anecdotes

1 The Rediscovered Yoga

2006-01-13T07:02:00.000+08:00

There is always the possibility of yoga being lost. Actually, it is quite a fragile thing. If not irretrievably, then lost to be discovered – lost and rediscovered, again and again. Yogīs do not fear this.

Confucius is an example of a philosopher who feared that his teaching would be lost with time. Therefore, he wrote it all down on bamboo tablets. But the problem with putting things down in writing is that distortion and dilution are bound to set in. This is why the Knowledge, once rediscovered, can only be transmitted via voca, or better, via mente, directly from the Master to the pupil. But it has to be expressed in the idiom of their time, in the form of terse maxims called sūtras. Sūtras are thread-like distillations of logic sheared of all inessential verbiage. They are aphoristic teachings, refined conclusions. Sūtras are the polished end products of thought and observation arrived at only after years of practice. As a Sanskrit term, sūtra literally means "thread," and is related to the English words "suture" and "suit." An so as fabric consists of many individual threads that are woven together, so the guru's teaching is represented by these singular, concise aphoristic sayings. The ideal sūtra says much in few words.

The guru reveals fundamental principles. But they have to be confirmed by the student in time. And knowing that the student won't accept them in toto, the teacher just smuggles them in tersely coined sūtras: un-emphatic statements of self-obvious truth, likened unto to mundane passing comments. They are therefore uttered without elaboration.

So, when does elaboration come?

–In time.

How much?

–It depends.

On what?

–Many factors.

2 Enlightenment

2006-01-13T06:01:00.000+08:00

One fine morning in the well-to-do suburbs, the topic of Enlightenment entered our discussion. To be sure, it was I who raised the theme, as the Master never stooped to legitimise such extravagance.

And what did the Guru have to say on the matter?

"That's something that everyone has to find out for themselves," he said, "and by themselves."

The following morning bright and early, I arrived to the ashram for my normal studies. Much to my surprise, I found that the house was unusually quiet for a very welcomed change, and apparently unvisited by anyone but me. I paid my respects to the jovial octogenarian and casually asked him, "Is today a holiday or something?"

"–Ha! Ha! Ha!" he responded with a belly laugh. "No," he said. "But it doesn't matter anyway because my house is even open on holidays."

He courteously placed a leopard-print beach towel down on the waxed and polished parquet. "Lay down and rest," he spoke with good humour. "Take your time...There's no hurry."

As I rested on my back I slowly came to realize that in spite of the house being free of the usual chattering women, there was the boisterous sound of a radio emission coming from the back of the house. Though I understood nothing of the Thai language broadcast, it apparently was some sort of urgent news report. Soon I understood that it wasn't just one, but two portable radios, each one tuned to a different station.

As I stood to perform my sun salutes, I glanced out the window to the garden in the back. There I saw the Guru with one of his sons. They were both immensely enjoying themselves. The old man was sitting at the table with a cigarette, intently listening to one of the radios, while his son was standing by the door to the maid's room holding the second radio to his ear. I was baffled.

After completing my sun salutes, I rested on my back. Then the Master stepped in with a boyish smile and offered the following explanation:

Some disgruntled army generals have attempted a coup d'état this morning, and fighting has broken out in various parts of the city. Just now rebel troops have taken over a radio station and they're loudly proclaiming victory. But then the government is speaking from another station and they say everything's under control. So we don't know who to believe yet."

The broadcasters' voices were suddenly silenced. Then a crackle of music perked the Master's ears. He bent his neck toward the back of the house and said, "Ah, they're playing old patriotic songs now!" He returned to the patio in a jubilant mood.

Some minutes later though, calmly smiling, the old man stepped back into the house. "Enlightenment is something like this revolution," he said. "It's not all that serious."

He again returned to the garden.

