowadays. sometimes i feel like i'm sleepwalking while all the time feeling totally attuned to something hidden and approaching. and i've learnt to be ruthless enough to stay in that space of not-knowing without worrying. i could almost say that i'm resigned to not having my friends around me for long periods of time - that i'm prepared (and preparing) to meet them again in 200 years time, not next month. i imagine a future where friends dont exist, just the plenitude of love and awareness, sufficiency and creativity. like in the sufi dance: "i love you when you arrive, i love you when you leave".

off to canada tomorrow (feb 3) and then new york and maybe further afield - to meet geshe michael at long last and to just enjoy the feeling of the ground moving beneath my feet. after that i really dont know - i cant see where i'm going to be three months down the line anymore - all i know is my intuition is saying to try and be 'in place' by the end of the year, somewhere i can settle and study and slow down deeply and begin to find my own voice and rhythm in that deep, slowed down space. i'll be happy to teach a la tushita 2005 within that scenario, but right now i dont know how its going to evolve. an obvious solution would be to go back to asia - thailand or india or maybe nepal - find a dharma centre where i can teach a little and go deeper into the meditation spaces, or (like in thailand) just disappear into my kuti and leave the teaching side alone for a while. but i'm sure there are other options too, waiting to announce themselves as my distracted head tumbles an extra 4 or 5 degrees left or right. i just have to stay loose and focussed and keep taking the interesting options, keep imagining the sweeter scenarios - optimism and imagination as a discipline.

talking of which (ie the interesting options, the sweeter scenarios), its great to have 'artforum' back on the floor of my room, read and re-read and semi-destroyed. every issue is a fantastic journey into the sweeter options of enlightened subjectivity: rirkrit tiravanija, a thai artist making wooden simulacra of gallery spaces in which he has temporarilly set up home (in one of them a voice-recording of sci-fi writer bruce sterling says "imagine living in an art gallery. no don't even imagine it. its unimaginable.")... a new art school in LA teaching free classes in a 'disappearing' classroom on top of a mountain... paul chan, a korean artist projecting onto the floor of a darkened room black sillouettes of objects tumbling through space (people, bicycles, even a train)... someone designing a town for ghosts to live in, and an imaginary island off bermuda with its own imagined bird (she's even created sound recordings of the bird's song)... maybe i should find a studio, not a kuti - become the first yogi to live on nettle soup and artforum. a cave in india "sponsored by sony, artforum and liverpool fc"... of course, i wouldnt last five minutes!

but maybe five minutes would be long enough.

till next time,

shenyen

ps the quote is from around 1920

broadcast dec 2005--stockholm

"Your stories leave the grooves of storytelling and become sheer discovery of speech at its end, in its last inscribed, audible moments..." (Edmond Jabes)

wandering the streets of stockholm feeling lost and at peace. this sweet feeling of realising that i have absolutely no reason to be here, or anywhere. which means my mind is free just to look and see. "i have nothing to say and i am saying it." besides, i dont really need reasons anymore. i'm just here. the mid-day sun just covers the rooftops. its dark at 3.30 pm.

if honesty is important to you, just stop explaining yourself. dont burn any bridges, just assume that they dont exist. be there for other people, but not for other people's fears. and whatever happens in your life, blame no-one and nothing, not even yourself. "to live outside the law you have to be honest."

this feeling called 'europe', this corner of a room where i sleep and meditate.

little green orange red lights dotted around me: telephones, cable tv, electric toothbrush, laptop. and snow on the rooftops opposite, like a quotation from some twelfth century christian mystic. writing at the computer (how old-fashioned that word is now) and listening to bjork's voice, layered, bleeping, shimmeringly and silently emotional. on the laptop screen a japanese girl lies on a bare wooden floor, covered by a song playlist window and this textbox, like two quilts. just being back in these kind of electronic quotational emotional disappearing spaces is incredibly powerful. tanya's house is beautifully saturated with these kind of spaces.

voices without bodies: the only furniture that some people understand now. computer playlists, podcasts, dropped songs, skype recordings. the 'chocolate hand-grenade' of the mobile phone. "mind-made objects." where we are there is only 'this' and 'this' and 'this'. a world falling apart electronically, gracefully.

lying on his deathbed writing to a friend, heidegger wondered "whether and how, in the age of a uniform technological world civilisation, there can still be such a thing as home." i love questions like this - love all the questions i hear heidegger asking - and i hope to wander through england asking questions like this, in the company of old friends and alone, out of sheer joy.

tonight, london.

braodcast nov/dec 2005--nice family

"...'What's this look like to you, Martial?' Fontaine asked his lawyer, Martial Matitse, of Matitse Rapelego Njembo, whose premises consisted of three notebooks and an antique Chinese bicycle..."

