Maya

Maya, the Hindu Goddess of Illusion

In my last blog I half threatened another on Maya - aka "illusion" - and looking back I see that I have already headlined it in a Blog titled "Maya and the Book of Revelation". 

In that I see that I wrote the following, "Maya is not that this world is illusion but, as far as the Dharma is concerned, the claim that to see and know this world falsely is to suffer." (Suffering, Pali dukkha)

Trying to see truly

Which is quite an optimistic thought, if true, with the consequence being that if we see and know rightly our Cosmos can itself be a true home. As I see it, more optimistic, more assuring, than any thought that this world is not our true home, that it is in fact more a preparation for a better one; which often goes together with implying that any creed or belief is more a lifeboat to escape from this world - and heaven help those who are not on board. This in contrast with the Dharma, in its Mahayana manifestation, that samsara and nirvana are "one"and therefore never a betrayal of this world for some imaginary "other".

All aboard

 It remains to actually realise the true way of seeing and so to know the end of suffering.

 "I teach this and this alone, suffering and the ending of suffering" said the Buddha; many times according to the texts. 

Yet here we are, and we suffer, and suffering is all around us. In what sense does it ever end? In what sense could it ever end?

"Old Man in Sorrow", Vincent Van Gogh (who knew his own)

This was a question I asked many moons ago on a Buddhist Forum and as I remember, there were many replies but nothing resolved, nothing definitive. But the point I would insist upon making is that all these questions are not academic, or merely a way of passing time, as meanwhile true life drifts by around us. For me, if the Dharma is the path to the end of suffering, nothing could be more relevant, more concrete. more significant; nothing can give life more purpose than to seek to walk that path. 

Just look around, look inside, see the suffering. Look back through history and see more - often suffering that appears to be pointless, with no "answer" in sight but to appeal and hope for another world where all the answers will be found - usually by the chosen few. Compensation. For some.

"Guernica" Picasso

Maya, illusion, can be understood in many ways. This is where interpretation comes into play, and maybe where the illusion of understanding is the greatest temptation. Here are a few relevant passages from various texts:- 

See it (the world) as a bubble, see it as a mirage; one who regards the world this way, the King of Death does not see. 

(Dhammapada)

So you should see this fleeting world - A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. 

(Diamond Sutra)

Know all things to be like this; a mirage, a cloud castle, a dream, an apparition, without essence, but with qualities that can be seen

(Samadhi Raja Sutra)

The aggregate of discrimination is like a mirage because it is mistakenly apprehended by the thirst of attachment

(The Aksayamatinirdesa Sutra) 

To sum up, possibly, the world is not a dream, but is dream-like. 

The world is a bubble

Moving on. T S Eliot begins Four Quartets with these words:-

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps in time future, 

And time future contained in time past. 

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable. 

Unredeemable. Fixed. But what is "time" and what part does it play in all this? Eliot ends his own musings with the solution in a "condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything, where the fire and the rose are one". 

"The fire and the rose are one"

My own musings lead me towards not falling into the temptation of thinking that I have understanding. (Often I muse also upon the words of the old hymn, will your anchor hold?)

Rather I see and hear the call of simplicity, I see and hear the call of selflessness; and seek to hear more deeply - and know this can or should be only be for the sake of all others, who suffer as I do, and many so much more than myself. In Christianity I would say this is to share the cross of Christ. Or, at least, to seek to do so. Surrendering all things to the "Father", this for the sake of others.

Sharing, cross or not

The Buddhist way is the way of the Bodhisattva, a word for one who has generated bodhicitta,  a spontaneous wish and compassionate mind to attain Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings. As the end of the Bodhicaryavatara (Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life) has it......and now so long as space endures, as long as there are beings to be found, may I continue likewise to remain to drive away the sorrows of the world. 

A Bodhisattva

Well, I'm not really sure I have got very far here. Aspiration always seems to exceed reality. Perhaps not.

Related Quotes:-

In the course of time one does not feel even the existence of God. After attaining enlightenment one sees that gods and deities are all Maya.

(Sarada Devi)

Speaking of the Buddhist Touching the Earth Mudra:-  the Buddha's right hand points downward to touch the earth, the other supports a begging bowl - symbolising acceptance of the gift - grace. In these two gestures the whole programme of our spiritual exigencies is summed up.......an active attitude toward the world and a passive attitude toward heaven......this opposed to the attitude of the "ignorant man" who passively accepts the world and resists grace, gift, and heaven.

(Marco Pallis, "Is There Room for Grace in Buddhism?")

Remember: the grass is never greener. You don't need any presents for Christmas. Presence in the moment - whether it's a dukkha (suffering) moment or a sukha (happiness) moment - is the greatest gift of all. 