3 Vincent van Gogh

2006-01-13T05:00:00.000+08:00

Late one morning in the cool of the patio the Guru and me were sipping tea while pouring over the various newspapers strewn about the pre-lunch table. Vincent van Gogh had made the news. One of the Dutch master's well known works had just been sold for a record-breaking sum at Christie's London auction. The article contained the standard litany depicting van Gogh as a tragic artist who during his career had hardly been able to sell a single canvas. Living thus in abject poverty and relentless psychological torment, the painter succumbed to incurable insanity and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

I had long admired the art of van Gogh, especially his letters, which I read in my teens. As we sat there reading and sipping tea, I began to reflect how for nearly a century van Gogh had been exalted as a veritable saint, as a bearer of the highest spiritual truth. 'How curious,' I thought, 'that we have picked our saints from the ranks of musicians, painters and poets. We have chosen these our men of religion, having honoured them the more for their anguish suffered in the course of bequeathing us eternal works of art.'

Such were the quiet thoughts passing through my mind when the Master spoke without looking from his paper. "He wasn't successful in his life."

4 What is Happiness

2006-01-13T04:00:00.000+08:00

"How to live happily," Guru Chod remarked while sitting one day around the crowded lunchtime table. "That's the question. How to live happily in this world." Indeed, it is the quintessential question of Oriental Thought. According to the fundaments of Indian philosophy, knowledge is deemed devoid of value that hasn't as its aim man's full emancipation. "Aside from this question," says the Śvetāśvatara Upanishad, "nothing else is even worth knowing." And what could be offered as a clearer example than the tersest abridgment of Bauddha doctrine: "I teach suffering," said Gautama, "and the end of suffering." In fact, in ancient India even logic was applied to the purpose of liberating man from the existential misery of life.

Now, the emphasis given by Chod to "this world" is crucial to his rediscovered teaching. 'Why'? "Because the problems people face are in this world and not in the past or future worlds. Man only dreams up future worlds when he finds himself unhappy in the present one. Thus happiness holds no store for the future, and contentment never laments the past.

"But in order to know happiness" the Master declared, "you have to know suffering first. You have to learn to stand it, and understand it." According to the teaching of Guru Chod, "Happiness is nothing but the reduction of suffering."

After arriving to the meaning of happiness, one moves on to the question how to acquire it. This is why the yoga hinges on the question of how to live happily in this world. Yoga is the application of a means by which a person becomes increasingly happy.

Aftrer having learned to live happily in this world, one naturally helps others live happily too. Compassion is hardly more than this.

5 Tenuous Retorts

2006-01-13T03:59:00.000+08:00

Once taken up then the practice of yoga continues throughout ones entire life. It continues right through the process of death. In Yoga, as in Bauddha, there is really no deep consideration of ends. Teleology and eschatology are extrinsic disciplines to Indian philosophy where atemporal mysticism has always reigned supreme[1]. This is also why "enlightenment" so rarely comes up in the philosophy of yoga, if ever at all. If anything, enlightenment is just the beginning. Having once arrived to supreme self-sufficiency, or what the Yoga technically calls kaivālya, the yogī seeks nil from his external environment. Everything the yogī needs appears before him. He is finished with becoming; all is done. There is nothing to do but to bask in the peace of his own self-luminous divinity.

One fine day the Master remarked, "My philosophy will never catch on like wildfire."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it never promises miracles," he said.

And it's true. Most of us are only interested in miracles: those powerfully vast metaphysical transformations occurring to the accompaniment of celestial trumpets, rainbow banners and cannon fire.

"But it's also because my philosophy rejects dogma," he added.

To speak about yoga in a dogmatic vein was a tasteless indiscretion for Guru Chod. Still he maintained his rule-ensemble and observed certain pat philosophical truths, all of which were grounded in the principles of nature.

He was open to fielding questions, too, and invited me to pose them whenever I wished. But if I asked too many he shook his head, "No. You'll just get confused."

I also got baffled when the answer he gave seemed to lack any bearing on the question I had asked. Later I caught on to his mode of response, which actually acted to help me get behind the superficiality of my original quandary. His tenuous retorts were like cryptic axes striking at the gristly roots of my predilection for cerebral self-ensnarement.

6 Nirodha

2006-01-13T02:58:00.000+08:00

The Bangkok Guru was very well aware that for thousands of years bliss-intoxicated spiritualists had painted grand frescos of an enchanted Kingdom of Nirvāna beyond.

