Postscript to my yesterday's letter. I have just found in Camus (La Chute, pp. 113-14)[1] exactly what I wanted to say about Durrell.

      You are wrong, cher, the boat is going at full speed. But the Zuyderzee is a dead sea, or almost. With its flat shores, lost in the fog, there's no knowing where it begins or ends. So we are steaming along without any landmark; we can't gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It's not navigation but dreaming.
      In the Greek archipelago I had the contrary feeling. Constantly new islands would appear on the horizon. Their treeless backbone marked the limit of the sky and their rocky shore contrasted sharply with the sea. No confusion possible; in the sharp light everything was a landmark. And from one island to another, ceaselessly on our little boat, which was nevertheless dawdling, I felt as if we were scudding along, night and day, on the crest of the short, cool waves in a race full of spray and laughter. Since then, Greece itself drifts somewhere within me, on the edge of my memory, tirelessly.... Hold on, I too am drifting; I am becoming lyrical! Stop me, mon cher, I beg you.
      By the way, do you know Greece? No? So much the better. What should we do there, I ask you? there it requires pure hearts. Do you know that there friends walk along the street in pairs holding hands? Yes, the women stay at home and you often see a middle-aged, respectable man, sporting moustaches, gravely striding along the pavements, his fingers locked in those of his friend. In the Orient likewise, at times? I don't say no. But tell me, would you take my hand in the streets of Paris? Oh, I'm joking. We have a sense of decorum; scum gives us a stilted manner. Before appearing in the Greek islands, we should have to wash at length. There the air is chaste, the sea and sensual enjoyment transparent. And we...

This letter gives me an opportunity to add something to what I said earlier. In my letter of the 26th I think I remarked that Maháyána Buddhism had taken over the Hindu idea of máyá without even proper acknowledgement. But this statement is obviously too simple, and is perhaps unjustified (since I do not know that the Maháyánists did not think up the idea for themselves). It almost sounds as if there were no real difference between the two teachings; whereas, in fact, distinctions must be made. At the same time it is true to say that the Maháyána concept of nirvána is separated by an abyss from the nibbána of the Pali Suttas.

The question hinges on the scandal of the world's relativity, or variety, (which stubbornly resists all our efforts to reduce it to a single Whole) -- 'The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia' (Le Mythe, p. 28; The Myth, p. 11). Three quotations will perhaps illustrate this. Here, first, is Jean Grenier on the Hindu máyá:

The world may be the product of a sort of dream, not the dream of a spirit but the dream of a power inherent in the world. That would be the case of this illusion that the Vedantists call Máyá. ...For Indians Máyá is Shakti, which is to say a power from (and of) Brahma, through which the latter takes a perceptible appearance.... The Vedic hypothesis of Máyá, a hypothesis that would better be called a postulate, because of its generality and indemonstrability, consists in supposing that the world is the product of a cosmic illusion, a modification of Brahma. This modification would be apparent only, like the rope one thinks to be a snake but which nevertheless remains a rope. The absolute would not be more easily reached through it than the desert through the mirage. (pp. 53-5)

Objects exist only insofar as they do not exist in reality. Insofar as they do not exist they are called avidyá, which means 'non-knowledge'. Common and ignorant people are attached to these things because they do not receive guidance (teaching) on this subject. They picture to themselves all these objects as existing, whereas in reality no one (nothing) exists.[1]

Sankapparágo purisassa kámo
Na te kámá yáni citráni loke
Sankapparágo purisassa kámo
Titthanti citráni tath'eva loke
Ath'ettha dhírá vinayanti chandam.     (A. VI,63: iii,411)

Thought and lust are a man's sensuality,
Not the various things in the world;
Thought and lust are a man's sensuality,
The various things just stand there in the world;
But the wise get rid of desire therein.

I do hope that all this stuff I am sending you does not make you feel under any obligation to reply to it. That is not the idea at all -- it is simply for you to read or not as you will, nothing more. The trouble is that when I get some coherent thoughts (or that seem so to me at least) I have to do something with them or else they get in the way; and the easiest thing is to write them down and post them to somebody. You will remember that Stephen Daedalus got rid of an aphorism by telegraphing it to Buck Mulligan at his pub. Tolstoy's toenails.