(from 'All Tomorrow's Parties' by William Gibson)

"You look like a rap singer from a nice family."

('Kafka On The Shore', Haruki Murakami)

two weeks hanging out with john and his family at el balcon: playing monsters with may and the puppies, losing crucial rallies in marathon badminton sessions due to my tendency to get carried away doing the accompanying 'televised commentary', morning meditations and studying nagarjuna at night, and eating big ... trying to think through the next step of my outward spiral from tushita but then realising it cant be 'thought through', it can only be 'stepped'...

bus to bangkok. endless gunfire on the tv screen. a hundred years ago the same journey would've taken ten days but accompanied by birdsong. which is best? both are best.

sitting in the foyer of my guest house watching a guy gently hand-slap his goodbyes to his friends. and then, while putting on an impossibly bulky back-pack, slapping the palms of one more friend. the things we carry, and the goodbyes...

the opposite of india, the guest houses and shops in thailand are nearly all run by women, their children sometimes sit in their laps or walk over to the refrigerator and take out a can of coke which they drink with a delightful seriousness, the way men who are uncomplicated and happy drink from cans of beer.

listening to songs i dont know and will probably never hear again, feeling light and clean. after so long in monasteries its great to be moving through these kind of spaces again. "all the lonely people." and the origins of language.

the city is like television: an amazing invention but used in such a trivial manner. its possible to enjoy the radiance of the details - a man selling helium-filled balloons walks slowly through the neon-alcohol-streetmarket frenzy of kaosan and then stops for a moment to carefully untangle the strings of the floating balloons; a girl comes out of a 7/11 store with such a beautiful look in her eyes - but i know something more is required of us...

Nagarjuna, talking about the benefits of giving ( www.purifymind.com/giving ), compares giving to rescuing valuables from a house on fire. the 'house on fire' is one's body, one's life, and the 'valuables' represent not one's possessions but the opportunity to cultivate blessings through giving whatever one is able to give - a giving which, if done purely, will outlive the inevitable destruction of one's present body and wealth. this is a fantastic image for a dance piece, i think. combining generosity and the emptiness teachings (give it all away and protect it forever; create your future worlds - future, i.e worlds you cannot yet see touch hear etc - simply by letting go within this one), awareness of death and the openness of the gift.

(and while searching for a specific nagarjuna text on the internet i came across a site by a woman who was into S&M and who's reading list included several deep-end buddhist philosophers, including a long passage about nagarjuna. its a strange world...)

the body, burning like a candle, shining, disappearing. perhaps transcending death, perhaps not. if you have the right teachings... by 'teachings' i dont mean somebody else's possessions, somebody else's words, i mean the vibration that unlocks your own mind. i mean nobody's anything.

a book entitled 'How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found'...

a phrase in 'Mother of the Buddhas': "...disappearing into reality..."

thinking of arranging the music and books in my room (next time i have one) into two categories: written/composed before 1961 and written/composed 1961 onwards. it's best to understand yourself through simple intuitive gestures, without closure. your biography, for instance, could be anything that makes you smile, anything that makes you think. like those quotes at the top of the page do for me. you dont have to own your biography, it's enough just to think it, imagine it, smilingly...

flying to stockholm tonight.

shenyen

broadcast 11.05--Bangkok

back in bangkok, a six week spin through the dream of japan is now disappearing into the dimensionlessness of memory. in the sky today, reading a new murakami novel (200 pages in and i still dont know what its about - typical murakami - but its speaking to me of autism and faith, patience and drunkenness) and suddenly realising that i'm actually leaving the country i was dreaming about so much during the last month at tushita, and yet feeling very comfortable and natural about it. like japan is now just another part of the world for me, a neighbourhood rather than a dream.

