Great Throughts Treasury

"In the clearness of this Himalayan air, mountains draw near, and in such splendor, tears come quietly to my eyes and cool on my sunburned cheeks. this is not mere soft-mindedness, nor am I all that silly with the altitude. My head has cleared in these weeks free of intrusions- mail, telephones, people and their needs- and I respond to things spontaneously, without defensive or self-conscious screens. Still, all this feeling is astonishing: not so long ago I could say truthfully that I had not shed a tear in twenty years."

"In the rain, all day, the Tibetans come to look at us, and again I am struck by the resemblances between our native Americans and these Mongol peoples. Most Dhorpatan Tibetans have the small stature, small hands and feet and noses of the Eskimo, the Mongoloid eye-fold, dark copper skin, and crow-black hair: even the low red-trimmed boots of hide and wool are very similar in appearance and design to the Eskimo mukluks. Their ornaments of turquoise and silver, on the other hand, suggest the Pueblo Indians and the Navajo, while the beads, braids, and striped blankets flung over bare shoulders evoke nothing so much as old pictures of the Plains tribes, an effect enhanced by the squalor of their encampments and the quarrelsome dogs. When traveling, these people use hide tents, children are carried papoose-fashion, and the basis of their diet is a barley or maize meal known as tsampa; no real kinship has been demonstrated between native American and Asiatic tongues, yet a similar farina of the Algonkian tribes of my own region is called ?samp.?"

"In their wondrous capacity of knowing the Lord?s mind, churchly folks will tell you that He would purely hate to hear such dirty talk. My idea is, He wouldn?t mind it half so much as they would have us think, because even according to their own queer creed, we are God?s handiwork, created in His image, lust, piss, shit, and all. Without that magnificent Almighty lust that we mere mortals dare to call a sin, there wouldn?t be any more mortals, and God?s grand design for the human race, if He exists and if He ever had one, would turn to dust, and dust unto dust, forever and amen. Other creatures would step up and take over, realizing that man was too weak and foolish to properly reproduce himself. I nominate hogs to inherit the Earth, because hogs love to eat any old damned thing God sets in front of them, and they?re ever so grateful for God?s green earth even when it?s all rain and mud, and they just plain adore to feed and fuck and frolic and fulfill God?s holy plan. For all we know, it?s hogs which are created in God?s image, who?s to say?"

"In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to the lanterns; through the black reaches of the outer night, so it was said, they flew toward the full moon."

"In the snow mountains- is it altitude?- I feel open, clear, and child-like once again. I am bathed by feelings, and unexpectedly I find myself near tears, . . ."

"It is related that Sakyamuni [the historical Buddha] once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had spent twenty years of his human existence learning to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin."

"Innumerable parallels to Eastern teachings among native American traditions might be cited, such as the Aztec concept of existence as dream state, or the great awe of wind and sky that the Ojibwa of our northern prairies share with the vanished Aryans of the Asian steppes ? Tibetan oracle-priests and Siberian shamans practice dream-travel, telepathy, mystical heat, speed-running, death prediction, and metem-psychosis, all of which are known to New World shamans: the Algonkian medicine man who travels as a bird to the spirit world, the jaguar ? shamans of the Amazon would be impressed but not surprised by the powers attributed to yogis and naljorpas. The energy or essence or breath of being that is called prana by Hindu yogins and chi by the Chinese is known as orenda to the Cree. Such concepts as karma and circular time are taken for granted by almost all native American traditions; time as space and death as becoming are implicit in the earth view of the Hopi, who avoid all linear constructions, knowing as well as any Buddhist that Everything is Right Here Now."

"Isn?t that the joy of fiction? To probe for fresh experience rather than perpetuate received wisdom? Why turn out endless variations on what we have already done well; what our reviewers, and friends and family, too, assure us we do best; what everyone feels most comfortable with and what might sell. Why not explore new territory and also new means of getting there when that seems necessary? Too few writers these days seem to risk long-term commitment to a project, like that of the great novelists of the nineteenth century, and Proust and Joyce. Not risk painful controversy, as Styron did in Sophie?s Choice and Nat Turner, nor even extend their reach from book to book, as Mailer tries to do, and Don DeLillo. Because these novelists embrace large subjects, they will write long books when necessary, although quite aware that the poor overworked reviewers and the busy readers much prefer slight fictions."

"It is said in Java that the tiger's hearing is so acute that hunters must keep their nose hairs cut lest the tiger hear the breath whistle through their nostrils."

