The cremation forest was Luang Por’s Room 101 and that he entered it of his own accord

 In the Cremation Forest

For thousands of years, the Thais have perceived themselves living in a universe inhabited by unseen forces, malevolent and benign. It is unusual to discover a blind belief in the non-existence of ghosts, even amongst the most materialist of modern urban dwellers. Fascination with ghost stories is almost universal. Although secular values have spread relentlessly throughout Thai society, there is no sign of them displacing the deep belief in spirits.

Many different kinds of ghost are spoken of in Thailand. The three kinds that can possess people are particularly feared: pee tai hong (victims of a violent death), pee tai tong klom (women who died during childbirth) and pee pob who, greedy for raw meat and offal, enter people’s bodies and chew away voraciously at their intestines. Pee pret (Pali: peta), meanwhile, are the hungry ghosts met with in Buddhist texts. They are horrifyingly ugly: gaunt and emaciated, with dishevelled hair, long necks, sunken cheeks, deep-set eyes. They feed on pus and blood and have huge bellies as well as tiny mouths no bigger than the eye of a needle: their appetite is never satisfied. They dwell in cremation forests and desolate areas and emit long, shrill and plaintive cries as they approach human beings. In the time and place in which Luang Por grew up – Isan of the 1920s and 1930s – fear of ghosts was normal and rational: they were all around.

While the modern Western mind is not so terrified of ghosts, it has its own profound fears. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, prisoners under interrogation are confronted with the deepest and most visceral of these in the dreaded Room 101. The following passage might be best appreciated if it is considered that the cremation forest was Luang Por’s Room 101 and that he entered it of his own accord.

It was late afternoon, and I was really afraid; I didn’t want to go. I was paralyzed. I told myself to go, but I couldn’t. I invited Postulant Gaew to accompany me. ‘Go and die there,’ I told myself. ‘If it’s time to die, go and get it over and done with. If it’s all such a burden, if you’re so stupid, just die!’ That’s the kind of thing I was saying to myself, even though, at the same time, I still really didn’t want to go. But I forced myself, ‘If you’re going to wait until you’re completely ready, you’ll never go’, I reasoned, ‘and you won’t ever tame your mind.’ In the end, I had to drag myself there.

As I got to the edge of the forest, I faltered. I had never stayed in a cremation forest before in my life. Postulant Gaew was going to stick close, but I wouldn’t have it. I sent him off a good distance away. Actually, I wanted him to stay really close, but I was worried that I’d become dependent on him. I thought if I had a friend close by, then I wouldn’t be afraid, and so I resisted the temptation and sent him away. ‘If I’m so frightened, then tonight let me die. Let’s see what happens.’ I was afraid; but I did it. It’s not that I wasn’t afraid – but I dared. ‘At the worst’, I told myself, ‘all that can happen is that you’ll die.’

Well, as the dusk started to thicken a little – just my luck! – they carried a corpse, swaying from side to side, into the cremation forest. Why should this happen on this very day? As I practised walking meditation, pacing backwards and forwards, I could hardly feel my feet touch the ground. ‘Get out of here!’ my mind screamed. The villagers invited me to go and chant the funeral verses. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. ‘Get out of here!’ I was still thinking. But after I’d gone a short distance I returned. They came and buried[25] the corpse right by my glot and then made a sitting platform for me from the bamboo they’d used to carry the body.

What should I do now? The village was two or three kilometres away. ‘This is it for sure. What shall I do? … Just get ready to die.’ Postulant Gaew moved closer. I sent him away, and told myself: ‘Just go ahead and die! Why are you so terrified? Now we’re going to have some fun with this. If you don’t dare do it, you won’t know what it’s like.’ Oh! It was such an intense feeling. It hardly seemed as if my feet were touching the ground. And it was getting darker and darker. ‘Where are you going to go now? Go right into the middle of the cremation forest. Die! You’re born and then you die, isn’t that the way it goes?’ I battled with myself like that.

After the sun had gone down, I felt I should get into my glot. My legs were refusing to move. My feelings urged me into the glot. I’d been practising walking meditation in front of it, opposite the grave. As I walked towards the glot it wasn’t so bad, but as soon as I turned towards the grave – I don’t know what it was – it was as if there was something pulling at my back. Cold shivers went down my spine.

That’s what the training is all about. You feel so frightened your legs refuse to walk, and so you stop; then, when the fear has gone, you start again.

So, as it got dark, I entered my glot and a wave of relief swept over me. I felt as happy and secure as if the mosquito net was a seven-tiered wall. My alms-bowl seemed like an old friend. That’s what can happen when you’re on your own: you can even see a bowl as your friend! I had no one to rely on, and so I felt happy and took comfort in its presence. It’s on occasions like this that you really see your mind.

I sat in my glot and watched for malevolent spirits right throughout the night. I never slept a wink. I was afraid – afraid but daring to train myself, daring to do it. I sat staring into the darkness the whole night. I wasn’t sleepy once; drowsiness was afraid to show its face as well. I just sat there like that the whole night … In practice, if you’re that scared and you just follow your mind, you’d never do it. It’s the same with everything: if you don’t do it, if you don’t practise, you don’t get any benefit. I practised.

As the dawn broke, I was overjoyed: I was still alive. I felt so happy. From now on, I just wanted there to be only the day. In my heart, I wanted to kill the night forever. I felt good; I hadn’t died after all.

Even the dogs were out to test me. I went on alms-round alone and some dogs chased along behind me and tried to bite my legs. I didn’t chase them away. Let them bite! It seemed that something was out to get me. They kept snapping away at my ankles. Some bites got home, some didn’t. I felt shooting pains and every now and again it seemed as if a wound had been opened up. The village women didn’t try to get hold of their dogs. They thought spirits had followed me into the village and that’s why the dogs were barking. They were chasing after spirits and biting them, not me – so they just left them to it. I didn’t drive the dogs off, just let them bite me. ‘Last night I was almost frightened to death, and now I’m being attacked by dogs. Let them bite me if I’ve ever hurt them in past lives.’ But they just snapped away ineffectually. This is what’s called training yourself.

After alms-round, I ate my meal and started to feel better. The sun came out and I felt warm and at ease. During the day, I had a rest and by then my mind was getting back to normal. I thought everything was alright; it was only fear. ‘Tonight, I should be able to get down to some meditation practice. I’ve been through the fear. Tonight, it should be fine.’

Late afternoon and here we go again. They carried in another corpse, an adult. It was even worse than the previous night. They were going to cremate it right in front of my glot. This was much worse. At least the villagers burned the body, but when they invited me to go and contemplate the corpse I stayed where I was. Only when all the villagers had left did I go. ‘They’ve all gone home and left me alone with the corpse. What shall I do?’ I don’t know what similes I could use to describe to you this fear – and in the night-time too.

The fire had burned right down. The embers were red, green, blue. They spluttered and every now and again broke into flame. I couldn’t bring myself to practise walking meditation in front of the fire. As soon as it was completely dark I got into my glot as I’d done the night before. I sat in that thick forest with the smell of the corpse-burning smoke in my nostrils the whole night. It was worse than the night before. I sat with my back to the fire with no idea of sleeping. How could I sleep? I didn’t have the slightest desire to; I was nervous and wide awake the entire night. I was afraid, and I didn’t know who I could depend on. ‘You’re here by yourself and you’ll have to rely on yourself. There’s nowhere to go; its pitch black out there. Just sit down and die! Where do you want to go anyway?’

If you were just to follow what your mind told you, you’d never go to a place like that. Who would willingly put themselves through such torment? Only someone with a firm conviction in the Buddha’s teachings of the fruits of practice.

It was about ten o’clock, and I was sitting with my back to the fire. Suddenly I heard a sound from behind me, ‘toeng-tang! toeng-tang!’ I thought that maybe the corpse had rolled off the fire and perhaps some jackals had come to fight over it. Or something. But no, it wasn’t that. I sat listening. Then came the sound, ‘khreut-khrat! khreut-khrat!’, like someone moving ponderously through the forest. I tried to dismiss it from my mind. Shortly afterwards, it began to walk towards me. I could hear the sound of somebody approaching me from behind. The footfalls were heavy, almost like a water buffalo’s. But it wasn’t a water buffalo. Fallen leaves thickly covered the forest floor – it was February – and I heard the sound of someone treading on the big brittle leaves, ‘khop! khop!’

There was a termite mound at the side of my glot. I heard the steps skirting it as they approached. I thought, ‘Whatever it’s going to do, let it, because you’re ready to die. Where do you think you’d run to anyway?’ But in the end, it didn’t come towards me. The sounds thudded off ahead in the direction of the postulant. After it moved away there was silence. I don’t know what it was, all I was aware of was the fear and that made me imagine all kinds of things.

It must have been about half an hour later that I heard the sound of someone walking back from the direction of Postulant Gaew. It was exactly like the sound of a human being! It came straight towards the glot as if it was determined to trample whoever was inside. I just sat there with my eyes closed. I wasn’t going to open them for anything. If I was going to die, then let me die right there. When it reached me, it stopped and stood silent and motionless in front of the glot. I felt as if burnt hands were clutching at the air in front of me. I was sure the end had come. My whole body was petrified with terror. I forgot ‘Buddho’, ‘Dhammo’, ‘Sangho’ – everything. All that existed was the fear; I was as stretched and tight as a monastery drum. ‘Alright. You’re there – but I’m staying here.’ My mind was numb. I didn’t know if I was sitting on a seat or floating in the air. I tried to concentrate on the sense of knowing.

