From ‘Wild East. Travels in the New Mongolia’ by Jill Lawless

Mongolia…. is the size of Western Europe but has only 1,200 kilometres of paved roads. And Mongolians are almost preternaturally patient people. I decided the two things must be related.



…..Mongolian character: self-sufficient, hardy, stoic, resourceful.



The Mongols came thundering out of nowhere, they conquered the world, and then they went home.

That’s not much of an exaggeration. In the 13th century, under the leadership of Chinggis Khan (Genghis to you), the Mongol armies carved out the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known. They conquered an area stretching from Korea to Hungary, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. And they did it all within a few decades, combining the speed and seemingly superhuman stamina of their cavalry with ruthless and inventive siege tactics. They were probably the greatest shock to the system they outside world has ever known. The arrival of the sweaty horsemen must have seemed no less cataclysmic than an alien invasion.



I went for three decades without eating mutton once; in Mongolia it is difficult to go a day without eating some.



Mongolians have what my Lonely Planet guidebook dryly referred to as “one of the world’s most rudimentary cuisines.”



Most Mongols I’d met had nothing good to say about the Chinese, their culture, language, or business practices.



Vodka….. lubricated all social gatherings in the Soviet world, from drop-in parties to weddings to state banquets; it cemented business deals, and it greased the wheels of government. …. And Mongolia has had seven decades of Russian tuition in the art of vodka consumption. ….. Lonely Planet Mongolia …..suggested that all errands and commerce in Ulaanbaatar be accomplished before noon; after that, a large segment of the population would be staggering and aggressive or catatonic…. It wasn’t that bad. …. Many men – I never saw a woman drunk – were unfamiliar with the notion of drinking in moderation. They started to drink and didn’t stop until they were unconscious. But I had been to England; I was used to this.

There was no particular social stigma attached to public drunkenness, and many men shrugged off the consequences …..the fistfights with friends, the raging hangovers, the tussles with police – with humour and grace. …..Mongols had a taste for alcohol dating back to the empire period, at least. ….. “Chinggis Khan’s son and successor, Ogodei, basically drank himself to death ….”



….Before the communist revolution, Mongolia had hundreds of Buddhist monasteries and more than 100,000 monks. By the end of the communist period, there was one functioning monastery and perhaps a couple of hundred monks.



…a Mongol proverb ……. “If you’re afraid, don’t do it. If you do it, don’t be afraid.”

From ‘Journeys to Sacred India. Acts of Faith’ by Makarand R Paranjape

It was Giri who ….taught me how to meditate …..tell all your senses that you’re about to conduct some serious business; tell them that you will not be attending to them for a while, and that they should not try to draw you outward with their perceptions or sensations. After that, you turn inward, closing the doors and windows of the mind to the outside world. Once you are reasonably comfortable in a particular place, cleanse your inner being of negativity. Cleanse the space around you, starting with the room you are in. Then send out positive thoughts in all directions – may all beings be happy; may they all be free from afflictions; may their hearts be purified. Consciously transmitting your positive vibrations everywhere. Your meditation may now commence.



I suddenly realized that I did not know of anyone, not a single person, who had left India to pursue dharma or find some sort of spiritual truth. Everyone who went abroad did so only to improve his of her standard of living, to make money, or earn success or fame. The reasons for leaving India were largely material, not spiritual.

Consequently, I understood that for those who wished to explore spirituality above all things else, India might naturally be the best place on earth.



The Vedas …..are perhaps the only sacred texts in the world which assert time and again that Truth is greater than the Vedas themselves. As Swami Vivekananda says, ‘It is the Vedas alone that declare that even the study of the Vedas is secondary. The real study is “that by which we realize the unchangeable.”’



….the four mahavakyas or ‘great sayings’ exemplify the ultimate spiritual truth of the Vedas. ….They are: Tat tvam asi or That Thou Art …..Aham brahmasmi or I am ‘Brahman’ …. Prajnanam brahma or Consciousness Is ‘Brahman’ …..and Ayam atma brahma or This Self Is Divine….These great sentences assert the oneness of the Self and God, or of the atman and Brahman, or jiva and Shiva. That is to say that we are all divine, immortal and free, even when we are human, mortal and embodied.



