As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams by Lady Sarashina

"One thousand years ago a woman in Japan with no name wrote a book without a title." So says Ivan Morris in his introduction; it is an imprecise description but an provocative one.  Although we don't know the author's given name, we do know her family name was Sugawara, and that she was the daughter of a man named Takasue. However, she is known to us as Lady Sarashina - a name derived from her mentioning a mountain in the province of Sarashina; and the title of this translation of the nameless book is taken from a poem.  Even so, there is something intriguing about a "nameless" Japanese woman living a thousand years ago, writing a nameless autobiography.

The book covers the period 1020-1059, at the height of the Heian period.  At this time, although very few people could read,  there was a flourishing of literature, mainly originating from the educated aristocrats and courtesans.  Lady Sarashina was both a beneficiary of, and a contributor to, this culture.  In her book, Lady Sarashina covers her life from ages twelve to fifty (or so).  The author spent her first twelve years in the remote eastern provinces of Honshu, the largest of Japan's four main islands.  In the first chapter she straightaway sets out her main theme : 

Yet even shut away in the provinces I somehow came to hear that the world contained things known as Tales, and from that moment my greatest desire was to read them for myself ... [and I prayed to Buddha]: "Oh, please arrange things so that we may go to the Capital, where there are so many Tales, and please let me read them all.

Her prayer is soon answered and her family moves to the Capital, Heian Kyo (now present-day Kyoto) and before too long she is given a copy of Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji.  We soon find out that Lady Sarashina was a dreamy youth without either spiritual or worldly ambitions, and she waits passively for a Prince Charming to whisk her away.  By the end of her account, the author is a sad and bitter woman in ill-health. She says: "If only I had not given myself over to Tales and poems but had spent my time in religious devotions, I should have been spared this misery."

Dreams figure prominently in the writing, and they mostly of a spiritual nature, which the author fails to take to heart. She also undertakes many pilgrimages to sacred sites, but these tend to be diversions from life at home rather than spiritual quests. 

Lady Sarashina tells her own tale using a combination of plain narrative, travelogue and poetry.  Descriptions of her fellow humans are usually terse, while those of the natural world are fuller and certainly more lyrical.  We are privy to her thoughts and emotions, but they are uneven: she is very aggrieved by the deaths of her sister and her parents, but she does not mention her marriage and hardly mentions her husband or children.

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams gives us a sketchy but beguiling insight into Japanese life as it was at the beginning of the last millennium and a wistful journey through life with the flawed and pitiful Lady Sarashina.

Publishing details: As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams - Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan (Penguin, London, undated, trans. Ivan Morris. pp.153)

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S.T. Coleridge

("A thousand thousand slimy things lived on,
and so did I."
The Mariner, with albatross hung around his neck,
cannot see the beauty of his fellow creatures,
the sea snakes. Etching by Gustave Doré)

A recent encounter with someone about twenty years my junior made me remember that the Western Canon is no longer something automatically transmitted to the next generation.  "Dead white males", I think sums up the  pedagogical argument that killed the transmission of the Canon.  Oh well, I liked most of what I read of it, and it is now that I return to one of its quirkier constituents: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".

The Rime is the longest poem that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote.  It is the story of a man who does not know how to love the world.  Being insensitive to the wonders of nature, he shoots an albatross that had befriended the crew of his ship in the Southern Ocean.  Shortly afterward, a supernatural revenge for the slaying takes place.  The Mariner, at this time a young man, is stranded "alone, alone, all, all alone" without human companionship until such time as he has learned to love the world.

There are plenty of critiques of the poem available, so I won't try to write a new one;  I do want to say a thing or two about my latest reading of this poem.

Firstly, when I re-read the passage about the killing of the albatross, I suddenly had the image of John Lennon in my mind.  As you will remember, Lennon sang about peace and love and about how we are really all one and the same ("Tomorrow Never Knows", for example), and someone shot him for his troubles.  The end of the beginning of the Mariner's troubles starts when he realises the beauty in even the ugliest of creatures and loves them.

Secondly, when I re-read the passage where the Mariner's ship becomes immobilised in the ocean:

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean

I was reminded of the film Groundhog Day.  There are definite parallels in the two stories. For instance, just as Bill Murray's character is released from his curse when he learns to be other-centered, the Mariner learns his lesson too: "He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small".

Survival ends and living begins when Love starts.

Publishing details: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (in Coleridge, OUP, Oxford, 1965, ed. J.Colmer)

The Bhagavad Gita

In 2001, I had the good fortune to visit London.  I was doubly lucky to have been able to have dinner at the Hare Krishna restaurant near Soho Square.  Outside the front door on that occasion was a life-size cardboard cut-out of Krishna and Arjuna riding on the latter's chariot.  The caption read: "The Bhagavad Gita - The Greatest Dialogue Ever Written."  A bold claim, but one that to my mind is true.