It’s probably like tipping water into a jar. If you just keep adding more and more, then eventually it overflows. I was so frightened, and the fear kept increasing until finally it overflowed. There was a release. I asked myself, ‘What are you afraid of? Why are you so terrified?’ I didn’t actually say that, the question arose spontaneously in my mind, and the answer arose in response, ‘I’m afraid of death.’ That’s what it said. So I asked further, ‘Where is death? Why are you so much more afraid than an ordinary householder?’ I kept asking where death was until finally I got the answer: ‘death lies within us.’ ‘If that’s the case, then where can you run to escape from it? If you run away, it will run with you. If you sit down, it will sit with you. If you get up and walk off, it will walk with you because death lies within us. There’s nowhere to go. Whether you’re afraid or not makes no difference, you still have to die. There’s no escape.’ These reflections cut off my thoughts.

When this dialogue had come to an end, familiar perceptions returned to the surface of my mind and the fear subsided. The change was as simple and total as when you flip your hand over from its back to the palm. I felt a great amazement that such fearlessness could arise right in the very same place that there had been such a strong fear just a few moments before. My heart soared to the heavens.

With the overcoming of my fear, it started to pour with rain – maybe it was the rain that falls on lotus leaves in the legend, the one that only makes you wet if you let it – I don’t know. There was the sound of thunder, of wind and of rain, deafeningly loud. It rained so heavily all my fears of death were forgotten. Trees crashed down and I was impervious. My robes, every piece of cloth I had was soaked. I just sat there, quite still.

Then, after a while, I started to weep. It just happened by itself. Tears started to roll down my face. Before that I’d been thinking how like an orphan I was, sitting there shivering in the middle of the pouring rain. I thought that probably none of the people happily asleep in their houses would imagine that there was a monk sitting out here in the rain all night; they were probably snuggling up in their warm blankets. ‘And here I am, sitting here, soaked to the skin – what’s it all about?’ As I started dwelling on those thoughts a sense of the sorrowfulness of my life arose, and I began to cry. The tears were streaming down: ‘That’s alright, it’s bad stuff. Let it all run out until there’s none left.’ That’s what practice is.

I don’t know how to explain what happened after that. Following my victory, I just sat there and all these things took place in my mind. It would be impossible to describe them all; I came to know and see so many things – too many to relate. It reminded me of the Buddha’s words: ‘Paccattaṃ veditabbo viññūhī’ – ‘to be seen by each wise person by themselves’. That was really true. I was suffering out in the middle of the rain and who could know how I felt? Nobody – only me. I was so deeply afraid, and then the fear disappeared. The people in their warm, dry houses couldn’t know what that was like. Only I could know that because it’s paccattaṃ. Who could I tell? Who could I relate it to? The more I reflected on it, the more certain I became and the more my heart was filled with energy and faith in the teachings. I contemplated the Dhamma until dawn.

As it became light I opened my eyes, and whichever way I looked the whole world was yellow. The danger had gone. During the night, I’d felt the need to urinate, but I’d been too afraid to get up. I’d held it back, and after some time the urge passed. In the morning when I got up, the whole world looked as yellow as the early morning sunlight. I went to urinate, and all that came out was blood. I wondered whether something inside me had torn or broken. I became afraid that something must have ruptured, and then I was confronted by an immediate retort, ‘If it’s ruptured, then it’s nobody’s fault; it’s just the way things are.’ It was an immediate and spontaneous answer to the worry, ‘If it’s ruptured, it’s ruptured. If you’re going to die, you’re going to die. You’ve just been sitting there minding your own business; if it wants to rupture, let it.’ The mind carried on this dialogue. It was like two people struggling for possession of something, one pulling it one way and the other pulling it back again.

One part of my mind elbowed its way in saying there was a serious problem. Another part fought with it immediately. As I urinated, the blood came out in gobs. I started to wonder where I could find some medicine. ‘Don’t bother. Where would you go anyway? You’re a monk, you can’t dig up medicinal roots. If it’s time to die, then just die! What can you do about it? Dying while practising the teachings is noble. You should be satisfied to die. If you were going to die for the sake of something evil, that wouldn’t be worth it; but if you die like this, it’s fitting.’ Alright, I said to myself, so be it.

That morning, Luang Por went on alms-round shaking with a fever that he bore patiently for a week before deciding to ask permission to convalesce at a nearby monastery. Ten days later, he had recovered sufficiently to continue his wandering.

By this time of the year, the nights would not have been so cold and the day’s heat stronger. Soon the hot season would glue the world together into a dense, smothering blanket, penetrated only by an occasional sweet and cooling breeze. As he made his way eastwards, the streams in which Luang Por bathed and from which he took his drinking water would have been diminishing rapidly, the paddy fields surrounding the occasional hamlets would be becoming hard as rock, cracking beneath a heat haze, while water buffaloes soaking in muddy pools of water would be making the most of them before they disappeared. At the edges of hamlets, he would have seen women searching in the woods for edible roots and leaves to supplement their meagre hot season diet.

In the thickly forested valleys of Nakhon Phanom, the huge hardwood trees – yang, pradu and daeng – stood like grave but kindly sentinels on the path. As he walked, he would have heard the sound of hornbills swooping above his head, or perhaps seen flocks of bright green parrots sweeping and weaving through the forest in perfect formation. Eventually, he arrived at his goal: Wat Pah Bahn Nong Hee[26] the monastery of Luang Pu Kinaree, one of the few tudong monks in the Mahānikāya Order. It was to be the beginning of a long and fruitful association.

Stillness Flowing 

The Life and Teaching of Ajhan Chah

Cannibalism in sex—Females who devour the male...

Cannibalism in sex—Females who devour the male, those who devour the spermatophore—Probable use of these practices—Fecundation by the whole male—Loves of the white foreheaded dectic—The green grasshopper—The Alpine analote—The ephippigere—Further reflections on the cannibalism of sex—Loves of the praying mantis.

The spider eats her male; the mantis eats her male; in locustians, the female is fecundated by a spermatophore, an enormous genital bunch-of-grapes which she gnaws through to the last shred. These two facts should be brought together. Whether the female swallow the male entire, or only the product of his genital glands, it is probably in both cases a complementary act of fecundation. There are possibly in the male assimilable elements necessary for the development of the eggs, almost as the albumen of seeds, little aborted plants, is necessary for nourishing the vegetable embryo, the surviving plantlet. Plants, according to recent study, are born twins: in order to live one must devour the other. Shifted to animal life, and slightly modified, this mechanism explains what one terms, from sentimentalism, the sexual ferocity of the she-mantis and the she-spider. Life is made out of life. Nothing lives save at the expense of life. The male insect nearly always dies immediately after the mating; in locustians he is literally emptied by the genital effort: whether the female respect, or devour him, his life would hardly be longer, or shorter thereby. He is sacrificed;
why, if this is for the good of the species, should he not be
eaten? Anyhow, he is eaten; it is his destiny, and he feels it coming, at least the male spider does, and the male mantis allows himself to be gnawed with perfect Stoicism. The spider revolts, the other submits. It is really a matter of ritual, not of accident or crime. One might try experiments. One might prevent the female dectic from pecking the mistletoe berry which the male has discharged on her; one might watch the coupling of mantes and isolate them immediately:
and then follow all the phases from laying to hatching. If the spermatophagy of the dectic is useless, if the murder of the male mantis is useless, it will annul the foregoing reflections, and others will rise.

The white-fronted dectic is, like all the locustians (grass- hoppers), a very ancient insect; it existed in the coal era, and it is perhaps this antiquity which explains its peculiar fecundative method. Like the cephalopoda, his contemporaries, he has recourse to the spermatophore; yet there is mating, there is embracing; there are even play and caresses. Here are the couple face to face, they caress each other with long antenne ‘fine as hair,”’ as Fabre says; after a moment they separate. The next day, new encounter, new blandishments. Another day, and Fabre finds the male knocked down by the female, who overwhelms him with her embrace; he gnaws her belly. The male disentangles himself and escapes, but a new assault masters him, he lies flat on his back. This time the female, lifted on her high legs, holds him belly to belly ; she bends back the extremity of her abdomen; the victim does likewise ; there is junction, and soon one sees something enormous issue from the convulsive flanks of the male, as if the animal were pushing out its entrails. ‘ It is,’’ continues the best observer, Fabre, in his Souvenirs VI, ‘‘ an opaline leather bottle about the size and colour of a mistletoe berry,” a bottle with four pockets at least, held together by feeble sutures. The female receives this leather bottle, or spermatophore, and carries it off glued to her belly. Having got over the thunder-clap, the male gets up, makes his toilet ; the female browses as she walks. ‘‘ From time to time she rises on her stilts, bends into a ring, seizes her opaline bundle in her mandibles, and chews it gently.” She breaks off little pieces, chews them carefully, and swallows them. Thus while the fecundative particles are extravasated toward the eggs which they are to animate, the female devours the spermatic pouch. After having tasted it piece by piece she suddenly pulls it off, kneads it, swallows it whole. Not a scrap is lost; the place is clear, and the oviscapte is cleaned, washed, polished.

The male has begun to sing again, during this meal, but it is not a love-song, he is about to die; he dies. Passing near him at this moment, the female looks at him, smells him, and takes a bite of his thigh.