"Liberation, freedom- unaccountably I think about a girl I talked to once in a marine-supplies store where she was buying rope, just a few years ago. The next day, with her young husband and a British companion, she rose in a balloon from the Long Island farmland, waving good-bye to a cheering crowd, and headed eastward, bound for England over the Atlantic Ocean. None of the three was ever seen again. At this moment I feel moved, not by the disappearance of the girl (which was no tragedy, only a brave essay that was lost) but by the name of their adventure- The Free Life Balloon. Perhaps the voyagers on the Free Life Balloon meant ?free life? as described by a mountaineer: The mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was necessary to us as breath. But the same mountaineer, after nearly losing his life, wrote of freedom in a quite different way: I saw that it was better to be true than to be strong. . . I was saved and I had won my freedom. This freedom, which I shall never lose. . .has given me the rare joy of loving that which I used to despise. A new and splendid life has opened out before me. This is closer to my own idea of freedom, the possibility and prospect of free life, traveling light, without clinging or despising, in calm acceptance of everything that comes; free because without defenses, free not in an adolescent way, with no restraints, but in the sense of the Tibetan Buddhist?s crazy wisdom, if Camus?s leap into the absurd that occurs within a life of limitations."

"Like anything that one makes well with one?s own hands, writing good nonfiction prose can be profoundly satisfying. Yet after a day of arranging my research, my set of facts, I feel stale and drained, whereas I am energized by fiction. Deep in a novel, one scarcely knows what may surface next, let alone where it comes from. In abandoning oneself to the free creation of something never beheld on earth, one feels almost delirious with a strange joy."

"Like the round-bottomed Bodhidharma doll, returning to its center, meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation. In this ?void?, this dynamic state of rest, without impediments, lies the ultimate reality, and here one?s own true nature is reborn, in a return from what Buddhists speak of a ?great death?. This is the Truth of which Milarepa speaks."

"Like Milapera and many other Kagyu-Karma-pas, he has chosen a hermit?s life of solitary meditation, which being the Short Path to true knowledge is therefore the supreme form of existence. But to renounce the world in this way requires the ultimate discipline, as well as exceptional power and inner resources, and my admiration is mingled with regret that, by comparison, my own dedication is halfhearted and too late."

"More often than I like, I feel that gaze of his, as if he were here to watch over me, as if it were he who had made me cut that stick: the gaze is open, calm, benign, without judgment of any kind, and yet, confronted with it, as with a mirror, I am aware of all that is hollow in myself, all that is greedy, angry, and unwise."

"Many great writers inspired me, of course, but inspiration is not the same as a direct influence. I was often stirred by the beauty of great prose, the passion and startling intensity of hard-won truths, which leapt from that creative fire. I suppose I became a writer to search out my own thoughts (though I was unaware of that for years; I simply wrote). For the writer, therefore the reader, fresh truth is exhilarating, even painful truth, as in Kafka or C‚line. Isn?t that what good writing finally arrives at? The insights and epigrams of Alexander Pope weren?t clich‚s when he wrote them, any more than those resounding lines in Shakespeare. They only became dog-eared from overuse."

"My anger is wasting energy I badly need, and realizing this, it is easy to put it aside."

"My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us, what one lama refers to as ?the precision and openness and intelligence of the present.? The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this, mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. To be anywhere else is ?to paint eyeballs on chaos.? When I watch blue sheep, I must watch blue sheep, not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present, for this present ? even while I think of it ? is gone."

"My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending."

"My letters I put away unopened, in my pack; they will not be read until I get to Jumla or Kathmandu. Today is the twelfth, and I leave on the eighteenth; even if the letters bring bad news, I could leave no earlier than the fifteenth, since Tukten and Gyaltsen have traveled hard, and must have rest. And good news, too, would, be intrusive, spoiling this chance to live moment by moment in the present by stirring up the past, the future, and encouraging delusions of continuity and permanence just when I am trying to let go, to blow away, like the white down feather on the mountains."

"Nothing exists but atoms and the void ? so wrote Democritus. And it is ?void? that underlies the Eastern teachings ? not emptiness or absence, but the Uncreated that preceded all creation, the beginningless potential of all things."

"Nevertheless, Tukem is a very proud little boy, and since his nami lives Lukigin, where his mother has already gone, he has decided to go away for good. This morning he put on his thin neck the cowrie collar with its brief string of shells which is his sole belonging, he smeared his body with pig grease until it shone, in order to make a fine impression at Lukigin....Then he set off alone on the long journey in the sun across the woods and fields, a small brown figure with a flat head and pot belly. His back was turned on Wuperainma, his pigs and his friends, his childhood, and he clutched a frail stick in his hand."

"Now those psychedelic years seem far away; I neither miss them nor regret them. Drugs can clear away the past, enhance the present; toward the inner garden, they can only point the way. Lacking the temper of ascetic discipline, the drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life. Old mists may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the I from the experience of the One."

"Of course I enjoy this life! It?s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!"