osaka felt like my first interactive experience with a complex twenty-first century soft logic cityscape: kyoto temples, homeless communities beneath the kyoto river bridges, art exhibitions... the beautiful patience of jerry and his family as this tibetan hooligan monk crashes through the soft precisions of a japanese home, turning jerry's study into the 'pigeon room' with string hanging from door to window holding drying robes and the floor covered in opened bags, exhibition fliers, books, cds... the aching sweet familiarity of trainstation announcements, and the trains themselves, and conversations with people sitting next to me... heidegger, keith jarret, brian eno, john cage all awaiting collection... making mandala offerings down by the river, accompanied by jerry playing the shakuhachi, pachinko (japanese pinball) parlour searchlights arcing the sky, and trainloads of commuters rattling over the bridge every few minutes... take-out sushi, talking bus stops, takoyaki stands, stand-up noodle shops in train stations... 'electroplankton' (a sweet little computer game where you make music by arranging labyrinths through which musical notes wander) and 'chirirobo' (where a mini-robot's goal in life is to make everyone happy: the family that owns him consists of a dysfunctional mother father daughter trio who cant communicate anymore - the girl especially doesnt talk to anyone, just wears a frog's hat and sits in the corner speaking gobblygook, and the father is frowned upon for spending so much money on electro-gadgets that he later abandons - for example, there are some abandoned frog-robots in the garden that chirirobo helps somehow (he takes them back to a pond maybe) and they reward him with a frog costume to wear which allows him to immediately understand what the little alienated girl wants to say... er, i better stop here or you'll think i've become addicted)... yes, osaka was a place where i could communicate with people at some basic level, and walk around in my robes in a semi-invisible way that didnt stop me from moving through spaces naturally.

it turns out that a month at bukkokuji was all i needed, all i wanted. i just needed that place in my memory, as one more star in the sky to gaze at when the moment of my death arrives. the landscape at that time, its not geological: its made up of all our collected loves and amazements and commitments. we have to start gathering them now. i loved being there (even though i wasnt 'happy' there) and i knew i had to leave and i'm thankful and clean and happy to be moving again, to realise so quickly and cleanly that it isnt me, its not the soft logic landscape that i need.

i realised early that i couldnt settle there long term, despite the power of the place. the cold was a real shock (and the snow hasnt come yet, although i was given advance instructions on how to avoid frostbite) soaking into my bones and stomach during the hours on the cushion in the unheated zendo and starting to make me feel sick, but the deeper, whispered truth lay in the sense of claustophobic limitation. i need to move through something more chaotic and technicolour, to be able to read and walk and dream in ways that you cannot do in such a place. but even one month has left a deep impression on me and blessed me. and i got some simple essential meditation instruction from a living zen master, along with a transmission of the enlightenment vow of dogen zenji to take away with me and make my own.

despite long hours of fighting the cold and the sadness of feeling bottled up (i was sleeping in the dining room and didnt feel like i had a place to just disappear into between the 4 a.m. wake-up bell and the 9 p.m. unfolding of the futon - just a tiny cemetery to walk up and down in outside) there were many times when the inner rhythm of the place would just blow me away with its focus and purity and i would find myself thinking "you're crazy, wanting to leave this place..."

its a very special place and i deeply recommend it (but not in november, to anyone coming from a couple of years in india and thailand). everyone there is so kind, and that kindness is partially the result of the discipline of the life there. seeing discipline and kindness linked so clearly has been a valuable teaching. and both the kindness and the discipline have their roots in the realisations of roshi-sama (the affectionate name for harada roshi, the abbot).

roshi-sama is 81 years old but he looks timeless, like an old taoist sage seen only in movies. occasionally scary but mainly shining with a soft compassionate wonder. lots of laughter in his face. but what a biography...