[L. 131]   20 September 1964

Your question about the propriety of sending good wishes ('Is not wishing desire, and so to be shunned?') can be answered, though not in one word. There is desire and desire, and there is also desire to end desire. There is desire that involves self-assertion (love, hate) and desire that does not (the arahat's desire to eat when hungry, for example), and the former can be either self-perpetuating (unrestrained passion) or self-destructive (restrained passion). Self-destructive desire is bad in so far as it is passionate, and therefore good in so far as, translated into action, it brings itself to an end. (By 'translated into action' I mean that the desire for restraint does not remain abstractly in evidence only when one is not giving way to passion, but is concretely operative when there is actually occasion for it, when one is actually in a rage. To begin with, of course, it is not easy to bring them together, but with practice desire for restraint arises at the same time as the passion, and the combination is self-destructive. The Suttas say clearly that craving is to be eliminated by means of craving [A. IV,159: ii,145-46]; and you yourself are already quite well aware that nothing can be done in this world, either good or bad, without passion -- and the achievement of dispassion is no exception. But passion must be intelligently directed.) Since an arahat is capable of desiring the welfare of others, good wishes are evidently not essentially connected with self-assertion, and so are quite comme il faut.

I had actually written you a long letter, mostly about Toynbee and Graves, but decided that it was intolerably prosy and not worth sending. My mind, of late, has been rather turbid -- ideas are there, but will not crystallize out -- perhaps as a result of reading The White Goddess. I found myself in much the same sort of fantastic wonderland as when reading Dirac's Principles of Quantum Mechanics a few years ago: in both I encountered a wholly compelling argument from wholly unacceptable premises.

I have been busy re-typing my Notes on Dhamma. But will anyone care to publish it? I don't think anyone would describe the Notes as a 'popular' work: in the first place because it is specialized and assumes in the reader some acquaintance (or at least a willingness to become acquainted) with the Suttas on the one hand and with modern philosophical ideas on the other; and in the second place because it is openly hostile to the disengaged critical attitude of the scholar, and so is hardly likely to be popular amongst the pundits, at least if they are no more than that. (In my own way, I am just as much 'engaged' as Graves is in his; and I am at one with him in his scathing remarks in the Goddess about scholars, having also myself had experience of the conspiracy of silence with which they habitually greet the unfamiliar or the unorthodox. No doubt you will recall Samuel Butler with his professors at the Colleges of Unreason:

It seemed to be counted the perfection of scholarship and good breeding among them not to have -- much less to express -- an opinion on any subject on which it might prove later that they had been mistaken. [Erewhon, Ch. 22]

So then, assuming that there are people in England (there are, certainly, a few in Germany and perhaps France), neither stuffy scholars nor yet silly sheep, who might read the Notes, what is needed is a publisher who is prepared to accept a work that is both unpopular (learned) and unpopular (unorthodox). But is the Notes respectable enough? I have sprinkled it with references to reputable philosophers, but I can't be sure that the cloven hoof is not still showing through this disguise. (Take Zaehner, for example. He has his own ideas about Pali Buddhism, holding, in spite of the Pali Buddhists, that it can be included under the general heading of 'Mysticism'. Is he, or is he not, one of those who, according to Samuel Butler, 'devote themselves to the avoidance of every opinion with which they are not perfectly familiar, and regard their own brains as a sort of sanctuary, to which, if an opinion has once resorted, none other is to attack it'? Would he or his colleagues approve of publishing the Notes?)

But perhaps it would be a waste of time to try and get such a book published in England -- it is, as Graves said about his White Goddess, 'a very difficult book, as well as a very queer one, to be avoided by anyone with a distracted, tired, or rigidly scientific mind'. (p. 9) Besides, I have never heard the book criticized, and it may be, for all I know, a bad book (I mean as regards form and style and so on: I myself am prepared to answer for the content -- except, perhaps, for the last part, which is my own speculative effort, and for which I can cite neither chapter nor verse in support). I am certainly more than half inclined to make no effort to get it published, particularly if it is going to encounter difficulties. (I think I told you earlier that both the P.T.S. and the Buddhist Society have been sent copies of the cyclostyled edition of the Notes and have 'refrained from any comment whatsoever'. It is hardly likely, though for different reasons, that they will have approved of the book.)