Fabre was unable to see the mating of the green grasshopper, which takes place at night, but he observed the long preludes; he has seen the slow play of soft antennez. The result of the coupling is the same as with all locustians ; the female chews and swallows the genital ampulla. She is a terrible beast of prey who eats alive a huge cicada, who fearlessly sucks the entrails of a wriggling cockchafer. One cannot say whether she eats her male, dead or alive ; it is very probable for he is quite timid. Another dectic, the Aipine analote, has given Fabre the alarming spectacle of a male lying on his back, a female on his belly, the genital organs joining end to end in this single contact, and while she was receiving the fecundative caress, the enigmatic female, with the fore part of her body raised, was gnawing with little mouthfuls, another male held in her claws impassive, his belly chewed open. The male analote is much smaller and weaker than the female; like his confrére the spider, he flees with greatest possible speed after the end of coition; he is very often nipped. In the case observed by Fabre, the meal was doubtless the end of a preceding amour: these locustians have the habit, rare among insects, of receiving several suitors. Truly this cannibal Marguerite de Bourgogne is a fine type of beast, and gives a fine spectacle, not of immorality, an empty term, but of the serenity of nature, which permits all things, wills all things, and for whom there are neither vices nor virtues, but only movements and chemical reactions. [Or vices imprinted in mind as habits?]

The spermatophore of the ephippiger is enormous, nearly half the size of the animal. The nuptial feast is finished according to the same rite, and the fernale, having consumed the leather-bottle spermatophore, adds thereto the poor emptied male. She does not even wait until he is dead; she chops him up as he is dying, limb by limb: having fecundated her with all his blood, he must feed her with all his flesh.
This male flesh is doubtless remarkably comforting to the mother to be. Female mammifers, after delivery, devour the placenta. Different interpretations have been given to this habitual act. Some see a precaution against enemies: it is necessary to obliterate traces of a condition which clearly shows that one is feeble, defenceless, surrounded by young, a tasty prey at the mercy of any tooth; others say it is a recuperation of energy. This latter opinion seems more likely, especially if one consider the habits of locustians. The spermatophore is indeed the preceding analogy to the placenta. On the other hand, fecundation, before being a specific act, belongs to the general phenomena of nutrition: it is the integration of one force in another force, and nothing more. The devouring of the male, partial or complete, represents, then, only the most primitive form of the union of cellules, this junction of two unities in one, which precedes the segmentation, feeds it, makes it possible during a limited time, after which a new conjunction is necessary. If the actual acts are only a survival, if they have lasted after their utility has disappeared, it is another question, and one which I leave again to experimenters. It will be enough for me if I have gained acceptance of the general principie that the acts of animals, whatever they may be, cannot be understood unless one strip them of the sentimental qualifications beneath which ignorant humanity has covered them, corrupting them with providential finalism.

While fully recognizing the immense social value of prejudices, analysis should be permitted to excoriate them and to grind them. Nothing appears more clear than maternal love, and nothing is more widespread throughout all nature: yet nothing gives a falser interpretation of the acts which these two words pretend to explain. A virtue is made of it, that is to say, in the Christian sense, a voluntary act; one seems to think that it depends on the mother to love or not to love her children, and those who relax or forget their motherly cares are considered culpable. Like generation, motherly love is a commandment; it is the second condition of the perpetuity of life. Mothers sometimes are without it; some mothers also are sterile: the will intervenes neither in one case nor in the other. Like the rest of nature, like ourselves, animals live submitted to necessity, they do what they ought to do, so far as their organs permit them. The mantis who eats her husband is an excellent egg-layer who prepares, passionately, the future of her progeny.

After Fabre’s observations of couples of these insects caged, the female much stronger than the male mantes, come the predatory ones who do combat for love. The combats are deadly, the vanquished male is eaten at once. The male is bashful; at the moment of desire he limits himself to posing, to making sheeps’eyes, which the female seems to consider with indifference or disdain. Tired of parade, he finally decides, and with spread wings, leaps trembling upon the back of the ogress. The mating lasts five or six hours; when the knot is loosed, the suitor is, regularly, eaten.The terrible female is polyandrous. Other insects refuse the male when their ovaries have been fecundated, the mantis accepts two, three, four, up to seven; and eats them regularly after the act is accomplished. Fabre has seen better. The mantis is almost the only insect with a neck; the head does not join the thorax immediately, the neck is long and flexible, bending in all directions. Thus, while the male is enlacing and fecundating her, the female will turn her head back and calmly eat her companion in pleasure. Here is one headless, another is gone up to the corsage, and his remains still clutch the female who is thus devouring him at both ends, getting from her spouse simultaneously the pleasures ac mensa ac thoro, both bed and board from her husband.
The double pleasure only ends when the cannibal reaches the belly: the male then falls in shreds and the female finishes him on the ground. Poiret has witnessed a scene perhaps even more extraordinary. A male leaps on a female and is going to couple. The female turns her head, stares at the intruder, and decapitates him with a blow of her jaw-foot, a marvellous toothed-scythe. Without disconcertion the male, wedges up, spreads himself, makes love as if nothing abnormal had happened. The mating took place, and the female had the patience to wait for the end of the operation before finishing her wedding breakfast.

The headless nuptials are explained by the fact that the insect’s brains do not seem to have unique control of its movements; these animals can live without the cervical ganglion. A headless grasshopper will still lift his bruised foot to his mouth, after three hours, with the movement familiar to him in his complete condition.

THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
REMY DE GOURMONT TRANSLATED WITH A POSTSCRIPT BY EZRA POUND

Meeting with Ajahn Mun

 Ghosts in the Night

Luang Por’s fear of ghosts had not been completely displaced by his growing courage and every now and again, it would flare up alarmingly. He usually kept it smothered, out of sight and mind, through a nightly recitation of protective spells and incantations before he slept. One night, however, after a long period of meditation high up on the ridge of Khao Wongkot, Luang Por felt such a surge of confidence in the power of his virtue that he omitted the recitations. Before long he would regret his decision.

The idea of virtue as protection is a hallowed one in the Buddhist world. It is a concept that became a cornerstone in Luang Por’s teachings, especially to the laity, and helps to explain the great emphasis he was to place on keeping precepts. It was his firm belief that, in addition to its vital role in the development of peace and wisdom, virtuous conduct long-sustained has an enormous intrinsic power. Luang Por had experienced a growing sense of integrity and self-respect through his efforts to keep the vast number of monastic observances scrupulously. But, as yet, he had never quite dared to put his convictions in the protective power of his virtue to the test. He believed the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha to be supreme refuges but could not deny his barely suppressed fear of malevolent spirits. Yet on this cool and silent night he felt invincible, ready to take the risk.

The moment Luang Por lay down to sleep he became aware of a chilling and thickening of the air around his glot. A malign presence began to bear down upon him. It was as if it had been lurking, waiting for the young monk to forget his chants; and through his hubris, he had made himself its prey. Suddenly, Luang Por was pinned down on his back, paralyzed. Whatever was crushing him seemed to exude a crude and elemental evil: he realized it was the kind of ghost called ‘pee am’. As the pressure intensified on his chest, he struggled desperately for breath. Somehow, he managed to maintain his presence of mind. He quelled the feelings of panic. Mentally he recited the word ‘Buddho’ over and over again with great determination. No other thoughts could enter his mind, and Luang Por found refuge in the recitation. The strength of the evil force was immense. Although checked, it put up a bitter struggle. Eventually, the pressure weakened. Luang Por gradually began to recover movement in his body. It was over. After the shock wore off, there came a wave of exultation. He had survived an ordeal, as bad as his worst dreams, purely through the power of his virtue and meditation on the Buddha. He could ditch his spells.

This incident gave Luang Por’s intellectual conviction in the power of virtue a strong emotional boost. Following it, he increased his care and attention to the precepts in the Monks’ Discipline, restraining himself from even the most minor infringements. It was at this time that he finally plucked up the courage to dispose of his small emergency stash of money. In the Thai Sangha of the time, only the forest monks heeded the Buddha’s prohibition against the receiving and use of money. Luang Por himself, so strict in other areas of the Discipline, had baulked at abandoning the safety net that money provided. But here in Wat Khao Wongkot, he determined that, from now on, there was to be no transgression of his precepts under any circumstances.

His problems with sexual desire were more intractable. Shortly before his father died, it had nearly led him out of the monkhood.

At one time I considered disrobing. I’d been a monk about five or six years at the time and I thought of the Buddha: six years and he was enlightened. But my mind was still concerned with the world, I wanted to return to it. ‘Perhaps I should go out and make a contribution to the world for a short while and then I’ll know what it’s all about. Even the Buddha had a son. Maybe entering the monkhood without any worldly experience at all is too extreme.’ I kept reflecting on it until some understanding arose. ‘Yes, it’s quite a good idea but the worrying thing is that this ‘Buddha’ is not the same as the last one.’ Something in me resisted. ‘I’m only afraid this ‘Buddha’ will sink down into the world and the mud.’

At Wat Khao Wongkot, Luang Por was searching for ways of overcoming lust. He believed that sense-restraint and non-indulgence in sexual thoughts would cause sexual desire to weaken.

I didn’t look at a woman’s face for the whole of the Rains Retreat. I allowed myself to speak to women but not to look at their faces. My eyes would strain upwards – they wanted to look so much I almost died! At the end of the retreat I went on alms-round in Lopburi town. Three months had passed since I last looked at a woman’s face, and I wanted to know what it would be like. ‘The defilements must be withering away by now’, I thought. As soon as I’d made the decision, I looked at an approaching woman – Ohhh! Dressed in bright red. Just a single glance and my legs turned to jelly. I was totally discouraged. When was I ever going to be free from defilement?