….Vishnu, following Shiva from behind, began to dismember Sati’s corpse. Wherever a part fell became a sacred shrine, a shaktipeetham. There are 51 such peethams, spread all over the subcontinent……

When the devotee, either physically or mentally, visits all or even some of these shrines, he is re-membering the Goddess, literally joining her different detached body parts into one unified whole. ……in doing so, what is also constituted is the image of a country, a territory……. Our myths and beliefs thus help to form this sacred geography of our country……Puranic or legendary India is full of such pan-Indian groupings of sacred places. The four sacred abodes of Vishnu or the char dhams …..the five Kashis are distributed over the north and the south; the seven sacred cities or puris, …….the 12 jyotir lingas or fire shrines of Shiva ….Likewise, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim and Christian holy places are also found all over the country. ……The thousands of temples, mosques, gurdwaras, churches, dargahs and shrines spread across the length and breadth of India help fabricate its spiritual body …….



It seems to me that it is India which has solved the ‘one-many’ problem more creatively and successfully than any other civilization. Elsewhere, a monotheistic God displaced the pagan plurality, but when God shuts our gods, then other intercessors such as angels or saints come crowding in, from the backdoor, as it were.



….the Kanchi Paramacharya’s beautiful song, ‘Maitrim bhajata,’ which M. S. Subbulakshmi had sung at the United Nations:
Maithreem bhajatha akhila hrith jeththreem
Atmavat eva paraan api pashyata
Yuddham tyajata, spardhaam tyajata, tyajata pareshwa akrama
aakramanam
Jananee prthivee kaamadughaastey
Janakodeva: sakala dayaalu
Daamyata Datta Dayadhvam Janataa
Sreyo bhooyaath sakala janaanaam (thrice)
Cultivate friendship, which can conquer all hearts
Consider others even as your own self.
Renounce war, forswear competition, give up the use of force to
get others’ possessions.
Our mother earth has enough to fulfill all our needs
And the Lord, our Father, is supremely merciful.
(O people of this earth) show restraint, be generous, and practice
compassion.
May all beings be prosperous (repeated thrice)


see 6:00 onwards



…..Gandhi-ji ….of gram svaraj:

It will have cottages with sufficient light and ventilations, built of a material obtainable within a radius of five miles of it. The cottages will have courtyards enabling householders to plant vegetables for domestic use and to house their cattle. The village lanes and streets will be free of all avoidable dust. It will have wells according to its needs and accessible to all. It will have houses of worship for all, also a common meeting place, a village common for grazing its cattle, a co-operative dairy, primary and secondary schools in which industrial education will be the central fact, and it will have Panchayats for settling disputes. It will produce its own grains, vegetables and fruit, and its own Khadi. This is roughly my idea of a model village …..

From ‘The Ultimate Iconoclast. Understanding Rajneesh Osho's Revolutionary and 'Dangerous' Ideas’ by Dr Kuldip Kumar Dhiman

Kabira jab ham paida huye, jag hasa ham roye,
Aisi karni kar chalo, ham hasen jag roye
(Sayeth Kabir, when I was born I cried and world rejoiced,
Do such deeds that as I die, the world cries while I rejoice)

At times he appears to be a fool, at times a wise man, at times with all the majesty of a king, at times like a misguided person, at times blissful, at times quiet like a motionless python; At times honoured, at times disgraced, often wandering unknown, Thus lives an enlightened person in everlasting supreme bliss

- Sankaracarya, Vivekacudamani


Regarding his Rolls-Royces, he responded typically, saying that a Rolls-Royce was a perfect vehicle for meditation; one would find it very difficult to meditate in a bullock cart. Not many got it, but Rajneesh was actually making fun of both the East and the West. His Rolls-Royces were not only a practical joke on Western consumerism, but also on Indians who think that to be spiritual one has to be necessarily poor.



Different people need different approaches to be provoked, to be awakened …. Buddha called such methods kusala upaya. What is being said need not be actually true, but if it is useful in teaching the truth, it is justified.



……he reminded listeners repeatedly that although language may be very powerful tool, it has severe limitations. ….it is difficult to convey certain experiences in language, and even if we manage to do so partially, the listener might not grasp them fully. … That is why, after the truth is uttered, it becomes an ‘untruth’…. Rajneesh gives a good example of how knowledge gets distorted as it is passed on. In the Bhagavadgita, Krsna is an enlightened person, he ‘knows’; he has experienced the ultimate truth himself. Now, he is trying to tell what he has experienced to Arjuna, who is an educated person but not enlightened. So Arjuna understands only a fraction of what Krsna is saying. Further, the dialogue between Krsna and Arjuna is being reported by Sanjay, who is not there on the scene at all. He is twice removed from the truth than Arjuna; therefore, by the time the truth reaches him, it becomes a lot more distorted. And Sanjay is reporting all this to Dhrtrastra, who is not only thrice removed from reality, he is also blind. How much Dhrtrastra could comprehend, we can well imagine. And five millennia later, thousands of other blind Dhrtrastras are trying to understand the dialogue with the aid of various commentaries and interpretations at our disposal. People have changed, times have changed, and the context has changed. How much of the original message of Krsna we can actually understand could well be imagined.