I hope that your leave is passing pleasantly for you -- that is, I do not hope that it is passing, but that it is pleasant in its passing: whether I hope or do not hope, it will pass, alas! like all good things, save one. But that one thing -- again alas! -- is not to be had simply by wishing.

Játijarámaranadhammánam ávuso sattánam evam icchá uppajjati: Aho vata mayam na játijarámaranadhammá assáma, na ca vata no játijarámaranam ágaccheyyá ti. Na kho pan'etam iccháya pattabbam; idam pi yam p'iccham na labbhati, tam pi dukkham. (D. 22: ii,307)

In creatures subject to birth, ageing, and death, friends, there arises such a wish as 'O that we were not subject to birth, ageing, and death! O that birth, ageing, and death might not come nigh us!' But that is not to be attained by wishing; and in this, too, not to get what one wishes is to suffer.

With all best wishes, including this (that is, if you would wish it for yourself).[1]




[L. 132]   2 November 1964

I am always glad to find possible points of contact between the Suttas and Western philosophy, since a first reading of the texts -- particularly in the light of the traditional interpretation -- seems to suggest that there are none. But this is perhaps due in some measure to the particularly futile stuff turned out of recent times in British philosophy -- I am thinking of the logical positivists and the linguistic analysts -- which really has singularly little connexion with the business of existing as a human being. (The English, I think, in general don't like to inquire too closely into the question of existence -- even in present fiction it seems to be taken for granted, the emphasis being always towards 'a quickened sympathy in personal relations'.[a] But perhaps my reading is too limited.) In any case, by way of contrast to the atmosphere of current British philosophy[b] here is the opening passage of Jean Grenier's book Absolu et Choix (p. 3):

We do not belong to the world: that is the first thought which sets philosophy in motion. Not belonging to the world and yet in the world, living, happy to live, acting, happy to act. It is not that the world seems bad to us, but that it seems alien. Pessimism is not necessarily the starting point of philosophical reflection, and it is not always when considering evil, old age, and death that we start asking ourselves the questions which are most important for us. It is a more general feeling, a feeling of estrangement. Pursued to its very end, this feeling sometimes becomes not only the source but also the goal of philosophy: to exist.

The philosophical state is a state of breaking with the world, in contrast to the state of communion where live the child, and the man who innocently enjoys his senses.

In the end he fails; but he comes to recognize that his existence is unjustifiable and accepts his sentence with equanimity (actually, in recognizing his guilt, he condemns himself to die to immediacy in the world -- he is dépaysé, an exile). So then, the philosopher is guilty, guilty of self-knowledge, of ravishing himself (Adam's fall comes with his knowledge of good and evil, when he knows his wife Eve -- and you may recall Durrell's Clea wanting to be rid of her 'blasted virginity', to become a mature artist).

But, this being the case, is not the acquisition of 'knowledge' a pure loss, being a fall from innocence into guilt? That will depend. Kierkegaard speaks of the acquired virgin purity of ethical passion, compared with which the purity of childhood is but an amiable joke; and knowledge of his crime of existing can put this within the philosopher's reach (that is, if he will persist -- but see the Notes, KAMMA). Kierkegaard is harder on the artist, remarking that it is a commoner practice than is generally supposed to sell one's soul to the devil for the sake of producing masterpieces (Marlowe knew all about that!). But the artist, though guilty of self-knowledge, is still something of a juvenile delinquent.




[L. 133]   19 November 1964

The English publisher's attitude[1] is, of course, quite normal. A publishing house, like any other association of businessmen, exists for the mutual benefit of its members, not for the purpose of edifying people; and we cannot expect that an exception will be made to the general principle of Business First. Even if he should personally like the book, he cannot accept it if its publication will not be to the material advantage of his colleagues. It is unfortunate, no doubt, that I should have hit upon such a dated subject as Buddhism to write about. But what would you? It seems that I must have got on the wrong boat some fifteen or twenty years ago and have been exploring a backwater ever since and now I find myself unable to write about anything more progressive. It is true, of course, that I have recently become unexpectedly well equipped (my health is just the same, thank you for your kind wishes) to make investigations in quite a different field of activity, still fashionable; but the subject seems to have been adequately covered -- that appears to be the right word[a] -- by people before me, and I do not feel I really have the talent to write another Káma Sútra. (It is quite possible, you know, that people might be more profoundly shocked by the Notes than by the K.S. The K.S. -- which I have never read -- suggests only that we should abandon morality; the Notes suggest that we should abandon humanity.)