(Words found on the Elephant Journal website)

A shout in the street

Seeking clarity?

I have now cleared up a major concern. As I see it, seeking clarification of mind is not that which Shinran would say was calculation. Amida would seem to agree. So I can proceed. 

It does seem to me that once we accept Reality itself as beyond comprehension and accept the consequences of this i.e. that we can only find rest in trust/faith/pure acceptance/grace or whatever, then we can move on and live safely in our world. 

Whether heading for hell

 or heading for the Pure Land

 all is in Amida's hands

Acceptance

That is about it. I ask no more. Then I can move on, into the world of diversification, even of this and that, yet without undue clinging to me and mine. 

It seems many seek to pin down reality. It must be either this or that, thus dictating the past, predicting the future and even determining the present. Things tend to congeal. And as for those pesky people who have a different opinion, another concept of reality, well there is always the Inquisition or a weapon of some description. The pen might well be mightier than the sword yet the sword, looking back through history, has always tended to have the biggest say, if not the last word. 

Pinning down reality

Thinking about it (now I have been cleared to do so) it does seem that many have declared that this, this, this and this are the facts of reality. Various beliefs and creeds, all indisputable and often found within a favoured text. But when the going gets rough in defending their favoured landscape of mind, they then fall back upon the mysteries of faith, of "who are we to question the Lord?" Really, all I am saying is that the mysteries of faith need to come first; the ground (in which we live and move and have our being) the "ground" itself, is that which is incomprehensible - or as is said in the "east", empty. Of suchness, such as it is; and what follows is that "emptiness is form and form is emptiness".

 

Up then goes the cry of "pantheism", the fear of relativity, that there is therefore no "right" or "wrong", which is inferred must be fixed in stone to guide us on our way. Or the "eastern" talk of maya is thrown into the ring and decried:- "This world is real, suffering is real, it is not all an illusion"! As I understand it, maya is simply the default way of seeing the world by a mind determined to fix it down permanently according to its culturally induced preferences (well, that could become the subject of an entire blog, with many qualifications, but that will do for now) 

Anyway, time for a quote from Alan Watts on all this:-

The moment I name it, it is no longer God; it is man, tree, green, black, red, soft, hard, long, short, atom, universe. One would readily agree with any theologian who deplores pantheism that these denizens of the world of verbiage and convention, these sundry "things" conceived as fixed and distinct entities, are not God. If you ask me to show you God, I will point to the sun, or a tree, or a worm. But if you say, "You mean, then, that God is the sun, the tree, the worm, and all other things?" -  I shall have to say that you have missed the point entirely.

A depiction of God, or maybe missing the point

James Joyce has his own words, found in his "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", a semi-autobiographical work; that God is a "shout in the street." Here is the short passage where the words are used:- 

"The ways of the creator are not our ways" Mr Deasy said."All human history moves toward one great goal, the manifestation of God......"

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window saying: "That is God" 

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! 

"What?" Mr Deasy asked.

"A shout in the street" Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

In effect, as Joseph Campbell claims in his own analysis of this passage, "Mr Deasy speaks of the process of God in history. There is no process, Stephen says, God is present." 

And Campbell then refers to a verse found in the Gnostic "Gospel According to Thomas", the kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it. As Stephen says further along in the book, "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake".

Joyce, listening for God

Related Quotes:- 

The way of the Tao is to begin with the simple good with which one is endowed by the very fact of existence. Instead of self-conscious cultivation of this good (which vanishes when we look at it and becomes intangible when we try to grasp it), we grow quietly in the humility of a simple, ordinary life, and this is analogous (at least psychologically) to the Christian "life of faith." It is more a matter of believing the good than of seeing it as the fruit of one's effort. 

(Thomas Merton, from the the preface to his loose translation of Chuang Tzu, The Way of Chuang Tzu)

 

Chuang Tzu

"Master Gotama, is suffering self-made?"

"Don't say that, Kassapa."

"Then is it other-made?"

"Don't say that, Kassapa."

"Then is it both self-made and other-made?"

"Don't say that, Kassapa."

"Then is it the case that suffering, being neither self-made nor other-made, arises spontaneously?"

"Don't say that, Kassapa."

"Then does suffering not exist?"

"It's not the case, Kassapa, that suffering does not exist. Suffering does exist."

"Well, in that case, does Master Gotama not know or see suffering?"

"Kassapa, it's not the case that I don't know or see suffering. I know suffering. I see suffering.......To say 'The one who acts is the one who experiences the result of the act' amounts to the eternalist statement, 'Existing from the very beginning, stress is self-made.' 'The one who acts is someone other than the one who experiences' amounts to the annihilationist statement, 'For one existing harassed by feeling, stress is other-made.' Avoiding these two extremes, the Tathagata teaches the Dharma, the Middle Way.