Mahavira held that reality is so complex tht there can be several views about it; however, no view can fully capture it. All assertions or negations are, therefore, conditional; and there is no need to be dogmatic about a particular view. When someone came to Mahavira with a question, he would give not one but seven answers. If you pointed to a simple object like a pot and asked him what it was, he would say:

Perhaps it is
Perhaps it is not
Perhaps it is and is not
Perhaps it is inexpressible
Perhaps it is and is inexpressible
Perhaps it is not and is inexpressible
Perhaps it is, is not and is inexpressible

This view is called Syadvada, and it is in sharp contrast to Aristotelian logic, which says with certainty that A is A, and A is not B. …..He felt that Mahavira was perfectly right, but he was of not much use to the common man because Syadvada leaves the seeker more confused than he already was.



Although Sankaracarya called the entire creation an illusion, maya, it does not mean, as many wrongly conclude, that the external world does not exist. It only means that we do not see the world as it is; we see fit the way our mind interprets it. The worled of a child is different from the world of old people. When we are in love, we find everything beaufiful, and when we are heartbroken, we find nothing beautiful. We all live in a world of our own creation although the external reality is the same for all. ‘The mind is a wall around you. You are enclosed in it as a prisnor. But the wall is transparent. It is a glass wall made of only thoughts, prejudices, theories, scriptures; that’s why you cannot touch it, that’s why you are not even aware of it. But you live behind it, and whatsoever you see and feel is not the fact. It is an interpretation.’

From ‘Magic Bus. On the hippie trail from Istanbul to India’ by Rory Maclean

Iran

The academic said, ‘Before 1979, we used to drink in public and pray in private. Now we pray in public and drink in private.’



Iran has struggled for security throughout its history. The Persians built an empire stretching from the Mediterranean to India only to surrender it to Alexander the Great, the Parthians and then the Sassanians. In AD 637, five years after Mohammed’s death, the country was conquered by the Arabs. Persian society flourished under the caliphs and the Seljuks, until destroyed again by the Mongols.

In modern times, Iran has continued to be a battleground for foreign and internal rivalries. The CIA helped to topple a democratically elected nationalist prime minister in 1953. Both Washington and London had disapproved of the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, forerunner of BP. But the new Shah’s brutality and impatient reforms inspired anti-American Islamic fundamentalists to hijack the 1979 revolutions which overthrew him.

That February, 3 million Iranians too to the streets to celebrate the Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Tehran.



Afghanistan

‘Mountains do not come to other mountains but man can come to man.’



‘I remember laughter, music, tablecloths spread under the trees, the phht-phht of the pressure-cooker,’ she says, her quick laugh like a string being plucked. ‘Once I rode on the roof of a bus (inside which were two sheep and a bag of rice for another picnic) high into the Hindu Kush, winding through an indescribable landscape, thinking, “If I have to go, let me go now. Let me breathe in this beauty and go.”’



India

…… In Lucknow, a beggar sits next to the ash-covered torso of a dead baby on a toy trolley. No sight can surprise me, even if a sacred cow stands on its hind legs and takes to the air.



‘Stop trying not to die,’ Ginsberg wrote during his sixteen-month Indian sojourn, ‘fly where you can fly.’



Every day, 14 million passengers travel on Indian railways. This morning, half of them seem to be on my train.



‘The (plane) door opened and I smelt India – a mikniva of shit and urine. I walked around Colaba in wonder, watching the puja, seeing the light, feeling no fear, thinking I’d landed in my mother’s lap.’



My old mother from Guernica had a saying. “La esperanza muere ultima.” Hope dies last. Lose hope and you’ve lost everything.



Then he details the ride-by-ride bus fares from Istanbul to India. Total 1971 cost: $15 to cross Asia.

