Skip to main content

Novel Zen



Dostoyevsky famously tried to write a novel about a saint, and notably failed. Prince Myshkin in The Idiot is a holy fool and the Brothers Karamazov leaves the potential of Alyosha incomplete.

The Romanian novelist's, Petru Dumitriu's, remarkable 'Incognito' has, at its heart, a 'secular' saint, Sebastian, who discovers God in a prison camp and infects others with his discovery of the unconditioned love of the world by example rather than through word.

Patrick White's 'Riders in the Chariot' has not one but four saints or four characters who carry different dimensions of the possibility of one, whole, saintliness.

Enter into this company, the Scottish novelist, Alan Spence's recently published, 'Night Boat'. In a sense he cheats because his is an imaginative realisation of an actual saint, embodied in a historical fiction (akin to Nikos Kanzantzakis' St Francis), in the Zen monk, Hakuin, one of the most important, and beloved, figures in Japanese Zen from whom all contemporary Rinzai practitioners are descended.

It is a compelling and beautiful book. I am not competent to judge its 'historical accuracy' but Hakuin himself would be sceptical of such a notion. How faithful can we ever be to 'telling the factual truth', what matters is whether you perceive the compassionately real. There is a wonderful story of Hakuin being accused of fathering a child and rather than deny it, he simply says. 'Is that so?' and takes the baby under his care, as his reputation disintegrates around him. Ultimately the young mother confesses and, with her embarrassed parents, takes the child back to which Hakuin's response is the same, 'Is that so?' What you live out of and towards is the essential not how you represent yourself or are represented. It reminded me of similar stories of the Desert Fathers in early Christian monasticism whereby the Father or Mother takes upon themselves, uncomplainingly, a false accusation for are we not all one of another - the parent of all, a sinner with all.

He was poet, calligrapher and artist, as well as Zen master, and the beautiful simplicity, humour and grace of his work can be seen here in one of his most famous representations - of blind men on a bridge. We can only feel our way, step by step, wholly alert to the texture, body of the bridge until at the end, the image suggests, we must jump, surrendering into the real.

There is only the 'support' of gravity which is grace in the moment. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more