81 years old, which means he was 20 in 1944. his homeland crumbling into chaos and disaster after taking a lunatic violent swing at the whole of the pacific region. imagine being 20 years old in the midst of japan at that time. "i just wanted to be of service, to protect the people of my homeland..."

so he signs up to train as a kamikazi pilot. you have to remember that he's just 20 years old. he just wants to be of service.

the training is apparently fierce, almost unbearable. training to be a kamikazi pilot isnt like training to jump off a cliff. you can jump off a cliff with a brief, combined focussing and shutting down of consciousness, then let gravity do the rest, but a kamikazi pilot has to stay totally conscious to the very last moment in order to steer the plane into the moving target of the enemy ship and hit it at the most vulnerable spot. you cant pass out five seconds before impact. fierce training.

get this: the war ends one hour before he is due to fly. there's a photo of him drinking a last cup of sake with his group of fellow pilots before heading off. his pilot's clothes look desperately poor. his face totally lost into the acceptance of the chaos of fate. and then just after the photo the end of the war is announced. this is not "big brother" or the academy awards.

but before he can return to japan (the training camp was in china) he's captured by the russians and kept as a prisoner for several months. one of the russian captains torments him every night by making him drink lots of vodka, till he's sick. he ends up being hospitalised, but while he's away the others get sent to siberia and most dont make it back. now he sees alcohol as sacred (in the sense that he never drinks it) - as the thing which saved his life.

he makes it back to japan then. he's totally devasted by the end of the war, by the apparent uselessness of the sacrificed lives of all his fellow soldiers and pilots. he has no reason to live. and then he meets a zen master who tells him that if he is willing to die for zen training in a few years his world will be irreversibly changed. he's already given up his life once so its not difficult for him to accept. he enters zen training and in three years experiences satori. spends the next fifty years polishing the experience and running the monastery that is given over to him.

he talks again and again about eternal life, about deathlessness and birthlessness. his instructions to me repeat the same message over and over, and i slowly begin to realise the enormity of his simple words. again and again: "trust yourself". so simple, and often heard from all the people around us but i have never heard them spoken like this, pushing me to wonder in the face of "what exactly is 'trust'? what exactly is 'myself'?"

"trust yourself, and make space for everything. cling to nothing, oppose nothing. and then just... (cut through)..." (this last part semi-gestural and difficult to translate into the sparse, textureless wordiness of email.)

his mother died giving birth to him. she knew she would die and could have saved her own life by not having the child. but she chose to carry the pregnancy through. i guess she just wanted to be of service.

i'm 44 years old. death (or deathlessness) doesnt seem so far away now - just a few blocks away, in a part of town i dont normally go. i realise that time is running out and there's no portion left among the little time left for hesitation. not hesitating is probably the kindest thing you can do for people (so long as you have developed the discpline of love). most people are being destroyed by patterns of hesitation, not by wars. lost in rationalisations, most people never see.

in an email yesterday a friend tells me that kirti tsenshab rimpoche has been talking about this world-system ending in three hundred years, and that only those who have the kalachakra initiation will be reborn in shambala. hearing such talk, its not about truth or falseness, its about whether your mind can hold such language without breaking, like the biblical parable of the new wine in old bottles. 'not hesitating' is about becoming a new bottle, of not being destroyed (or left behind) by the immensity of the new language. i'm not interested in petty rationalisations of what i consider true and what i consider false anymore, i just want to shine in the little time i have in this amazing immeasurable world, to make something real, beyond language.

as i spiralled out of bukkokuji, waiting for me at jerry's house in osaka was a letter from india - a little piece of white cloth with "HHDL" (His Holiness the Dalai Lama) sewn into it, my parting request to ani desal when she offered me a present to take with me from tushita. ani desal is a nun who has been living at tushita all the time i stayed there and who runs the tailor's office there. she's a really sweet, shining older american lady, down to earth and shining with confidence in her teacher and her path. her teacher has given her enough diamond sutra recitation commitments to last six lifetimes - a fact that so amazed me when i first heard it six months ago that i immediately asked her to sew the cloth that holds my mandala-offering set. i wanted my mandala set to travel in a cloth made by a woman with enough diamond sutra recitation commitments to last six lifetimes. (i guess its her teacher's way of keeping her out of trouble for 300 years...)