From ‘In the Land of the Ayatollahs. Tupac Shakur is King. Reflections from Iran and the Arab World’ by Shahzad Aziz

The ink of the scholars was weighed against the blood
of the martyrs and overweighed it.
- A saying of the Prophet Mohammed (al-Khatib, Tarikh)



Shall I hear the lament of the nightingale, submissively lending my ear?
Am I the Rose to suffer its cry in silence year after year?
The fire of verse gives me courage and bids me no more to be faint.
With dust in my mouth, I am abject to God I make my complaint.
Sometimes You favour our rivals then sometimes with us You are free,
I am sorry to say it so boldly. You are no [more] fickle than we.
- Complaint to God, Mohammed Iqbal



For the West, irrespective of the artistic merits of the book, Rushdie’s ‘righ to write’ touched upon one of the foundations of Western civilization, the right of free expression, of freedom of speech and thought. It was not a fanciful or abstract right, a right whose merits could not be measured. The unprecendented success, influence and continuing dominance of Western civilization is, in part, built upon Western constitutions protecting and promoting the fundamental rights of their citizens.



….writer Ziauddin Sardar responded to the death sentence by commenting that, “Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa not only declared a death sentence for Rushdie, it made me redundant as an intellectual. Implicit in the fatwa is the belief that Muslim thinkers are too feeble to defend their own beliefs ”.



…Rushdie argues that “language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.” But not everyone’s ‘language’, nor everyone’s ‘imagination’ can be equally expressed. As Rushdie knows all too well, power is not distributed fairly and equally in society. And if the language and imagination of people who are privileged enough to operate in the dominant culture of our times (such as Rushdie) is misused and abused, especially against the subaltern and marginalized, then although it might not result in their precious language, their precious imagination, their precious art being imprisoned or left to die, it does place at serious risk the language, the imagination, and the art of the subaltern, of the marginalized, being imprisoned and being left to die a slow death, and with it, a little of what makes ‘them’ and ‘us’ human will also die. Salman Rushdie, once a spokesperson for the oppressed, seems to have forgotten this.

From ‘Eurydice Street. A Place in Athens’ by Sofka Zinovieff

Come home to Greece!
- Greek National Tourism Organization Slogan



….more significant is Greek parents’ overwhelming ambition for their children, and tremendous love of ‘letters’. The respect for politismos – a word meaning both culture and civilization – is universal and unquestionable



If there is one thing that characterizes Greek conversation, it is a lack of reticence in expressing opinions. In fact, such is the natural argumentativeness and critical nature of many Greeks that what is a perfectly natural conversation can appear on the outside like a frantic matter of life and death.



‘…..folk music runs deep inside us. In Greece we live with our emotions, we cry more easily than others …..’



‘You cant even start to understand anything about Greece if you don’t realize that everything is expressed through poetry and song,’ …..that almost every other person in Greece is a poet.



…..by the middle of the nineteenth century there were still far more Greeks outside Greece than inside. When Athens was still a small town with 30,000 citizens, there were 120,000 Greeks in Constantinople and 60,000 in Smyrna [Izmir]



The Greeks, like the Russians, can be the most hospitable and welcoming of people, but they can also be uncompromisingly suspicious and even hostile to the outsider.



During the 1940s about 1,000 villages were destroyed, agricultural production fell by over seventy per cent, and about eight per cent of the entire population died. The proportion of people living in rural areas fell from about two thirds in 1940, to less than one third in the 1990s. Greece became an urban country in less than half a century.



Greeks speak louder, interrupt more often, and if they cant use their bodies as well they feel drastically handicapped….



Smoking embodies countless Greek ideals about spontaneity, living in the moment …..It also forms such a perfect accompaniment to lengthy cups of coffee and wine-filled evenings that it sometimes seems surprising that there is anyone in Greece who doesn’t smoke. Newspapers report that one in four ten-year olds smoke…..



Whereas about a third of babies in Britain are born out of wedlock, in Greece they only account for about three per cent. It is true that this remarkable traditionalism goes hand in hand with the highest rate of abortion in Europe, something which often stands in for contraception.



Whatever Greece’s turbulent history, its people are extraordinarily homogeneous as far as religion goes. ….almost everyone is Orthodox. Over ninety-five per cent of Greeks declare themselves to be so, and there is a widespread belief that ‘religion is the only thing keeping us Greek’. …. Unlike Catholicism, there is little preoccupation with sin and guilt. I’ve never spoken with a Greek who was worried about his or her morals from a religious point of view….. People also bring an easygoing, homely attitude to church. You see shoppers popping into a church while out on their errands in Athens. They put down their shopping bags in a corner of the dark, incense-filled church, and, with a casual efficiency, light a candle and make a quick tour of all the main icons, which are given due respect with a kiss and a sign of the cross.



‘He who never flew a kite didn’t look high enough,’…..

From ‘Original Dwelling Place. Zen Buddhist Essays’ by Robert Aitken

Strip off the blinders, unload the saddlebags!
- Hsueh-Tou Ch’ung-Hsien



Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
- Walt Whitman



Nyogen Senzaki…..recorded his last words before he died in March 1958.