Certainly, people have to make money to live; and just because I have been fortunate enough never to have been in need of it (least of all, perhaps, now that I don't have any) there is no occasion for me to give myself airs. But, beyond a certain point, devotion to money becomes scandalous ('Money is lovely, like roses'), and we finish up with the dying Rimbaud: 'Que je suis malheureux, que je suis donc malheureux...et j'ai de l'argent sur moi[b] que je ne puis même passurveiller!'[2]

Ven. S. tells me -- it is his leitmotiv -- that nobody in Europe now thinks of anything but money, and some firms (notably the pharmaceuticals) make so much of it that they don't know what to do with it all. He himself has had a letter from his people urging him to return, on the grounds that he will never make money by being a Buddhist monk. (Evidently they are not very well informed about the present state of the monkhood in Ceylon.)

The late Ven. Soma Thera aspired to poetry; here is a translation of his from the Sanskrit (the second line might be improved, but the last two make their effect):

In him who ever and again
Reflects on death's hard hand of pain
The drive for gross material gain
Grows limp as hide soaked through with rain.

Lowly stoic Epicteatise
Never wrote a single treatise:
The utterances of the man
Were taken down by Arrian.
Imperial Mark Aureliorse,
His bibliophobia was worse:
He wrote a book himself instead
When 'Throw away your books!' he said.

Clearly you are one of those people who manage to feel and perhaps to re-create the atmosphere and associations belonging to buildings and places, and so, when you visit these places, you are able almost to take yourself back in time in a bodily way. Whatever little capacity I had in this direction (I used to enjoy travelling and visiting places) was blighted by my years in the wartime Army where, having abused my brain all day (I was in Intelligence -- of which, as Huxley has pointed out, there are three kinds: human, animal, and military), I only sought (with indifferent success -- my education was against me) to abuse my body all the night. Anyway, it simplified my world and brought out the issues clearly.

But now, even though there are the places of significance for the Buddhist in India, and the Buddha himself spoke in praise of visiting them (the Birthplace, the place of Enlightenment -- strictly this is a mistranslation, it should be Awakening --, of the First Sermon, of the Final Passing Away), I have never felt either the need or inclination to visit them.

How irritating the Buddha's Teaching must sometimes appear! Here you are, having been to an ashram and learned or realized the Great Truth that 'reality is consciousness -- not consciousness OF, not knowledge, but consciousness', -- and now here am I with the distressing duty of having to inform you that the Buddha says (I simplify slightly) 'Without matter, without feeling, without perception, without determinations (intention, volition), that there should be consciousness -- such a thing is not possible' (cf. Khandha Samy. 51: iii,53). (An exception is made for the highest spheres of consciousness, where matter is transcended by a process of successive abstraction, but all the other items are still present.) I am sorry about it, but there it is -- but then I am not obliging you to accept the Suttas.[a] (Hindus have the habit of saying that all religions are One, with particular reference to the Buddha's Teaching. Since the Buddha was a Hindu, they say, his Teaching must be Hinduism. Besides, they say he was the eighth avatar of Vishnu. Buddhists, on the other hand, do not say that all religions are One -- thus demonstrating at least one difference from Hinduism.)

Perhaps this very point will throw light on my preference (within due limits) for the existentialist philosophers: Husserl maintained, and Sartre confirms, that all consciousness is consciousness of something, e.g.

Consciousness is consciousness of something. This means that transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness; that is, that consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself. (B&N, p. lxi)

It is quite clear that the Notes can never be a popular work (except by mistake), but it is perhaps more difficult than you or I quite realize. Possibly it might be of interest to professional or semi-professional philosophers, but, to judge from Mind, there don't seem to be any in England. Why should the book be published at all? I don't quite know.

