Letter 2.59

The last time I saw Buddhananda he confided to me, with the air of divulging a state secret, that he was going off to Sarnath for a while. (Sarnath, a few miles outside Benares, is where the Buddha first taught his Teaching; consequently there's a large Buddhist settlement there with numerous temples from various countries.) So, my mail drop's now at Mary Opplinger's place: she's an elderly Quaker from New England who has been here for 16 years. Her husband -- a Swiss working for some Swiss Church-sponsored foreign-aid group -- being off in Africa for the past few months, she has recently discovered a Hindu recluse who she is very taken with and whose teaching she now follows without being any less a Quaker for it. She's an expert in homeopathic medicine and treats all and sundry -- natives, hippies, freaks, cranks -- who call at her door. (In fact, her medicine cured some sores on my legs, caused by insect bites, that I'd not been able to rid myself of even using antibiotics and other Western potions.) She is, I suppose, the den mother up here.

I'm told that at Tibetan altitudes (over 10,000 feet) it's possible to fall asleep in shadow and wake up with both sunburn and frost-bite. These cooler clear days seen like a portent, though it never gets that extreme here -- but, for sure, winter's icumen in, and my thoughts run to thick woolen and fluffy down. Yet Time if not the seasons has a different character upon the hills -- it changes only as a cloud changes, simply shifting about imperceptibly while never seeming to change at all -- and it's easy to forget that in other parts it moves with the steady rhythm of an army on the march. But the clock and calendar of Kumaon -- the sun, the clouds, the trees -- are still timely.

Letter 2.58

Actually I've got it all figured out now -- it's simply the altitude making me a bit giddy. But also (for nothing is really just 'simply') the sap is great I up here, flows freely providing much viriya [1], and is leaving me with a lot of time to do a lot of work on myself. I find the various scenes amusing, not presumptuous, when viewed from the proper distance (2,628'4,5", to be exact), just as I find the mountains presumptuous, not amusing, when viewed from an improper distance (anything less than 25 miles), and besides there's a big difference between being against things and being up against them. I'm against lobha, dosa, and moha [2], trying to not be up against them, and nothing else. But I've lost interest in the pharmacy of enlightenment long ago, and have failed to renew my subscription. (I used to sell Life, but I never sole Time.)

Your piece of ultimate reality arrived, my blessings to an honest postman (like what could he do with it, anyway?), and I'm closer to Thailand, not Ceylon, every day now, but there's coconuts there to, never fear, never fear. Still, even when I get there, I'm just gonna try to fine me a nice mountain, 'cause the lowlands just ain't for me. Whether to pass through, around, under or over, but neither down nor up. Perhaps just 'on'?

Lama Govinda, by the way -- will be in Vancouver, apparently, some time around the end of the year, or maybe after. Since you sang for your tea -- in Pali -- when you saw him in Almora -- maybe you'd like to try again?

Recycle wastes??! Lawdy, ain't goin' 'round once ‘nuff?! We always do end up going around twice, to say the least, but let's not make a virtue of non-necessity. Water's fine for fighting fire, if you got water (Oh! Is that what Vas is for?), but one thing you can be sure you've got if you're fighting fire, and that's fire, and as far as I know I've never met a man who had water (which, I believe, is the essence of the sotapanna [3] – viz. Ven. Ñānavīra Thera -- and not of the puthujjana [4]. This suggests a different, non-recyclable, use for wastes, does it is not? Or doesn't it?

(Look, my friend. First I hold it up at the ends of my fingers, balanced there like the egg the magician makes appear out of nowhere, and exhibits. Look, this piece of space I hold for us to examine. Now I set it down, and see how quickly it is absorbed into this table and runs out to saturate everything.)

Ho hūm,

V.

[1] viriya: (Pali) energy
[2] lobha, dosa, moha: (Pali) greet, hatred, and delusion
[3] sotapanna: (Pali) stream-attainer (see p.11 for definition -- Hum)
[4] puthujjana: (Pali) commoner; unenlightened person

Letter 2.57

I'm convinced now that the magnificently sculpted mountains have strongly influenced the people here, so that their minds become better sculpted. Everyone out here -- the Indians, the freaks, the lamas, Tibetans, and other oddities -- seems to be on well-directed trips (of different velocities and varying rates of cycles per second) trying to find a level at high altitude. The openness of the Himalayas is an open invitation to spread one's wings, drop one's burdens, and join the eagles in the sky. So for the three months of Vas (rainy season) retreat I'll be living on Crank's Ridge, where I feel very much at home. The mountains -- let alone the rest of the fairyland trip -- may help me to live in peace, to be as straight as I can, and to cool my head. That, at any rate, is what's on the menu for this Vas. We shall see how well I fill my plate.