The Bhagavad Gita forms part of the great Indian epic The Mahabharata.  It comes at the point when two powerful families of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kuravas, are just about to fight a war for control of an Earthly kingdom.  Arjuna, a prince of the Kuravas, asks his charioteer Krishna to drive his chariot midway between the two armies so that he can see the faces of the relatives he is about to slay; and in viewing those cousins and uncles he loves so, he breaks down and loses all taste for action.  Krishna tells Arjuna to arise and take action, and so begins the dialogue.

Of course, the scenario is a metaphor: Krishna is the omnipotent God, Arjuna is the human mind, the chariot is the body, the two contending armies are the forces of good and evil, and the kingdom is the human soul.  "On the battle field of life" are we to side with good or evil, or do we do nothing?

Arjuna asks the questions, Krishna supplies the answers.  We are told of a cosmogonic vision of God, the universe and our place in it.  Separateness is an illusion.  God is in all, and all is in god.  The motive force of Creation is love.  We can apprehend the Truth in three ways: through knowledge, through work and through devotion.  Krishna says the easiest way for most people is through devotion to him (in his form as he appears in time and space), then through holy work according to the principles he lays down in the last few chapters.
  

The Bhagavad Gita is the ultimate mindfulness handbook: do everything as though you were doing it for the god you adore, and do it in the awareness of the light of the Eternal.  Luckily for us, Krishna had a good editor, and the whole thing weighs in at 120 pages.  Once read, The Bhagavad Gita is the gift that keeps on giving, eternally.

Publishing details: The Bhagavad Gita (Penguin, London, first published 1962, trans. Juan Mascaró)

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space by Joseph Campbell

Originally published in 1986, this is the last work of Joseph Campbell published in his lifetime.  It consists of three essays.

In the first essay, Campbell examines human history to date.  He finds that humans are very concerned with nourishing themselves, reproducing themselves and acquiring and accumulating power and territory.  As for compassion, he finds that this is something extended only to people in the in-group, whether it be village or nation.  Campbell points out that we live in the space age but our myths are still those of the bronze age, still myths of in-groups. A space age mythology, he feels, must be one that involves universal compassion.  Our planet is too small now for in-groups.

In the second essay, Campbell looks at what myths are and how they can be applied correctly.  Myths, he thinks, are something that gets denoted by language and images of the phenomenal world but which connote something that transcends the phenomenal world and cannot be described by language or represented by images.  He calls this thing eternity.

In the final essay, "The Way of Art", Campbell compares the aesthetic theories of Aristotle, James Joyce and ancient India.  Art, he says, is something which can generate mythologies, and it can lift us out of our limited understanding of the world and put us in touch with the great mystery of existence.

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space is not as easy to read as some of Campbell's other work, but it an impressive work of thought and scholarship.  I enjoyed it greatly.

Publishing details: The Inner Reaches of Outer Space - Metaphor as Myth and as Religion by Joseph Campbell (New World Press, Novato C.a., 2002. pp.146)

Myths of Light by Joseph Campbell

Pure genius.  Joseph Campbell is the Deep Thought of mythography and comparative religious studies.  He has the knack of comprehending the important and complex questions and answers of life, the universe and everything and transmitting his findings in a supremely entertaining and understandable form.

Campbell begins by relating the Hindu story "The Humbling of Indra", in which the top god of the pantheon has his colossal ego lanced by a small child.  We learn how ego is delusion, and how everything we need to be happy is really within us.

The rest of the book is an examination of the three main religions of the East - Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism - as seen through their theology and their mythology.  He also explains the social and spiritual development of the individual by way of the several yogic philosophies: raja, hatha, jnana and bhakti (breathing, stretching, thinking, adoring).  If you have ever wondered what chakras are all about, this is the book for you. 

There is a challenge for western readers, especially those from Christian, Jewish and Muslim backgrounds: these myths are not about good vs evil, they are about being and non-being.  It is an idea about religion and spirituality that can seem very alien to some of us.

Sounds daunting? Don't forget that Campbell makes it easy for his readers.  Even so, this is a book to be read slowly for several reasons.  One is to savour the prose.  Another is to take time to consider the images and ideas Campbell describes.  A third is assimilate the message - bliss: if you don't get it here (and it is within you), you ain't gonna get anywhere - and it is a message well worth the effort.

Publishing details: Myths of Light - Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal (New World Library, Novato Ca., 2003. pp.166)