I am glad to hear that you have managed to make something of Ulysses after all. Your reaction to the book (a feeling of sadness) is appropriate and shows that you have not misread it; but surely the sympathy you feel for the ageing Molly Bloom should be extended to Mr. Bloom himself (and, in a lesser degree, to most of the other characters)? Bloom has lost his first-born son, Rudi, and this had affected his relations with his wife: he himself says somewhere that he is now less happy than he used to be in earlier days.

Actually, when I first read the book, it was not so much the ageing of the characters that affected me as the ultimate meaninglessness and futility of all their actions and aspirations. They are busy, all of them, seeking their immediate satisfactions and avoiding their immediate discomforts; and everything that they do -- whether it is making money, making music, making love, or simply making water -- is quite pointless -- in terms, that is to say, of an ultimate purpose or meaning in life.

At the time I read it -- when I was about twenty -- I had already suspected (from my reading of Huxley and others) that there is no point in life, but this was still all rather abstract and theoretical. But Ulysses gets down to details, and I found I recognized myself, mutatis mutandis, in the futile occupations that fill the days of Joyce's characters. And so I came to understand that all our actions, from the most deliberate to the most thoughtless, and without exception, are determined by present pleasure and present pain. Even what we pompously call our 'duty' is included in this law -- if we do our duty, that is only because we should feel uncomfortable if we neglected it, and we seek to avoid discomfort. Even the wise man, who renounces a present pleasure for the sake of a greater pleasure in the future, obeys this law -- he enjoys the present pleasure of knowing (or believing) that he is providing for his future pleasure, whereas the foolish man, preferring the present pleasure to his future pleasure, is perpetually gnawed with apprehension about his future. And when I had understood this, the Buddha's statement,

Pubbe cáham bhikkhave etarahi ca dukkhañ c'eva paññápemi dukkhassa ca nirodham

Both now and formerly, monks, it is just suffering that I make known and the ceasing of suffering,

(M. 22: i,140), came to seem (when eventually I heard it) the most obvious thing in the world -- 'What else' I exclaimed 'could the Buddha possibly teach?'

Had I delayed my return here for a few more days I should have missed a rare experience these times in Ceylon (though perhaps still common enough in India) -- a fine foul corpse. After my early dána this morning one of the villagers came to tell me that a man had been killed in the jungle by an elephant on Monday (5th) and that now, two days later (7th), his body had been found -- should I like to go and see it? So, together with Ven. S., I went.

The body was lying in the jungle about a mile and a half from here, and about three hundred yards from the metalled road. The corpse was covered with kajans when we got there, but one arm, rather swollen, was exposed. On it, evidently at the site of a wound, was a heap of small maggots. The kajans were removed, but the head was covered with a blood-stained cloth. Taking a stick, I raised the cloth and pushed it back. The head, which was partly crushed, was seething with maggots, much larger than those on the arm. The face, what could be seen of it under the maggots, was quite unrecognizable, and the jawbone was protruding to one side. There was no hair on the head, and the maggots appeared to be crawling on the skull. The Visuddhimagga (Ch. VI) describes this kind of corpse as follows:

There is a worm-infested corpse when at the end of two or three days a mass of maggots oozes out from the corpse's nine orifices,[a] and the mass lies there like a heap of paddy or boiled rice as big as the body, whether the body is that of a dog, a jackal, a human being, an ox, a buffalo, an elephant, a horse, a python, or what you will. It can be brought to mind with respect to any one of these as 'Repulsiveness of the worm-infested, repulsiveness of the worm-infested'. ...Here the learning sign (uggaha-nimitta) appears as though moving; but the counterpart sign (patibhága-nimitta) appears quiet, like a ball of boiled rice. (p. 198)

There is still no rain here, but this bright weather suits me well.




[L. 115]   1 May 1965

I am sorry to hear about your renal colic. I believe it can be extremely painful -- so much so that morphia is inadequate and the victim has to be given chloroform. Having once been threatened with something like this, I have taken good care to drink plenty of liquid, enough to keep my urine more or less colourless.

Yes, it is a dangerous thing indeed to possess a body. So long as we have it we are at the mercy of violent and prolonged sufferings of one kind or another. You now have direct experience of the fact that the possession of a genito-urinary tract is very much of a mixed blessing. Suppose you had to pay for the pleasures in bed that you can get from it with a monthly attack of renal colic -- would you think it a price worth paying? And yet the majority of women don't seem to be put off their pleasures by the prospect of childbirth, which, I believe, is no less painful than renal colic. Perhaps if the pleasure and the pain came together we might think twice before indulging ourselves. It is no wonder that the Buddha said 'One who lays down this body and takes hold of another body, he I say is blameworthy' (M. 144: iii,266 & KAMMA [b]).