Sense-restraint was certainly a key element of practice, but was not sufficient in itself. Instructing monks many years later, he said:

In the beginning, you have to keep your distance from women. But the true abandonment of lust comes only from developing the wisdom that sees things as they are.

Luang Pu Mun

It was during the Rains Retreat at Wat Khao Wongkot that Luang Por first heard the name of the monk who was to become a legendary figure in Thailand, the most revered monk of his generation. Today, on the shrines of houses, shops and offices throughout Isan, a photograph of Luang Pu Mun can commonly be seen in a place of honour just below that of the Buddha himself. The most common of these photographs reveals a slight figure dressed in the sombre robes of the forest monk, standing with an almost ghost-like stillness amongst unearthly trees, his hands clasped in front of him, radiating an austere composure. He seems to be looking right through the camera and straight into the viewer’s heart. It is an inspiring but discomfiting picture. It challenges all that the viewer takes for granted.

The stories and anecdotes featuring Luang Pu Mun, related by his students and contemporaries, are startlingly reminiscent of the accounts of great monks found in the Buddhist scriptures. Although a certain amount of hyperbole may be expected from such sources, the comparisons are not fanciful. Luang Pu Mun was an exemplary forest monk who was so devoted to the ascetic, peripatetic way of life that for a period of over fifty years he did not spend two consecutive Rains Retreats in the same monastery. It was only at the very end of his life, when he could no longer walk, that he gave up his daily alms-round. His psychic powers were, by all accounts, stupendous and the sharpness and penetration of his reflective powers, breathtaking. For many Thai Buddhists, Luang Pu Mun represents an utterly convincing proof that enlightenment exists and is attainable in this day and age.

Forest monks have never been absent from Thailand, but before Luang Pu Mun, they were usually scattered in small isolated communities that possessed little sense of being part of a wider tradition. These Sanghas tended to be centred around a charismatic teacher and rarely lasted long after his death. There are no records to tell us how many such groups have assembled and dispersed in the last seven hundred years. We will never know how many enlightened beings have come and gone. In the words of the Buddha himself, ‘Like birds crossing the sky, they leave no tracks.’

Luang Pu Mun, however, lived at the beginning of a more informed and connected age. Accounts of his practice and teachings have been recorded in a large number of books. Many fine training monasteries, which attract visitors and pilgrims from all over the country, have been established by his disciples throughout Isan. He may be an unfathomable figure to many, but he is not obscure in the way that great monks of an earlier generation will always remain. The high standards maintained by the monks of his lineage and the integrity and prowess of his greatest disciples have ensured that today there is a respect for forest monks that has not existed in the country since the Sukhothai period. It would be no exaggeration to say that the Thai Forest Tradition, as we know it, was established almost single-handedly by Luang Pu Mun.

During most of his lifetime, however, Luang Pu Mun was relatively unknown. Throughout his monastic life, he shunned fame and status as a pestilent disease. In 1928, while staying at Wat Chedi Luang, one of the oldest and most prestigious monasteries in Chiang Mai, he received a letter from the powers-that-be in Bangkok, informing him of his appointment as the monastery’s new abbot. Before long, he had gathered his possessions and disappeared into the mountains. It was another eleven years before he was seen in the city again.

Luang Pu Mun could be a fierce and exacting teacher (one of his famous scoldings would, in a senior disciple’s memorable phrase, ‘shrivel your liver’), but he inspired a quiet and intense devotion from those around him. One layman, whose life had been transformed by his contact with Luang Pu Mun, was then living at Khao Wongkot and it was he who first spoke of the great master to Luang Por. Apparently, Luang Pu Mun had finally returned to Isan after so many years of solitary wandering in the north of the country and a large group of monks had gathered around him in the Phu Phan Mountains of northern Isan. Monks of the Mahānikāya lineage were also receiving teachings. Luang Por’s plans for the cold season began to take shape.

At the end of the retreat, Luang Por, together with three other monks, a novice and two laymen, set off on the long walk back to Isan. They broke the journey at Bahn Kor, and after a few days rest, began the 240 kilometre hike northwards. By the tenth day, they had reached the elegant white stupa of That Phanom, a revered pilgrimage spot on the banks of the Mekong, and they paid homage to the Buddha’s relics enshrined within it. They continued their walk in stages, regularly finding forest monasteries along the way in which to spend the night. Even so, it was an arduous trek and the novice and one of the laymen asked to turn back. The group consisted of just three monks and a layman when they finally arrived at Wat Pah Nong Peu, the home of Luang Pu Mun.

As they walked into the monastery, Luang Por was immediately struck by its tranquil and secluded atmosphere. The central area, in which stood a small raised wooden Dhamma Hall, was immaculately swept, and the few monks they caught sight of were attending to their daily chores silently, with a measured and composed gracefulness. There was something about the monastery that was like no other that he had been in before – the silence was strangely charged and vibrant. Luang Por and his companions were received politely and, after being advised where to put up their glots, took a welcome opportunity to bathe away the grime of the road.

Luang Por was never to speak in any great detail about this first meeting which was to have such a monumental effect on his life. But for monks who have lived in the forest monasteries of Isan, it is a scene easy to imagine. The three young monks may be pictured with their double-layered outer robes folded neatly over their left shoulders, minds fluctuating between keen anticipation and cold fear, making their way through the gathering dusk to the wooden Dhamma Hall to pay respects to Luang Pu Mun. As he approaches the congregation of resident monks, Luang Por starts to crawl on his knees towards the great master. He approaches a slight and aged figure with an indomitable diamond-like presence. Luang Pu Mun’s deeply penetrating gaze bears into Luang Por as he bows three times and sits down at an appropriate distance.

Most of the resident monks are sitting with eyes closed in meditation, one slightly behind the teacher slowly fanning away the evening’s mosquitoes. As Luang Por glances up, he notices how prominently Luang Pu Mun’s collarbone juts through the pale skin above his robe and how his thin mouth, stained red from chewing betel nut, forms such an arresting contrast to the strange luminosity of his presence. As is the time-honoured custom amongst Buddhist monks, Luang Pu Mun first asks the visitors how long they have been in the robes, the monasteries they have practised in and the details of their journey. Did they have any doubts about the practice? Luang Por replies that he does.

It is at this point that he was later to take up the story himself. He said he had been studying the Vinaya texts with great enthusiasm but had become discouraged. The Discipline seemed too detailed to be practical; it didn’t seem possible to keep every single rule. What should one’s standard be? Luang Pu Mun listened in silence. Then he gave simple but practical advice. He advised Luang Por to take the ‘two guardians of the world’ – wise shame (hiri) and wise fear of consequences (ottappa) – as his basic principles. In the presence of those two virtues, he said, everything else would follow.

He then began to discourse on the threefold training of sīla, samādhi and paññā, the four roads to success and the five spiritual powers.[21] Eyes half closed, his voice became progressively stronger and faster as he proceeded, as if he was moving into a higher and higher gear. With an absolute authority, he described the ‘way things truly are’ and the path to liberation. Luang Por and his companions sat completely enrapt. Luang Por said that, although he had spent an exhausting day on the road, listening to Luang Pu Mun’s Dhamma talk made all of his weariness disappear. His mind became lucidly calm[22] and clear, and he felt as if he was floating in the air above his seat. It was late at night before Luang Pu Mun called the meeting to an end, and Luang Por returned to his glot, aglow.

On the second night, Luang Pu Mun gave more teachings, and Luang Por felt that he had come to the end of his doubts about the practice that lay ahead. He felt a joy and rapture in the Dhamma that he had never known before. Now what remained was for him to put his knowledge into practice. Indeed, one of the teachings that had inspired him the most on those two evenings was this injunction to make himself ‘a witness to the truth’. But the most clarifying explanation, one that gave him the necessary context or basis for practice that he had hitherto been lacking, was of a distinction between the mind itself and transient states of mind which arose and passed away within it.

Luang Pu Mun said they’re merely states. Through not understanding that point, we take them to be real, to be the mind itself. In fact, they’re all just transient states. As soon as he said that, things suddenly became clear. Suppose there’s happiness present in the mind: it’s a different kind of thing, it’s on a different level, to the mind itself. If you see that, then you can stop, you can put things down. When conventional realities are seen for what they are, then it’s ultimate truth. Most people lump everything together as the mind itself, but actually there are states of mind together with the knowing of them. If you understand that point, then there’s not a lot to do.

On the third day, Luang Por paid his respects to Luang Pu Mun and led his small group off into the lonely forests of Phu Phan once more. He left Nong Peu never to return again, but with his heart full of an inspiration that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Stillness Flowing 

The Life and Teaching of Ajahn Chah

Asceticism in Literature and Philosophy

The Habit of Indifference: Samuel Beckett

Saintly in appearance, Samuel Beckett, in his own squidlike way, could release a cloud of ink that today blurs his image, making it even more indecipherable than it was in his time. One of the myths that he fostered about his own life was the story that he had been born on Good Friday, and moreover, the day happened to be Friday the thirteenth (April 13, 1906), although diligent biographers have shown that his birth certificate indicates he was born in May of that year. His family owned its own pew at the Tullow Parish of the Church of Ireland; and while he took great Asceticism in Literature and Philosophy pains to distance himself from formal religion, he borrowed the idiom and rituals of the church and the tension of its various crises in the same way that Jean Genet, T. S. Eliot, Robert Musil, and many other great Modernists tapped these sources. The biblical text of greatest importance to Beckett is the book of Job, and the anecdotal progress of Dante, par- ticularly of the Inferno and Purgatorio, is a stylistic as well as emotional foundation for his theologically based musings.