"Of all African animals, the elephant is the most difficult for man to live with, yet its passing - if this must come - seems the most tragic of all. I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange such as mow grass with its toenails or draw the tusks from the rotted carcass of another elephant and carry them off into the bush. There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea."

"No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place."

"Or altered realities, perhaps, induced by altitude and exhaustion. And there were peculiar time shifts as we headed northward, ever higher and farther north toward the Tibetan Plateau, walking out of the present into the past?the Middle Ages, finally. First, time dissolved, then space. It?s broad daylight, good visibility, yet mountains move. You perceive that the so-called permanence of the mountains is illusory, and that all phenomena are mere wisps of the cosmos, ever changing. It is its very evanescence that makes life beautiful, isn?t that true? If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us. Beauty always has that element of transience that is spoiled when we draw clumsy attention to it. The great haiku poet Basho [HORIZONTAL OVER ?O? IN BASHO] wrote, ?How blessed is he who sees the cherry blossoms fall and does not say, ?Ah, time is passing.?? He has let go of all such concepts as time passing in order to enter deeply into this moment. I tried to capture some of that immediacy in Far Tortuga and The Snow Leopard, too. The first draft of that journal was written in the Himalayas as a Zen practice of close observation, and perhaps that gave it a meditative quality that otherwise it might have lacked."

"On the sunny ledge, under the bright blue window of the gompa, we listen to the murmurs of the Lama and contemplate the prospect of the snows. Soon the mountains stir, the shift and vibrate- how vital these rocks seem, against blue sky! If only they would fly apart, consume us in a fire of white light. But I am not ready, and resist, in fear of losing my death grip on the world, on all that provides the illusion of security. The same fear- of loss of control- of insanity, far worse than the fear of death- can occur with the hallucinogenic drugs: familiar things, losing the form assigned to them, begin to spin, and the center does not hold, because we search for it outside instead of in."

"One intuits truth? even those that are scarcely understood; and now intuition had become knowing, not through merit but ? it seemed ? through grace."

"On the hillside above Tarakot is a pageant of tall poles crowned by symbols of sun, moon, and fire; brown, white, and gray Tibetan ponies graze among white prayer flags, which snap OM MANI PADME HUM on the autumn wind. (Is it the flag that moves? Is it the wind? Neither, said Hui-Neng, the sixth Ch?an Buddhist Patriarch of China: It is your mind.)"

"Only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri."

"Phu-Tsering?s awestruck face, so like a child?s, reminds me of GS?s story of the time in eastern Nepal when our cook received a letter saying that his wife had left him for another man. Weeping, Phu-Tsering had got to his feet and read the letter aloud to all the Sherpa villagers where they were camped, and the people had all stood there and wept with him. As GS commented: A Westerner would have slunk off and kicked stones; you have to admire the Sherpas for being so open about everything- so open, so without defense, therefore so free, true Bodhisattvas, accepting like the variable airs the large and the small events of every day."

"Presented with a receipt, Dawa takes special pleasure in drawing his own name for the fist time in his life; the whole idea convulses him with laughter."

"Stravinsky said a wonderful thing: ?I was for a period of time obsessed with the weight of interval.? He meant, of course, the anticipation, even the anxiety, about what?s immediately going to follow."

"Rising painfully, the Lama hobbles out upon a stone platform that overhangs the cliff and squats to urinate through a neat triangular hole, into the ravine; as if to enjoy this small shift in his view, he gazes cheerfully about him, his tulku pee drop sparkling in the sun upon the stone."

"Such concepts as karma and circular time are taken for granted by almost all native American traditions; time as space and death as becoming as implicit in the earth view of the Hopi, who avoid all linear constructions, knowing as well as any Buddhist that Everything is Right Here Now. As in the great religions of the East, the native American makes small distinction between religious activity and the acts of every day: the religious ceremony is life itself."

"Such similarities are doubtless superficial, but others are more than remarkable in cultures so widely separated in time and space. The animistic kinship with the world around that permeates the life of the Gurung and other tribes in the corners of these mountains ? as well as that of the Chukchi Eskimos and other remnant hunter-gatherers of eastern Asia, differs little in its spirit among most of the Eskimos and Indians of the Americas. The great thunderbird of North America is known to the forest Tungus of Siberia; and the sun symbols and sacred eyes, the thread-crosses, cosmic trees, and swastikas that symbolize esoteric teachings of the Old World from ancient Egypt to present-day Tibet have been widespread in the New World since very early times ? so early, in fact, that present estimates of dates for nomadic waves of Asian hunters across the Bering land bridge into the New World do not seem to account for them. (Such dates are regularly set back, and may be meaningless; on a clear day one can actually see one continent from the offshore islands of the other, and for all we know people were traveling in both directions on the sea and ice even when Beringia was under water.)"