Lama Govinda will be leaving shortly for a year or so, lecturing at, I believe, Southern Methodist University (he's been invited by the Methodist Church), and Suññata Bahaji is in Denmark at present, visiting his ailing elder sister (he's somewhere about 85 years old), so we're a bit short on Big Names at the mo, but Baba Ram Das (Richard Alpert) is down the footpath at Kausani -- about 8 miles toward Bageshwar -- and, locally, we have the Ven. Buddhananda (Ronald Boughan), a recently ordained former Intelligence officer for the British Foreign Service, who, says, with a sinister and confidential grin, that he still keeps a hand in the game. (Did you meet him when you were out this way? He lives in Snowview.) Then we have Win Chamberlain, the producer-director of a film called 'Brand X'. (I've never heard of him or his film before, but apparently it got good reviews and a bit of attention in some of the more ethereal segments of North American culture: have you heard of/seen it?) and an intimate of Timothy Leary. We also have Leary's ex—wife, a lanky Swede married to a Harvard grad student doing studies in Tibetology (he'd been a Tibetan monk for four years in -- yup -- New Jersey), so it's not surprising that rumors maintain that Leary Himself has fled from Algeria (where, I'm told, he was being held prisoner by the Black Panthers -- politics makes incredible bedfellows) and is hiding out either in the Kumaon hills or in Scandinavia. (Neither of us, of course, will believe a word of it, will we?) And then… but enough: you are now aware that the spiritual-pharmaceutical fringe is very biz in these parts (at the mo).

I've been to see Lama Govinda several times, and shall see him a few more times before he splits. He's a fine old man, alert, friendly, with a good head, fine vibes, and lots of undiscovered vitamins. He came from Germany together with Ven. Nyanaponika (of the Forest Hermitage and Buddhist Publication Society fame) and Swami Garibalda, who holes up near Jaffna. All three, at one time, were Theravada monks at the Island Hermitage. It's interesting to see, after thirty years, what each of them has done with his life. Certainly Lama Govinda -- scholarship and other diversions aside -- has been making some good use of his time, and has profited by it. He manages, nonetheless, to enshroud himself in a few romantic veils (stitched in secret by his wife?).

If I can keep the body together (which will require reasonably good health) and shitting at the proper rate (which will require some funds), there will be nothing to stop the mind from holding together and shitting at the proper rate. 'Monks, whoever eats and drinks needs to shit and piss' And again: 'There are, monks, these four foods: solid food, whether coarse or fine, contact second, thirdly mental-intention (mano sañcetanā) and consciousness as fourth'. Your tract on defecation was good. What about the void in the bowels after the movement? If it all comes out in the end, when does the end come out? As for contact (consider the sensory-deprivation experiments), mental-intention (i.e. time-structuring) and consciousness, what they produce (i.e. shit) is worthy of consideration. So too is it worthwhile to consider what they are, which, in the present terminology, is that they're itches produced by the mosquito bites of the mind. Shit is what happens when we scratch them. Thanks for pointing that out. Dhamma is a spiritual calamine lotion. It is also a mental flit bomb. It's for eliminating the cause of the itch, and not for finding a better way to scratch, There are no mosquitos on Crank's Ridge -- except the ones we bring with us.

Om Hūm,

V.

Letter 2.56

No, my handwriting is not a strain on my eyes. I didn't even think it particularly small. I‘ve a little book of texts, etc. that I've collected over the years. Intended for use while travelling, I wrote as small as possible to get in as much as I could, and that's really small. I used a Parker 21 fountain pen and it took a lot of care to write, especially since much of it was in Pali. Anyway, that's how I learned to write small and legible. Perhaps, I'll nest take up thumb-nail sketches.

Perhaps it is the rarer atmosphere that makes kite-flying difficult. I'd ascribed it to my lack of skill. Two nights ago the mountains were visible at sunset for the first time since the rains began; then at dusk huge fires were lit everywhere in the valley, and on the Ridge, and on the distant hills, celebrating -- I think -- the Hindu New Year (at Autumn Equinox?), and yesterday, for the first time since Nepal in '66, it was possible for me to see the mountains all day long, and this morning -- about 10 AM -- there's still not a cloud in the sky. Not a breeze, which makes me suspect that I can now retire my kite (a large diamond shape, which I made myself).

No, I have no interest in writing books. At present I'm concerned with another art-form, one admittedly less salable, but much more satisfying, which is called meditation, and might be looked at as turning oneself into 'a work of art' -- i.e. making oneself more pleasing to be in the presence of -- and this takes up most of my time. I sometimes pick up a paint-brush, however, and see if I can coax the color and line into something resembling a thanka, a Tibetan religious painting. This requires delicate work and fine concentration.

As for the Cranks of the Ridge, there seems to be little space left on this aerogramme, but, perhaps, special mention should be made of Buddhananda, who I stayed with briefly when I first arrived. He's a fat old Englishman ordained earlier this year after his retirement from the Intelligence and Security branch of the British High Commission, whose mind is still warped by his past: he's always pulling off little 'coup d'etats' to 'keep in practice', such as picking the lock of a door when he has the key in his pocket, and he knows the intimate life of 250,000,000 of India's 500,000,000 population. He tells, in the strictest confidence, the same stories to everyone he meets, even casual strangers. He has a black heart of gold. He's lived on Crank's Ridge longer than most of the Cranks.