Although they are not as widely known as the plays or even the novels, Beckett’s poems offer some of the most startling imagery of asceticism in his work. In “The Vulture,” from the volume Echo’s Bones, he describes the deathly bird “dragging his hunger through the sky / of my skull shell of sky and earth.”** This desert scene, like a lost passage from Eliot, takes us right to the themes of impoverishment and pain that haunt the later plays and fiction. In another lyric titled “La mouche,” Beckett sounds out the “musique de l’indifference” that, in a Mallarméan gesture, silences the lovers. Beckett invokes the same imagery in the poem “Alba” with the Mallarméan line “beyond the white plane of music.” That haunted wasteland that Beckett discovers in his poems and ten roams through in the novels and plays has baffled and inspired critics and philosophers for decades. Harold Bloom calls it “the beyond”: “Call it the silence, or the abyss, or the reality beyond the pleasure principle, or the metaphysical or spiritual reality of our existence at last exposed, be- yond further illusion. Beckett cannot or will not name it, but he has worked through to the art of representing it more persuasively than anyone else.”*” Writing about Endgame, T. W. Adorno notes that Beckett creates a “zone of indifference” regarding subjectivity and objectivity:

“All content of subjectivity, which necessarily hypostatitzes itself, is trace and shadow of the world, from which it withdraws in order not to serve that semblance and conformity the world demands.”** Adorno lowers himself into the canyons of Endgame on the ropes of Schopenhauer, Proust, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. “The aesthetic principium stilisationis does the same to humans. Thrown back completely upon themselves, subjects—anticosmism becomes flesh—consist in nothing other than the wretched realities of their world, shrivelled down to raw necessities; they are empty personae through which the world truly can only resound.”” The language of suffering is relentless in Beckett’s plays. Waiting for Godot invokes the cross, as well as the sheer brutality of the beatings in the ditch, the little instances of physical pain such as the cramp from shoes that are too tight or a hat that does not fit, or more pathetically, the sores around the neck of Lucky created by the rope by which he is dragged from place to place. The visual austerity and poverty of the characters is reflected in the setting, including the bare tree by Giacometti in the first Paris production, the moon which is full and fat (a spotlight in most productions), the bare stage, the ragged clothes, and that overall sense of exposure that makes an old hat all the more precious. These clowns or tramps are not by any means saints in the ethical sense. At one point they mean to rob the passing travelers. There is an abundance of sexual innuendo, including the constant running offstage to urinate, or worse. Mean-spirited, shifty, and deceitful, as entertainers they try to dupe the audience into the notion that the time of the performance is filled satisfactorily.

The novels explore this territory in what may be an even more painful way. The only way out of distress is the gradual wearing down of the senses, to the point of unconsciousness. In Malone Dies the absence of sensation is represented by the condition of being in a coma and by the almost active (as illogical as that sounds) reduction of sense data. “I shall be neutral and inert,” the narrator declares at the outset of the novel.” Even when the meals arrive according to a “time-tablé” (the measure of time being a very important image in all of Beckett), he occasionally shuns them. He is imprisoned, and as in the prison paintings of Peter Halley, the texture of prison life becomes the substance of the work. Like Robert Musil’s hero, Ulrich, Malone uses mathematics as a way to quantitatively amuse himself. “He made a practice, alone and in company, of mental arithmetic,” Beckett writes.

This focus on habit is a key factor in Beckett’s work. In his challenging and often revealing little book on Marcel Proust, Beckett came closer to declaring his aesthetic credo than in any other work. One of the most sigónificant ideas in Beckett’s study is the centrality of habit in the ongoing negotiations between the individual and the environment. As Beckett wrote, “Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals.” In terms of the ascetic way of life, its rhythms and rituals, this strikes a fundamental pitch. In the odd opening pages of Molloy, a writer’s miserable routine (“blackening” pages) and rag-tag physical appearance are reminiscent of a cross between the tattered old martyrs of Yeats and Melville’s Pierre or Bartleby (“He gives me money and takes away the pages”). He recounts the physical abuse he has suffered and the distress he habitually inflicts upon himself in his daily existence. Like the “vanishing” reader of Heidegger’s ideal, he is almost perfectly disguised: “I was perched higher than the road’s highest point and flattened what is more against a rock the same color as myself, that is grey.”** More than the ashen annihilation of color, the flattening of form and the elevation of perspective serve also to position Molly among the oddly indolent saints of Beckett’s canon. Only a few passages later, this character, who has the sculptural quality of an object, observes: “To restore silence is the role of objects” (p. 13). He eats “like a thrush,” and his various ailments leave him almost paralyzed. With a Baudelairean love of the night in which he can hide, he contemplates his own objecthood: “I was a solid in the midst of other solids” (p. 100). The narrator of Molloy uses a routine to fight his insomnia. It leads him into a desert labyrinth and complements the imagery of drowning and inundation. In the end, it brings us closer to the mind and voice of Beckett himself, lulling us to sleep in a strange pianissimo that could be set to music by Messiaen, choreographed by Cunningham, with sets, of course, by Giacometti: “I did as when I could not sleep. I wandered in my mind, slowly, nothing every detail of the labyrinth, its paths as familiar as those of my garden and yet ever new, as empty as the heart could wish or alive with strange encounters. And I heard the distant cymbals. There is still time, and still time. But there was not, for I ceased, all vanished and I tried once more to turn my thoughts to the Molloy affair. Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea” (p. 106).

Metaphysics in Retreat: Martin Heidegger

If Heidegger had pursued the career path that his parents had intended for him he would have become a Catholic priest. He ended up leading a monkish existence, clad in Alpine boots, on top of a hill near Todtnau in the Black Forest. A favorite anecdote among academics (particularly those who believe in the sanctity of office hours and sabbaticals) is the tale of Heidegger firing his gun over the head of a graduate student to keep him from cutting across his property and disturbing his isolation.

Against the onslaught of technology, nihilism, and obscure academic theories that had clouded the original questions philosophy is meant to address (generally Greek in origin, although Heidegger was also interested in Asian thought), Heidegger posed his own wonderfully literary, human, nostalgic question: What is Being? The opening pages of the English volume of essays known as Poetry, Language, Thought are devoted to a series of brief lyric poems collectively titled “The Thinker as Poet” (Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens). The “single pathway” of these poems is an austere, solitary road to the top of a mountain, where Heidegger, who feels we are too late for religion and too early for Being, as he conceives it, contemplates its apparition: “To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the word’s sky.”*? The poems celebrate the “splendor of the simple” in mountain wildflowers, butterflies on the meadow breezes, the path through the trees, the rays of the sun streaming down through the clouds, the pleasures of living in a cabin way above society. He is careful to bring in the element of privation: “Pain gives of its healing power where we least expect it.”** The close communion with the seasons guides the philosopher to a calm clarity: “In thinking all things become solitary and slow.”* Heidegger’s thought is pointed toward the revelatory experience of the “transcendental” or “ecstasy,” like that of Gould, and very different from that of Olivier Messiaen, Joan Miré, or even T. S. Eliot. While they induce the rhapsodist’s flight, through a suspension of analytic rigor, Heidegger and Gould pushed their introspective interpretations to the level of creativity. One of the most revealing passages in Heidegger related to ecstasy and its aesthetic roots is found in the study of Nietzsche, which began as a series of lectures at Freiburg during the winter of 1936-37. Heidegger soars past Nietzsche’s aesthetic rapture into a description of “attunement”:
Rapture is feeling, an embodying attunement, an embodied being that is contained in attunement, attunement woven into embodiment. But attunement lays open Dasein as an enhancing, conducts it into the plenitude of its capacities, which mutually arouse one another and foster enhancement.
But while clarifying rapture as a state of feeling we emphasized more than one that we may not take such a state as something at hand “in” the body and “in” the psyche. Rather, we must take it as a mode of the embodying, attuned stance toward beings as a whole, a stance which for its part determines the pitch of the attunement.”* To gain an appreciation of how Heidegger attains this elusive “stance” from which the apprehension of Being becomes possible, let’s consider his reading habits. He had an approach to poetry that enabled him to address his ontological questions in the uniquely lyrical style that has vanquished so many translators and explicators since his time. The secret goal that Heidegger kept in mind as a reader is a kind of self-effacement that permits the poem to radiate its own meanings without interference.