I have just been given the English translation of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). About five hundred pages. It should keep me occupied for some time.




[L. 116]   29 May 1965

I am glad to hear that you have recovered your health and are no longer standing uncomfortably undecided with one foot in the bath and one on the bath mat. To have one ailment is bad enough; to have two is worse; but when they require contrary treatment it can be infuriating. For the past month I have been busy with Heidegger, and it will still take me two or three weeks to reach the end. But he is really first class: once I can discover through his rather difficult language (which translation does not make any easier) what he is actually saying then I find him beautifully perspicacious. Sartre has criticized him in many places (though he is very greatly indebted to him), but I now find that nearly always Heidegger is in the right (naturally, within the limits of the puthujjana's field).

In a general way, if I had to name any single Western philosopher who could profitably be read as affording a way of approach to the Buddha's Teaching, I would choose Heidegger (but not in his later writings -- only Being and Time). I do not mean that the Buddha's Teaching is a continuation or development of Heidegger's; by no means; but rather that Heidegger clears the ground for all those misconceptions that can be cleared away -- indeed must be cleared away, if they are present -- before a start can be made on the Suttas.

Of course, I now find it not so excessively difficult going because I have already spent much time over Sartre and have read two separate summaries of the book, and probably I tend to under-estimate the difficulties that it presents to a reader approaching it with no knowledge at all of what it is about. And also, it may well be that I tend to over-emphasize the importance of a philosophical approach to the Suttas; but I do think that, if one is not able to get a living teacher who can give the necessary guidance and orientation, a consideration of some of these existentialist thinkers can be helpful. Even Bradley (you may remember how much I was enjoying his Principles of Logic a year ago) can give certain indications, at least of a negative kind. But there must always come a time when one asks oneself, 'These philosophers are all very well, but they don't get me out. What is it, precisely, that the Buddha sees and that these thinkers fail to see? Where is it that they go wrong?'

The situation about the printing of the enlarged edition of the Notes is simply that we are more or less back where we started -- that is to say, that both typescript copies are now here with me and that there is no proposal on foot to have it printed.

Yes, the Ven. Thera is quite right, and so are you. It is a personal book. But then, what other kind of book is worth writing? Palinurus, as you may remember, says -- perhaps pushing matters to extremes -- 'None but the truths which have been extracted under mental torture appeal to us'; and any good novel is drawn from the author's own experience. (This, however, is not always to the author's advantage, since a good many writers seek for experiences in order to write about them. If you want to write a good book about life in a brothel or about addiction to opium, the best way to set about it is to go and live in a brothel or become an opium-addict. As Kierkegaard says somewhere,[1] there are many artists who sell their souls to the devil in order to produce a first-rate work of art.)

At the other extreme, it is possible to regard the Suttas as the product of the Buddha's 'personal' experience. The Buddha is dhammabhúta, 'become Dhamma', and the Suttas are an account of Dhamma. In the Suttas, however (unlike in a novel, where the emphasis is in the other direction, upon the particular), the Buddha expresses, for the most part, what is universal in his experience -- i.e. what can be experienced by anyone who makes the appropriate effort in the appropriate conditions. So it is that the Buddha says 'He who sees the Dhamma sees me' (and this, I take it, is what Sister Vajirá meant when she wrote, 'I saw the Buddha as paticcasamuppáda').

A few days ago Ananda Pereira wrote to me and asked if I could throw any light on the relation (if any) between humour and Buddhism. 'Obviously there is dukkha' he says 'and its cause is tanhá. The picture is ever so given and one feels one should be deadly serious. But, one cannot be.... Why, besides being meaningless and often tragic, is life also funny? I do not think it is ignorance -- or only ignorance -- of life's true nature that makes one laugh. On the contrary, I have found that consistently solemn people are invariably stupid and lacking in sympathy. They see less, not more than the laughers.' In reply to this I sent back (not entirely without malice aforethought) between five and six thousand words, heavily weighted with quotations from Kierkegaard and Heidegger.

Next section

Back to Clearing the Path - Contents

Back to Ñánavíra Thera Dhamma Page

Footnotes:

[114.a] Surely they are deposited on the corpse by flies and blue bottles? [Back to text]















Editorial note:

[116.1] CUP, p. 349:

Aesthetically it would be in order for a man to sell his soul to the devil, to use a strong expression which recalls what is perhaps still done more often than is ordinarily supposed -- but also to produce miracles of art. Ethically it would perhaps be the highest pathos to renounce the glittering artistic career without saying a single word.
[Back to text]