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Footnotes:

[131.a] The real trouble is not the mere difference of opinion, as between one scholar and another, but the fact that Graves (like myself) refuses to treat his subject as dead. A scholar only feels secure if he is sure that the subject of his study is not one day going to get up and look him between the eyes; and nothing could be in worse taste than a suggestion that anything more is required of him than a chaste rational disinterestedness. Both the Buddha and the White Goddess, it is felt, have been safely dead these two thousand years and more, and the professors of these subjects congratulate themselves on having chosen such admirably extinct fields of study. (Quite the last thing that a professor of Buddhism would dream of doing is to profess Buddhism -- that is left to mere amateurs like myself.) But what happens? Here comes Graves and myself shouting out one, that you cannot know the Goddess unless you worship her -- and in the flesh, to boot (or, should I say, to buskin?) --, and, the other, that you cannot understand the Buddha unless you practise his teaching -- in the jungle, preferably, and barefoot. If I have my way, these comfortable scholars will have to exchange the fleshpots of Oxford for the almsbowl of India; and if Graves has his, their dutiful wives will become Bassarids, dancing naked with Dionysian fury on Boar's Hill, and tearing the Vice-Chancellor to pieces and devouring him raw at the summer solstice. And that would never do, would it? [Back to text]

[132.a] Not necessarily a bad thing -- sensibility is not taught in English schools, and we could do with more of it (how often have I not, abroad, felt hot with shame at my own boorishness!). But sensibility is not the answer -- witness Chamfort: 'Quand on a été bien tourmenté, bien fatigué par sa propre sensibilité on s'aperçoit qu'il faut vivre au jour le jour, oublier beaucoup, enfin éponger la vie á mesure qu'elle s'écoule.'[1] [Back to text]

[132.b] And also by way of comment on Toynbee's view that the Buddha's going forth from home into the homelessness was a direct consequence of the widespread social unrest of his time -- which Toynbee has deduced from the Buddha's going into homelessness (or literally, exile) and then used to account for it. [Back to text]

[133.a] There are others, e.g. (a supposed Daily Mirror headline): UNDERGRADS PROBE SEX SENSATION. [Back to text]

[133.b] Eight kilos of gold! [Back to text]

[134.a] I don't in the least doubt that you were benefitted by your visit to the ashram; and it may be that (in a manner of speaking) this is the Truth for you. But the question is, ultimately, how far it takes you. And the Buddha says that it does not take you (or anyone) to extinction. But perhaps that is not what you wanted. [Back to text]















Editorial notes:

[129.1] La Chute: The text is taken from pp. 72-3 of the Penguin edition of The Fall. [Back to text]

[130.1] Prajñápáramitá: The Ven. Ñánavíra's letter contains a French translation of this passage, apparently taken from an essay, 'Le Bouddhisme d'après les Textes pális', by Solange Bernard-Thierry on p. 608 of Présence du Bouddhisme, the Feb.-June 1959 issue of the journal France-Asie, published in Saigon. The quotation would seem to be from one of the more recent strata of the Prajñápáramitá Sútra, not identified by Ms. Bernard-Thierry. English translation is by the editors. (The aphorism at the end of this letter is from Joyce's Ulysses.) [Back to text]

[131.1] The author's usual closing salutation was 'With best wishes'. See L. 20. [Back to text]

[132.1] Chamfort: 'When one has been sufficiently tormented, sufficiently wearied by one's own sensibility, one finds out that it is necessary to live from day to day, forget a lot, in brief, suck up life as it flows by' (quoted in French on p. 46 of The Unquiet Grave). [Back to text]

[133.1] English publisher: Mr. Brady had taken the typescript of Notes with him when he went on home leave. L. 131 to 133 were addressed to England. The typescript remained in England for about six months (see L. 143) making the rounds of the publishers. (It was on Mr. Brady's return to the East, it seems, that he stopped off at an ashram in India, discussed in L. 134.) [Back to text]

[133.2] Rimbaud: 'How wretched I am, oh! how wretched I am...and I've got money on me that I can't even watch!' [Back to text]