As he writes, “The final, but at the same time the most difficult step of every exposition consists in vanishing away together with its explanations in the face of the pure existence of the poem.”*’ This is more than an act of Socratic restraint or academic politesse. It sets up an ascetic morality of reading. Despite all that has been made lately of the highly personal (on the brink of egomaniacal) strain of literary criticism, the strict application of Heidegger’s principle takes as its premise the effacement the reader’s agenda. He was also an advocate of the stillness of the wise participant in his dialogue on language, which invokes his powerful interest in Buddhism and Japanese aesthetics, he sets up a scene in which an “Inquirer” encounters a Japanese scholar (the occasion for the dialogue was the actual visit to Freiburg in 1953 of a certain Professor Tezuka of the Imperial University in Tokyo). Their colloquy, interrupted by long meditative pauses, touches not only on the differences between Western and Japanese perceptions of language but on aesthetics, the No theater, and the film Rashomon. The Japanese scholar demonstrates the way in which a No actor conjures a mountain scene, slowly raising and opening his hand. Asked what the “essence” of the gesture evokes, he ex- plains: “In a beholding that is itself invisible, and that, so gathered, bears itself to encounter emptiness in such a way that in and through it the mountains appear.” The Westerner, perfectly attuned, completes the thought without missing a beat: “That emptiness then is the same as nothingness, that essential being which we attempt to add in our thinking as the other, to all that is present and absent.” At the core of Heidegger’s masterpiece, Being and Time, there is a passage on silence that is arguably one of the great ascetic statements in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Bearing in mind the “death-centered” nature of Heidegger’s conception of Being, which relates its wholeness in death, the symbolic importance of one who keeps silent in dialogue is chilling, reminding us of the potency of the long silences in Elliott Carter’s string quartets. As a writer and thinker, Heidegger validates an economy of discourse in this passage, requiring the type of self-restraint that was noted in the dialogue on language. In his eyes, the protracted excess of words make clarity impossible, while silence bears the possibility of revealing:

Keeping silent is another essential possibility of discourse, and it has the same existential foundation. In talking with one another, the person who keeps silent can “make one understand” (that is, he can develop an understanding), and he can do so more authentically than the person who is never short of words. Speaking at length [ Viel-sprechen] about something does not offer the slightest guarantee that thereby understanding is advanced. On the contrary, talking extensively about something, covers it up and brings what is understood to a sham clarity—the unintelligibility of the trivial.” As the paragraph continues, Heidegger raises the stakes by distinguishing between merely rhetorical reticence and the deeper, meaningful, and “authentic” silence of the sort of attunement observed earlier. There is a discernible shift in this passage from the mode in which a person is speaking or keeping silent to a condition in which Dasein (“Being- there”) is communicating (“Dasein must have something to say”):

But to keep silent does not mean to be dumb. On the contrary, if a man is dumb, he still has a tendency to “speak.” Such a person has not proved that he can keep silence; indeed, he entirely lacks the possibility of proving anything of the sort. And the person who is accustomed by Nature to speak little is no better able to show that he is keeping silent or that he is the sort of person who can do so. He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment. Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say—that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one’s reticence [Verschwiegenheit] makes something manifest, and does away with “idle talk” [Gerede]. As a mode of dis- coursing, reticence articulates the intelligibility of Dasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a potentiality-for-hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-with-one-another which is transparent.”” For Heidegger, “clarity” is a supreme virtue, and nothing could be clearer than the transparency in which this “Being with-one-another” possible by silence. The problem is finding a language with which to discuss Dasein, which in a sense confirms Heidegger’s hunch that “silence is most noble in the end.” As Richard Rorty has ventured to suggest, there is a linguistic brink that cannot be comfortably crossed: “We do not need to ask which understandings of Being are better understandings. To ask that question would be to begin replacing love with power.”” The poetry coming down from the mountain begins to echo and break up in the valley below. Heidegger labored to rescue Dasein from what Nietzsche had called the “pale, cold, gray concept nets” of philosophy and went on to try nostalgically to protect Dasein from the encroachments of technology. Ironically, because Heidegger had deep-seated reservations about the spread of technology even in his age, with the growth of the Internet, Heidegger’s terminology is a fashionable resource, constantly raided by cyber-philosophers like Ernesto Grassi and Geert Lovink, whose Metaphysics of Virtual Reality portrays Heidegger as one who projected possibilities in the giddy way that devoted Netjunkies rhapsodize about. Much of this is far from the cold, clear atmosphere of Heidegger on his mountaintop, gripping with all his strength the scythe that made a clearing in which Dasein could be at home.

Baroque of the Void: Robert Musil

Unjustifiably neglected for decades in the English-only literary world, Robert Musil reemerged recently thanks to a new translation of his classic The Man without Qualities. The lead character in The Man without Qualities, Ulrich, is a scientist and amateur philosopher, just like Musil himself, who was born in a small town called Klagenfurt in Austria in 1880. After a brief stint of military service, he became a writer. He split his life between Vienna and Berlin until, afraid that the Nazis would ban his fiction, he moved to Switzerland in 1938. Desperately poor, he never finished his materwork (it was published in part nine years after his death in 1942).
Musil used Ulrich to show how he “realizes to his astonishment that reality is at least one hundred years behind what is happening in thought.” In his diaries, Musil brooded on the possibility of a new order, of “mind taking charge of the world” (geistige Bewatigung der Welt). His reading in Novalis, Emerson, and Husserl- is evident in this anthithetical stance, as are his literary tastes, which ran to Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, D’Annunzio, Verlaine, Rilke, and the ubiquitous Poe. Ulrich lives in a “dainty little white gem of a house” that has the cloistral touch of being both book-lined on the inside and surrounded by the “fine green filter of the garden air” on the outside. The reader usually finds Ulrich watching life through a window, keeping a muffling medium being himself and the world. We first meet him in the novel playing a weird little mathematical game, daydreaming with a stopwatch in his hand while he counts the traffic going by and attempts to calculate the unquantifiable busyness of the world. His mathematical reverie is an attempt at transcendence that take the place of theology, striving toward the kind of perfection that, sadly, often means inaction. He is mysteriously described as a “man returning after years of absence,” yet as the determined reader will find out through the course of the next 1,700 pages or so, Ulrich rarely emerges from what he later calls the “Baroque of the Void.” He moves through the scenes like a shadow, attuned to the “inner acoustics of emptiness,” replying to the “yes” of Joyce’s Ulysses with a deep, resonating pizzicato cello note of “no.” This indifference sets up an outer shell that protects the inner emptiness, leaving Ulrich in a state of paralysis, or “pseudoreality,” with a “passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled.” Ulrich extols the “masters of the inner hovering life,” looking ahead to the only genuinely happy period in his existence, when, sitting quietly with his sister Agathe in the home of his deceased father (a scene that is filled with the tension of impending incest, not unlike the kind found in the work of two other Modern Austrian masters, Georg Trakl and Thomas Bernhard), he reads the lives of the saints in search of what he calls a “sensible asceticism.” The “masters” are not specifically Christian or Buddhist: “Their domain lies be- tween religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry. They are saints without religion, and sometimes they are also simply men on an adventure who have gone astray.” Out of this, Ulrich temporarily fashions a credo that takes into account the split of morality into mathematics and mysticism and that feeds the “alchemist’s fire glimmering behind the moral injunctions, no domestication of evil” (1:836-—37).
These saints recur subtly and yet regularly through the novel. The powerful businessman turned statesman, Arnheim, collects Baroque and Gothic sculptures of Catholic martyrs in twisted poses of torture and death that remind him of ecstasy and give him a feeling of “horrified amazement.” As Ulrich contemplates the difference between the mystical experiences of antiquity or the Middle Ages and the Modern age, he realizes that metaphysics has lost credibility. In a memorable sentence, Musil observes through Ulrich:

And while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of all the traditional, terminological husks of faith, freed from ancient religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn. (1:603)

As with the practical Arnheim, who defines even his happiness against the limits of propriety, legitimacy, and reality, Ulrich is after a moment of simplicity and clarity. To Arnheim, “at peak moments of perception, one senses how the cosmos turns on an axis of vertical austerity” (1:548).
That axis presents a stark contrast to the luxurious, overactive exterior of Arnheim’s wealth and business. The Proustian lush life of Musil’s characters is spent in posh, if comfortless, world of titled aristocrats mixing with social-climbing industrialists in Vienna’s better residences. When Ulrich fires every bullet from a revolver’s chamber into a piano that Agathe, his sister, is playing, Musil takes pains to indicate that it is a very good, “expensive” piano that is destroyed. The luxurious state in which they live is at odds with the selfless intentions (pretensions) they bear and the intellectual asceticism they use to force the “paling” of their drives and desires to keep them under control. Musil peers into the cells of his meditating monks—the boudoir of Bonadea, the music room of Clarisse, the bed- room of Ulrich, or the office of the General, outside of which a red light is lit over the door to indicate that he is not to be disturbed. The reader eavesdrops on their private forays into spiritual questions behind Musil, who drills deep into these characters’ soul-searching and then, reversing the drill deftly at chapter’s ends, extricates his narrative line without damaging the structure.

The imagery of Heraclitean fire in the work is significant, particularly as it leaves the ascetic residue of ashes or cinders. When, at last Ulrich and his sister do allow their relationship to become more physical, it is described (vaguely) in terms of their plunging into fire. Until then, as Musil writes, “Love and asceticism stand apart in their lonely kinship.

How aimless this pair appears, how devoid of a target, compared with the aims and targets of normal life” (1:610). Against fire, Musil poses the habitual cold of Ulrich. In an early diary entry, Musil observed: “Around me there is organic solution, I rest as if under a covering of ice, one hundred meters thick.”*? Arnheim, too, is locked in ice. Staring at his Black servant, Soliman, thinking of his sterile relationship with Diotima, he realizes that “at the very summit of his life, a cold shadow separated him from everything he had ever touched.”** A moment later, realizing that Ulrich too lived in such a selfless shadow but more comfortably—which Arnheim ascribes to an aversion to acquisitiveness—Arnheim recasts the barrier as “an almost imperceptible skin of ice” (1:597). Arnheim thinks that there is “something missing” in the younger— the sort of thing one might say about a eunuch.