"The boy Weneluke wove hand patterns with a string, working skillfully into abstract designs on all eight fingers: one of these represented a man and woman facing each other, and, by manipulating each sex, he arrived at a nice parody of copulation."

"The center does not hold because we search for it outside instead of in."

"The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it has no patience with mysticism, far less the occult. Nor does it have any time with moralism, the prescriptions or distortions we would impose on the world, obscuring it from our view. It asks, it insists rather, that we take this moment for what it is, undistracted, and not cloud it with needless worries of what might have been or fantasies of what might come to be. It is, essentially, a training in the real?the Universe itself is the scripture of Zen. Pico Iyer from introduction."

"The cook?s happy-go-lucky ways can be exasperating, although GS has learned in eastern Nepal that his merry smile more than compensates for any failings. And the sherpas accept his reprimands in good spirit, since GS is faithfully considerate of their feelings and concerned only for their welfare, and rarely permits their childlike natures to provoke him."

"The cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center. Such an idea holds no terror for mystics; in the mystical vision, the universe, its center, and its origins are simultaneous, all around us, all within us, and all One."

"The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing? He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths? There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of a voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. ?You are no different from anybody else,? they will chorus, or, ?there?s no such thing?, and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as ?morbid.? ? He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. ?His own law!? everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law? The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization ? absolute and unconditional ? of its own particular law? To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being? he has failed to realize his life?s meaning."

"The flower fulfills its immanence, intelligence implicit in its unfolding."

"The flower grows without mistakes."

"The glee of It. The ecstasy of It. I can't speak about this It because I know no word. It is just there, It is always there, like death in life. In this instant I know that something terrible is rising that must be seized and turned back upon itself before it twists outward into violence. But that knowing always comes too late, a wild unraveling is under way and I am caught up in it like a coyote seen late one afternoon in an Arkansas tornado-a toy dog spinning skyward, struck white by a ray of sun against black clouds, then black, then white, then gone and lost forever. The wind dies. A dead stillness. Mirror water. That ecstasy that shivered every nerve replaced by the precise knowing that what this self-perpetrated is as much a part of the universal will as erupting lava that subsides once more into the inner earth."

"The moon is up over Tibet, and in the southern mountains, over Jang, the planet Mars is disappearing. How much dignity the moon has lost, now that man has left his disrespectful litter, his cute golf balls! But the moon retains a mystery for the dogs of Tichu-Rong, which howl in awe at its first appearance, and set one another off the whole night through; while its fellows rest, the dog next door harangues the cosmos for an hour. The mastifs sleep much of the day and are let loose at night to deal with wolves and robbers; in the absence of such, they will make due with strangers. Not caring to venture out into the streets when such brutes are abroad, I follow the custom of the town, standing on the roof edge and urinating into the mud street, in daybreak light."

"The physicist seeks to understand reality, while the mystic is trained to experience it directly. Both agree that human mechanisms of perception, stunted as they are by screens of social training that close out all but the practical elements in the sensory barrage, give a very limited picture of existence, which certainly transcends mere physical evidence. Furthermore, both groups agree that appearances are illusory. A great physicist extends this idea: ?Modern science classifies the world? not into different groups of objects but into different groups of connections? The world thus appears to be a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.? All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux, and at moments this flux is actually visible: one has only to open the mind in meditation or have the mind-screens knocked awry by drugs or dreams to see that there is no real edge to anything, that in the endless interpenetration of the universe, a molecular flow, a cosmic energy shimmers in all stone and steel as well as flesh. The ancient intuition that all matter, all ?reality?, is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are mere crystallizations of mind, is an idea with which few physicists have quarreled since the theory of relativity first called into question the separate identities of energy and matter."

"The native American traditions are Eastern cultures, thousands of miles and perhaps thousands of years from their source. Anyone familiar with Zen thought or the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism will not be astonished by the insights attributed in recent years to a Yaqui Indian sorcerer of northern Mexico. In content, attitude, and especially in that cryptic manner of expression which the inexpressible requires, there is nothing in the comments of this shaman that might not have been spoken by a Kagyu-pa lama or Zen roshi."

"The Nepal government takes yeti seriously, and there is a strict law against killing them. But one of the Arun Valley scientists has a permit that would allow him to collect one of these creatures, and I asked him what he would do if, one fine morning, a yeti presented itself within fair range; it seemed to me that this decision should not wait for the event. The biologist was unsettled by the question; he had made this hard decision, or if he had, was not at peace with it."

"The prayer wheel [of silver and copper] is inscribed with the same mantra, and so is the tight-rolled scroll inside it, spinning out the invocation that calls the universe to attention:"