"But that's too far away!" he often pleaded. "You have to learn how to live happily first – in this world."

"Or think of it like this," he was also fond of saying,

We are all tourists living in the hotel of the world for a very short period. We will leave the hotel, for who knows where?...The basic point is that, if you're all right here, you'll be all right there.

What this signals in Guru Chod's teaching is the practical feasibility of human beings to learn to live happily in this world.

We also arrive to a key attendant fact that is held in common by the Bauddha and the Yoga. We speak of nirodha or "lessening."

"We should not think of nirodha as the 'cessation' of suffering, but rather its 'lessening,'" Chod declared. In other words, one should not view nirodha as an absolute abstraction, vis-à-vis annihilation or extinction. It is more at 'reduction' or 'diminution.' It is the cooling down of the embers of desire, having entered in the metaphoric stream of things...

When applied to the fact of human suffering, nirodha is the pinnacle of human aspiration, which is simply nirvāna – 'the blowing out of the agonizing fires of hatred, greed and delusion,' beyond which every opulence befalls one[2].

7 Anecdotes

2006-01-13T01:57:00.000+08:00

One day a sophisticated Colombian man arrived at the Conservatoire posing a whole range of complicated intellectual questions. His line of inquiry exposed an ardent interest in the awakening of kunalinī śakti, its upward movement through the sushumnā-nādi, the piercing the cakras and the subsequent unfolding of latent human intelligence, and that sort of thing. Yet all he received in the way of an answer was a side-glance of ridicule as the Master stood quietly and walked into the other room.

One fine morning a charismatic Korean woman visited at the ashram. After lunch, she held many ladies spellbound with her compelling discourse. At one point Guru Chod turned to me and remarked, "That's showmanism."

"Showmanism?" I didn't understand.

He discreetly disappeared and returned with a dictionary. He pointed to an entry on the page.

"Oh," I said. "You mean, 'shamanism.'"

"Is that how you pronounce it?" he remarked.

One fine morning in his 88th year, the old man privately confided in me. He said, "I'm too old to be teaching yoga. My body is like an old car."

He then posed the question that was weighing on his mind: "How to call it quits?"

A few weeks before the Master's passing he ate a deadly mushroom that was innocently given by people very near and dear to him.

"I didn't want to eat it," he explained the following morning, rubbing his tummy with a little discomfort. "It was given as a gift and considered a great delicacy. That's why I ate it. It's not their fault. They didn't know it was bad," he said.

This odd occurrence, this strange reenactment was a clear indication that the end was near.

One fine afternoon I came across a copy of Theos Bernard's Heaven Lies Within Us (1940)[3] in a second-hand bookshop on Sukhumvit Road. I immediately purchased the hardcover volume and read it through that very night. The following morning I presented the book to Guru Chod. He expressed exceptional delighted to receive it. Not only that, he treated the book in a reverential manner, almost as if it were a holy relic. He was beaming! Nearly fifty years old though, the book was a little worm-eaten, but also in a rather aesthetic way. I told him this, too, and pointed out the tiny holes scattered along the otherwise well intact binding. The Master then took this as a kind of pretext for placing the book on a chair in the garden, letting it receive bright rays of sun, as he stood at a distance gazing on resplendent.

Endnotes

2006-01-13T01:30:00.000+08:00

[1] Religions like the majority of those in India, which recognize "time" as an endless succession of repetitive cycles, develop only relative or "individual" eschatologies, since the concept of the ultimate consummation of history is alien to them. In Indian philosophy, individual eschatology denotes an individual's liberation from the endless, weary wheel of death and rebirth by escaping into the eternal or timeless, transmundane reality called moksha or nirvāna.

[2] A Puranic interpretation of nirvāna breaks the word into three particles: nir, 'total' + vān, 'blow away' + na, 'bliss,' or "totally blown away to bliss." Some, however, would regard such analysis as highly fanciful.

[3] Bernard, Theos 1940. Heaven Lies Within Us. London: Rider & Company.