The stunningly powerful ending to the novel’s “Pseudo-Reality Prevails” section is a late-night walk home that brings Ulrich face-to-face with the relationship between inner and outer. As he progresses from narrow to wide street and open squares, he is struck by the “foreshortening of the mind’s perspective” that allows visual relationships to be presented in a coherent picture, and he relates this to his own gift for a kind of necessary “abstraction” in the creation of narrative order. Throughout the novel, Ulrich has stopped conversations cold with his “stories,” and now he notes that the mathematical order or thread of narrative allows him to hold the world at bay. On the way home he is stopped by a prostitute and gives her the money she would have demanded for sex. Then he reaches home, abstemious to the last, where he is surprised to find the lights blazing, a telegram informing him of the death of his father, and his best friend’s wife throwing herself at him. But she too is rejected despite momentarily arousing him. These twin denials in close order underscore the ascetic strength of Ulrich. As dawn approaches and he slips into “a painless state of exhaustion that changed his total sense of his body,” he notices how his solitude has deepened. He takes in the cool air of morning and returns to “civilized European” precision with a bath and vigorous exercise session (2:725).
For Ulrich, love becomes a kind of anesthetized “antireality” on the same plane as the other psychological exercises (like the counting games that figure so prominently not only in Musil’s work but in the novels of Thomas Bernhard as well). Even when Ulrich and his sister are lying side by side, making a “constellation” (recalling Miro and Mallarmé), they are paralyzed. Lying on their stomachs outside watching one ant murder another, having one of their protracted discussions about the Annunciation, bliss, love, and death, they hover over making love or trying to commit suicide. Ulrich advises his sister:

Try to take it metaphorically. You don’t even have to rush to give it a particular significance: just take its own! Then it becomes like a breath of air, or the sulfurous smell of readiness for dissolution tremble. I can imagine that one could even get over one’s own death amicably, but only because one dies just once and therefore regards it as especially important; because the understanding of saints and heroes is pretty lacking in glory in the face of nature’s constant small confusions and their dissonances! (2:1396)

THE SAINTS OF MODERN ART
Charles A. Riley II 

The body in Dhamma

 “Now, Aggivessana, this body that has material form consists of the four great entities (of earth, water, fire, and air); it is procreated by a mother and father and built up out of rice and bread; it is subject to impermanence, to anointing and rubbing, to dissolution and disintegration. It must be regarded as impermanent, as suffering, as a boil, as a dart, as a calamity, as an affliction, as alien, as disintegrating, as void, as not self. When he regards it so, he abandons his desire and affection for it and his habit of treating it as the necessary basis for all his inferences.¹

¹ “Habit of treating it (the physical body) as the basis for all his inferences” (kāyanvayatā) refers to the way of thinking which assumes the physical body as the basic reality, the empirical truth, and builds its system upon that (materialism, in fact, the physiological view of mind, or the view of consciousness as an “epiphenomenon” upon matter). Both this standpoint and the opposite, which treats matter as subordinate to mind, are discussed at the beginning of
MN. 36.

“If anyone says, ‘The body is self,’ that is not tenable. The rise and fall of the body are discerned, and since its rise and fall are discerned, it would follow: ‘My self rises and falls.’ That is why it is not tenable for anyone to say, ‘The body is self.’ Thus the body is not self. MN 148

“Bhikkhus, this body is not yours, nor does it belong to others. It is old action, to be seen as generated and fashioned by volition, as something to be felt. Therein, bhikkhus, the instructed noble disciple attends carefully and closely to dependent origination itself thus: ‘When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases. That is, with ignorance as condition, determinations [come  to be]; with determinations as condition, consciousness; with consciousness as condition, name-and-form; with name-and-form as condition, the six sense bases; with the six sense bases as condition, contact; with contact as condition, feeling; with feeling as condition, craving; with craving as condition, clinging; with clinging as condition, existence; with existence as condition, birth; with birth as condition, aging-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair come to be. Such is the origin of this whole mass of suffering.

“But with the remainderless fading away and cessation of ignorance comes cessation of determinations; with the cessation of determinations, cessation of consciousness; with the cessation of consciousness, cessation of name-and-form; with the cessation of name-and-form, cessation of the six sense bases; with the cessation of the six sense bases, cessation of contact; with the cessation of contact, cessation of feeling; with the cessation of feeling, cessation of craving; with the cessation of craving, cessation of clinging; with the cessation of clinging, cessation of existence; with the cessation of existence, cessation of birth; with the cessation of birth, aging-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair cease. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering.” SN 12:37
“Bhikkhus, what do you think? Is material form permanent or impermanent?”—“Impermanent, venerable sir.”—“Is what is impermanent suffering or happiness?”—“Suffering, venerable sir.”—“Is what is impermanent, suffering, and subject to change, fit to be regarded thus: ‘This is mine, this I am, this is my self’?”—“No, venerable sir.” (...) “Therefore, bhikkhus, any kind of material form whatever, whether past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near, all material form should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’ (...)

“Therefore, bhikkhus, whatever is not yours, abandon it; when you have abandoned it, that will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time. What is it that is not yours? Material form is not yours. Abandon it. When you have abandoned it, that will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time. Feeling is not yours. Abandon it. When you have abandoned it, that will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time. Perception is not yours. Abandon it. When you have abandoned it, that will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time. Determinations are not yours. Abandon them. When you have abandoned them, that will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time. Consciousness is not yours. Abandon it. When you have abandoned it, that will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time.

“Bhikkhus, what do you think? If people carried off the grass, sticks, branches, and leaves in this Jeta Grove, or burned them, or did what they liked with them, would you think: ‘People are carrying us off or burning us or doing what they like with us’?”—“No, venerable sir. Why not? Because that is neither our self nor what belongs to our self.”—“So too, bhikkhus, whatever is not yours, abandon it; when you have abandoned it, that will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time. What is it that is not yours? Material form is not yours…Feeling is not yours…Perception is not yours…Determinations are not yours…Consciousness is not yours. Abandon it. When you have abandoned it, that will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time. MN 22

Then the Venerable Sāriputta approached the Blessed One, paid homage to him, and sat down to one side. The Blessed One then said to him:

“Sāriputta, I can teach the Dhamma briefly; I can teach the Dhamma in detail; I can teach the Dhamma both briefly and in detail. It is those who can understand that are rare.”
“It is the time for this, Blessed One. It is the time for this, Fortunate One. The Blessed One should teach the Dhamma briefly; he should teach the Dhamma in detail; he should teach the Dhamma both briefly and in detail. There will be those who can understand the Dhamma.”

“Therefore, Sāriputta, you should train yourselves thus: (1) ‘There will be no I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit in regard to this conscious body; (2) there will be no I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit in regard to all external objects; and (3) we will enter and dwell in that liberation of mind, liberation by wisdom, through which there is no more I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit for one who enters and dwells in it.’ It is in this way, Sāriputta, that you should train yourselves.

“When, Sāriputta, a bhikkhu has no I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit in regard to this conscious body; when he has no I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit in regard to all external objects; and when he enters and dwells in that liberation of mind, liberation by wisdom, through which there is no more I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit for one who enters and dwells in it, he is called a bhikkhu who has cut off craving, stripped off the fetter, and, by completely breaking through conceit, has made an end of suffering. And it was with reference to this that I said in the Pārāyana, in ‘The Questions of Udaya’:

“The abandoning of both
sensual perceptions and dejection;
the dispelling of dullness,
the warding off of remorse;
“purified equanimity and mindfulness
preceded by reflection on the Dhamma:
this, I say, is emancipation by final knowledge,
the breaking up of ignorance.”
AN 3:33

Just as a woman or a man—young, youthful, and fond of ornaments, with head bathed—would be repelled, humiliated, and disgusted if the carcass of a snake, a dog, or a human being were slung around her or his neck; so too, Bhante, I am repelled, humiliated, and disgusted by this foul body. (...) Just as a person might carry around a cracked and perforated bowl of liquid fat that oozes and drips; so too, Bhante, I carry around this cracked and perforated body that oozes and drips. AN 9 : 11

Boil
“Bhikkhus, suppose there was a boil many years old. It would have nine wound orifices, nine natural orifices. Whatever would flow out from them would be impure, foul-smelling, and disgusting. Whatever would ooze out from them would be impure, foul-smelling, and disgusting.

“‘A boil,’ bhikkhus, is a designation for this body consisting of the four great elements, originating from mother and father, built up out of rice and gruel, subject to impermanence, to kneading and abrasion, to breaking apart and dispersal. It has nine wound orifices, nine natural orifices. Whatever flows out from them is impure, foul-smelling, and disgusting. Whatever oozes out from them is impure, foul-smelling, and disgusting. Therefore, bhikkhus, become disenchanted with this body.” AN 9 : 15
***
The mistake is to approach consciousness by way of the body . But rational science, being essentially the study of what is public, namely matter, has no alternative. The laws of science are the laws of matter, and if these laws are universal then consciousness (whatever it may be) must necessarily be subordinate to matter. What science overlooks, and cannot help overlooking, is the fact that in order to know the body it is first necessary to be conscious of it—the body is an object (amongst other objects) of consciousness, and to seek to investigate consciousness by way of the body, instead of the other way round, is to put the cart before the horse. Consciousness comes first, and if it is to be known it must be studied directly (that is to say, by immediate reflexion). This matter has been stated clearly by J.-P . Sartre, who, in his principal work dealing with consciousness, writes more than 250 pages out of a total of 700 before mentioning the body at all. This is what he says.

Perhaps some may be surprised that we have treated the problem of knowing without raising the question of the body and of the senses and even once referring to it. It is not my purpose to misunderstand or to ignore the role of the body. But what is important above all else, in ontology as elsewhere, is to observe strict order in discussion. Now the body, whatever may be its function, appears first as the known. We cannot therefore refer knowledge back to it, or discuss it before we have defined knowing, nor can we derive knowing in its fundamental structure from the body in any way or manner whatsoever. (EN, pp. 270-1; B&N, p. 218)

And Sartre goes on to point out that whatever knowledge we have about our own body is derived in the first place from seeing other people’s bodies. As a doctor this will be evident to you—you know about the structure of your own heart not from having dissected it but from having dissected other people’s bodies in your student days.