Friends in Dhamma, be satisfied with your own heads. Do not put any false heads above your own. Then minute after minute, watch your steps closely. Always keep your head cold and your feet warm. These are my last words to you.



“Every act is a rite,” Thich Nhat Hanh had said……. “When you sweep the garden, you are sweeping your own mind,” the [Soen] roshi said to me…



….lines from Tennyson

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be,
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, are more than they.



Thich Nhat Hanh has said that you are like a TV. If you want a peaceful channel, you can turn to a peaceful channel. If you want some other kind of channel, you can turn to that.



We can enjoy the world without exploiting it, and we need not isolate ourselves. I am fond of the line from the Ts’ai-ken-t’an: “Water which is too pure has no fish.”



Tao-hsin made his bows before Seng-ts’an and said, “I beg the compassion of Your Reverence. Please teach me the Dharma way of emancipation.”
Seng-ts’an said, “Who is binding you?”
Tao-hsin said, “No one is binding me.”
Seng-ts’an said, “Then why should you search for emancipation?” Hearing this, Tao-hsin had great realization.



Hui-neng says that with an enlightened thought, you compensate for a thousand years of evil and destruction.



….a key passage in the “Genjo Koan,” the essay that Dogen placed at the head of his great collection of talks and essays, the Shobogenzo…..

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment is continued forever and ever.



The Buddha Shakyamuni taught this apparently complex yet actually very simple complementarity more than 2,500 years ago. With the passage of his teaching through many cultures and languages, the original manner and expression of his Way have evolved significantly in a variety of directions. Yet the archetypal message is the same: “Human beings tend to be miserable because they are preoccupied with themselves. When they are free of their self-centeredness they can find happiness.”



Basho wrote:

The little horse ambles clop-clop

across the summer moor -

I find myself in a picture.

Basho’s disciple Sampu painted a picture of Basho nodding along on his little horse, completely absorbed – subjective and objective fallen away, the inside world enlarged to fill the summer moor; the summer moor filling the inside world.



Something has to give. Either koan study must go, or the path of reason. Thus, early on, the student who elects to pursue the path of Zen Buddhism gives up history and philosophy as basic tools and takes up the way of poetry. The way of poetry is the way of staring at the word or words with only the question “What is it?” occupying the mind. The point either emerges or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, one’s only recourse is to go on staring.



There are many such stories of death used as an upaya, a skillful means of turning the Dharma wheel. Death poems were upaya. Here is Hung-chih’s composition:

Illusory dreams, phantom flowers -

sixty-seven years.

A white bird vanishes in the mist,

autumn waters merge with the sky

Bassui advises a dying man:

If you think of nothing, wish for nothing, want to understand nothing, cling to nothing, and only ask yourself, “What is the true substance of the Mind of this one who is now suffering?” Ending your days like clouds fading in the sky, you will eventually be freed from your painful bondage to endless change.



….Philip Larkin’s despair in his poem “Aubade””

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night,

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

And interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

….Bokkei’s presentation with the famous haiku by Issa, on the death of his baby daughter:

The dewdrop world

is the dewdrop world

and yet – and yet.

“It is true that this world is transitory,” Issa is saying. “All beings are ephemeral. I know this, but when I am faced with the death of my baby girl, I look desperately for something to give me hope and comfort.”



It is Geist that is missing, Landauer says – communal spirit, the volkseele, or folk soul, the larger self of people in a particular region, culture, or nation. It dwells in the hearts of individuals who give themselves over to the unfolding of this spirit as they work together in communal units that interpenetrate to form a “society of societies”. Geist can be compared with Plato’s philia, the friendship of high-minded individuals who are drawn together by their affinity for noble conduct and their rejection of self-centered materialism.



As the acquisitive system burgeons, its collapse is foreshadowed by epidemics, famine, war, and the despoliation of the earth and its forests, waters, and air.

I envision a growing crisis across the world as managers and their multinational systems continue to deplete finite human and natural resources. Great corporations, underwritten by equally great financial institutions, flush away the human habitat and the habitat of thousands of other species far more ruthlessly and on a far greater scale than the gold miners who once hosed down mountains in California.



When we devote ourselves to the Buddha Way, we practice loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity in the market and in our households ….. We internalize these ideals and extend tender care, as Torei Zenji advises us, to beasts and birds – and indeed to plants, pancakes, orange juice, and undershirt. The haiku poet Issa wrote:

Don’t kill it!

The fly wrings its hands;

It wrings its feet