why did i ask for a label with the dalai lama's name on? a few years ago i came across this story: In the 1970s the chinese imprisoned the panchen lama for many years, sometimes torturing and trying to humiliate him. at one point a chinese guard held a gun to his head and told him to spit on the name of the dalai lama. but the panchen lama refused. "i will never spit on the name of the dalai lama," he replied. "instead i will write his name on my hat and carry it around the universe..."

when i first heard this story i finally knew that buddhism was totally wild, and that i too could become totally wild and talk in the same way. and the desire to fulfill the panchen lama's beautiful defiant vision, to act out his spontaneous (spoken) performance art piece and carry the dalai lama's name on my hat and through the universe, came to me. two nights ago, while talking with jerry, we sewed the label into my new hat, and during my last day and a half in japan i walked about for the first time realising my wish. it felt wonderful. and on the first day i bumped into an old friend on the street in osaka - a city of 12 million people...

of course, everyone on the planet is an old friend, and the planet itself is just an aeroplane crashing. we're all going to die so why dont we just be nice to each other while the plane is going down? why make such a big fuss about some spilt drink or cold food, or fight over the arm rest? "let's break break all the rules and help each other."

------------------------------

i havent had chance to catch up on all the emails of recent weeks (only allowed out of temple every five days and a very awkward japanese keyboard, in a community centre in the town, was all i had) - but thanks to all of you that have written, and especially the offers of floors etc back in england. i hope to write direct soon.

love,

shenyen

broadcast 10.2004--winterzweige

winterzweige

“And then too there are the winterzweige (winter branches)… You know how branches look pretty dead in the winter, but in the sky of spring the branches burst forth in blossoms and subtle shades? Sometimes a lineage looks dead or dormant through several generations, yet it may still be transmitting the entire sap of the teaching. And then in auspicious circumstances the lineage may visibly blossom in some disciple. Well, each of us needs to be the spring for some teacher. If you nourish a lineage, if you nourish the teachings with your life, everything blossoms. Its much better to be in for this long learning curve, because so much of Buddhism is only absorbed through incubation. You learn it over a period of time with somebody, maturing the conditions for enlightening states of mind and being. Suzuki Roshi is still the main companion I have today…”

(Richard Baker Roshi, ibid)

What you probably don’t know – and what makes that last line so beautiful – is that his teacher Suzuki Roshi died more than twenty years before this interview took place…

Fresh snow up on the high mountains. I’ll be out of here before it falls beneath my feet.

Now, as I walk down to class in the afternoon, each time the mountain path curves into shadow the temperature drop is noticeable. But my regular morning walk up to trijang rimpoche’s stupa is still baked in sunshine, and sometimes on the way back I sit and read for an hour on a little rock which I now call the moon-viewing seat.

Up on the roof of lama’s house, walking in circles in the late afternoon sun. My shadow skips off the edge of the roof and onto the trees about twenty metres away. Each leaf a pixel of memory, flickering on and off with the passing shadow. Suddenly I have the feeling that language is with me, and I have the feeling that I could say anything – make the simplest sentences – and you would understand completely and even be here with me. “when your body is only just beginning…” I wonder how long this language will last. Maybe I should make prayers to the goddess of sentences.

A friend tells me that Jacques Derrida died recently. For years this man’s language has been my own emerging language. I can say that this is the first death of a friend. I think of him not so much as a philosopher but as the greatest love poet of the twentieth century. When I return to England I will read his essay ‘telepathy’ and write in its margins - to him, to everyone - one last time. Please, everyone – if you come across any beautiful pieces about him over the next few months can you save them for me?

I leave tushita in five days, but this time not just for a couple of weeks but for a four month spin that should take me to Thailand, south India, north India and Nepal, through airports and train platforms, roadside restaurants and simple hotel rooms with satellite tv – teachings, retreats, ceremonies, re-unions… some long, long journeys (at least one of the train journeys is 36 hours long) before I end up back here for the next six months of study, march to august next year.

During the picnic lunch at the end of the last course a student took some photos and gave me a cd copy, so I finally have some photos to send you. They should be attached to this email.

But a request to my English friends: if anyone has access to a photo printer could you print out a sheet and send them to my mum? She doesn’t have access to a computer. The first person to reply saying they can do it I will send my mum’s address to you. Thanks.

shenyen