Knowledge of our own body is thus very indirect, and this is particularly true of the nervous system. (...)

But the Suttas put consciousness first and the body a bad second, for reasons that I hope to have made clear; and it is to be expected that statements about consciousness will be complex and those about the body simple. Nanavira Thera
*
M: Is it not important to you to know whether you are a mere body, or something else? Or, maybe nothing at all? Don’t you see that all your problems are your body’s problems — food, clothing, shelter, family, friends, name, fame, security, survival — all these lose their meaning the moment you realise that you may not be a mere body.
*
Q: Within the field of your consciousness there is your body also.
M: Of course. But the idea 'my body', as different from other bodies, is not there. To me it is 'a body', not 'my body', 'a mind', not 'my mind'. The mind looks after the body all right, I need not interfere. What needs be done is being done, in the normal and natural way.
*
Q: Why do desires arise at all?
M: Because you imagine that you were born, and that you will die if you do not take care of your body. Desire for embodied existence is the root-cause of trouble.
*
Q: But can one step out of the world?
M: Who was born first, you or the world? As long as you give first place to the world, you are bound by it; once you realise, beyond all trace of doubt that the world is in you and not you in the world, you are out of it. Of course your body remains in the world and of the world, but you are not deluded by it.
*
What makes you come here is your being displeased with your life as you know it, the life of your body and mind. You may try to improve them, through controlling and bending them to an ideal, or you may cut the knot of self-identification altogether and look at your body and mind as something that happens without committing you in any way.
*
Q: You said the body defines the outer self. Since you have a body, do you have also an outer self?
M: I would, were I attached to the body and take it to be myself.
Q: But you are aware of it and attend to its needs.
M: The contrary is nearer to truth — the body knows me and is aware of my needs. But neither is really so. This body appears in your mind; in my mind nothing is.
Q: Do you mean to say you are quite unconscious of having a body?
M: On the contrary, I am conscious of not having a body.
*
The 'I' and 'mine', having no existence in themselves, need a support which they find in the body. The body becomes their point of reference. When you talk of 'my' husband and 'my' children, you mean the body's husband and the body's children. Give up the idea of being the body and face the question: Who am l? At once a process will be set in motion which will bring back reality, or, rather, will take the mind to reality. Only, you must not be afraid.
Q: What am I to be afraid of?
M: For reality to be, the ideas of 'me' and 'mine' must go. They will go if you let them. Then your normal natural state reappears, in which you are neither the body nor the mind, neither the 'me’ nor the 'mine', but in a different state of being altogether. It is pure awareness of being, without being this or that, without any self-identification with anything in particular, or in general. In that pure light of consciousness there is nothing, not even the idea of nothing. There is only light.
*
Coming back to the idea of having been born. You are stuck with what your parents told you: all about conception, pregnancy and birth, infant, child, youngster, teenager, and so on. Now, divest yourself of the idea that you are the body with the help of the contrary idea that you are not the body. It is also an idea, no doubt; treat it like something to be abandoned when its work is done.

M - Nissrgadatta Maharaj 

The Foundations of the Monastic Life: A Presentation of the Practice of Stillness

Introduction

Evagrius wrote two treatises concerned primarily with the earliest stages of monastic training, the Foundations and Eulogios. This first text takes as its central theme the practice of stillness or hesychia.1 As Evagrius uses the term, hesychia refers to both the exterior and interior stillness that the monk must continually cultivate, for it can so easily be disrupted or lost. Both in his choice of physical space and in his regulation of his own interior space, the monk seeks for the state of perfect tranquillity that will allow him to devote himself single-mindedly to the practice of contemplation. For Evagrius, being a monk and living in true hesychia are virtually the same thing. The text of the Foundations therefore is devoted to a discussion of the necessary conditions for the cultivation of stillness and the hazards to be avoided in preserving it.

The first prerequisite is to withdraw from society in order to take up the solitary life (i—3).2 This involves the renunciation of marriage with its attendant worries and distractions. Through an allegorical reading of a citation from Jeremiah (16: 1—4), Evagrius aligns the Pauline anxieties and cares of the world suffered by the married (i Cor. 7: 32—4) with the thoughts and desires of the flesh. Anyone who remains bound to these cannot attain eternal life. The monk therefore abstains from marriage, renounces the thoughts and desires of the flesh, and leaves behind all material concerns of this world. Evagrius here associates the practice of monastic hesychia with the long-established tradition of ascetic virginity.

Even the biblical verses he cites have an established history in this context.3 Secondly, the monk must adopt a style of life that is simple and free of all unnecessary distractions. This means a plain and frugal diet, even taking into account the obligations of hospitality (3). Possessions and physical comforts must be reduced to the essentials required for basic subsistence (4—5). Almsgiving is not an excuse for the accumulation of wealth.

Clothing is to be kept to the minimum necessary, with any surplus to be given to others in need. Servants should be considered an unnecessary distraction and a possible source of scandal in the case of a serving-boy.

Thirdly, the monk should exercise great caution in his human relationships. To preserve stillness, the monk will choose to live alone or only with like-minded brothers, avoiding any associations with people who are material-minded and involved in business affairs. Family bonds present their own dangers. Meetings with relatives should be avoided, and the monk needs to free himself from any preoccupation with his affection or worry for parents and relatives (5). Taking careful stock of his circumstances the monk must decide whether or not they are conducive to stillness and, if not, he should accept voluntary exile. The city is a dangerous place and is to be shunned as offering nothing of value to the monk's way of life. The remoteness of the desert is presented as the ideal location for the cultivation of stillness (6). But there too the monk needs to be careful about frequent encounters with the brothers, and he must choose friends carefully, spiritual friends who will aid him in his progress. Invitations to eat with a brother may be accepted on occasion, but the monk should never be away from his cell for long (7—8). Manual labour is an essential practice in the monastic life, undertaken so that the monk will not be a burden to anyone and may have some surplus to assist others in need. In thus eschewing laziness, the monk averts the danger of acedia and overcomes desires. But at some point the monk must sell the produce of his manual labour, thus involving him in the commerce of the nearby villages or towns. In the course of selling his produce or buying necessities, the monk might get caught up in the haggling over prices and the disputes that might follow. It was considered preferable to have someone else go to market on the monk's behalf (8).

Finally, Evagrius turns his attention to the ascetic exercises that will establish stillness in the monk's heart. Above all the monk must cultivate an interior attitude of compunction through meditation on death, judge-ment, heaven and hell, calling to mind the good things that lie in store for the just and the punishments that will be meted out to sinners (9). Fasting is recommended as a central ascetic practice that will purify the soul and drive away the demons, but fasting may be relaxed in giving or receiving hospitality or in the case of sickness (i o). Prayer should be offered always •with an attitude of vigilance and humility, remembering that the demons will make every effort to render prayer ineffectual (ii).

There is very little in this short introductory pamphlet on the monastic life that can be recognized as teaching specific to Evagrius. The astute reader might perhaps recognize the reference to 'the kingdom of heaven and the righteousness of God' at the end of Foundations 4 as a veiled allusion to the practical and the gnostic life, for Evagrius himself offers that interpretation in Prayer 39.4 The seven references in the treatise to the importance of being free from all attachments to 'materiality' of any kind5 may suggest the Evagrian concern that the ascetic progressively divest himself, insofar as possible, of all material attachments in order that he might attain impassibility and prepare himself for pure or immaterial prayer.6 Apart from these well-concealed references to his teaching, Evagrius presents in this treatise the common teaching of the desert tradition. This same teaching would again enter the written record within the next century in the first collections of Apophthegmata Patrum7

1 See the discussion of hesychia and Foundations in A. Guillaumont, 'Les fondements de la
vie monastique selon Evagre le Pontique', Annuaire du College de France, 78 (1977—8), 467—77;
'Un philosophe au desert: Evagre le Pontique', Revue de I'Histoire des Religions, 181 (1972),
29—56 [Origines 12: 185—212].

2 The numbers in brackets refer to the sections of the text.

3 i Cor.7 in particular was a well-known locus classicus for patristic writers wishing to argue the merits of celibacy. See Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 106—7, 259~329-

4 'In your prayer seek only righteousness and the kingdom, that is, virtue and knowledge, and all the rest "will be added unto you" (Matt. 6: 33).'

5 Foundations 2.125365—As a soldier of Christ the monk must be 'freed from matter and from anxieties'; 2. 1253610, 'He has abandoned all material concerns of the world';3. 125307—He is told to 'stand free of material concerns and the passions, beyond all desire'; 5. 1256010—ii5yA5. He is to avoid living "with people "who are 'material-minded' and should either live alone or 'with brothers who are free of material concerns'. The one who chooses to live '"with material-minded people' risks, among other things, 'madness over material things'.

6 Prayer 66, 'Approach the Immaterial immaterially and you will attain understanding';119, 'Blessed is the mind which becomes immaterial and free from all things during the time of prayer'; 145, 'One still entangled in sins and occasions of anger, "who shamelessly dares to aspire to the knowledge of more divine things or who even embarks on immaterial prayer, let him receive the rebuke of the Apostle.'
7 See e.g. the teaching on hesychia in the Apophthegmata Patrum, Alphabetical Collection, (...)

Evagrius of Pontus
The Greek Ascetic Corpus
Translation, Introduction, and Commentary by
ROBERT E. SINKEWICZ