(From the Acela Sutta, The Samyutta Nikaya)

The Buddha speaks with Kassapa

WW1 and Poetry

The "poetry" of war?

Much has been written in the UK over the past few years about the Great War. The "war to end all wars". Myself, it often seems that those who fought in it, especially those who died in it, are perceived as a "special" generation. 

Without seeking to deny the depth of the sacrifices made, I tend to see - or try to see - all as "special"; and think that the unique individual human being is often lost amid "generations", special or not. Maybe just a quibble, but I always question claims of "what they died for" or "what they fought for". Just one thing filling each and every heart?

Remembrance at a local village

Each death was unique. As each wife or mother would have known on receiving the telegram or the knock on the door. Fathers too, brothers and sisters. 

Receiving the telegram

On the face of it, writing poetry seems a strange thing to do in response to the horror of war. Yet like most artistic expressions it seems it is an attempt to understand and make sense of experience; often the attempt to make others understand. It is the Tao being shared. Never divided.

I have long had an interest in WWI and this has centred upon the Western Front and life  and death in the trenches. Not to say that I know nothing of Gallipoli, the Eastern Front and a few other arenas of the conflict, but it has certainly been  what could be called "life in the trenches" that has captured my imagination. If "imagination" is really the right word. 

Once I went on a trip to Ypres and the Menin Gate. The tour also took in the Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery. The sheer number of names on the Menin Gate Memorial is staggering, each one a testimony to a life lived and a  life lost. 

A view of Tyne Cot - more names

I have a fond memory of Ypres, of buying something or other in a small shop, having interrupted a conversation in the local language between another customer and the  proprietor. On the way out I was called back, "Hey, don't forget your wallet" (in perfect English) My wallet, which I had left on the counter, was handed back. Always remembered in gratitude, and the smiles on their faces. An example of just how the War has been "shared", of how so many years later the sacrifice of others  becomes "embodied". I'm told that many in Belgium still have a fondness for the English. Well, I'm drifting - though perhaps not. 

Anyway to pad out this blog, a poem or two, the first, "MCMXIV", by one of my favorite poets, Philip Larkin. Philip Larkin was born only in 1922, and so was imagining back, and in a sense seeing a watershed between "ancient" and "modern", capturing the mood that perhaps then was, of "it will all be over by Christmas", of "let's do our bit" before its over, an "August Bank Holiday lark":-

Those long uneven lines

Standing as patiently

As if they were stretched outside

The Oval or Villa Park,

The crowns of hats, the sun

On moustached archaic faces

Grinning as if it were all

An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached

Established names on the sunblinds,

The farthings and sovereigns,

And dark-clothed children at play

Called after kings and queens,

The tin advertisements

For cocoa and twist, and the pubs

Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring

The place-names all hazed over

With flowering grasses, and fields

Shadowing Domesday lines

Under wheat’s restless silence;

The differently-dressed servants

With tiny rooms in huge houses,

The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word—the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

"An August Bank Holiday Lark"

All a long way from those who die as cattle from "Anthem For Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen. This "Anthem" creates a contrast between a Church Service and the sacrifice (slaughter) of the soldiers. The "choirs" of wailing shells; and what of the candles found at such services? 

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

Wilfred Owen, who died in the war close to its end, also wrote "Futility":-

Move him into the sun— 

Gently its touch awoke him once, 

At home, whispering of fields half-sown. 

Always it woke him, even in France, 

Until this morning and this snow. 

If anything might rouse him now 

The kind old sun will know. 

Think how it wakes the seeds— 

Woke once the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides 

Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? 

Was it for this the clay grew tall? 

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil 

To break earth's sleep at all?

Futility

Just to finish, with a more "uplifting" poem of Siegfried Sassoon. Not every day was a day in the trenches, nor a time of horror, "Everybody Sang":-

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away ... O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Well, that's it. Except perhaps a final image, of the river of Poppies flowing like blood from the Tower of London, one of the many commemorations of WWI during 2018......

Related Quotes:- 

Ah! Summer grasses!

All that remains

Of the warriors dreams

(Basho)

I, too, saw God through mud -

The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled

(Lines from "Apologia pro Poemate Meo" by Wilfred Owen)

 

The Divine Comedy and The Waste Land

Dante and the Divine Comedy

Bob Dylan was once asked about his influences. He said that if you have eyes and ears you are influenced. At other times he would tell tall stories of having, in his teens, travelled with a circus for six years. Hog-wash, but it made a good story at the time. But we are all influenced for good or ill. And most have eyes and ears.

Where Dylan spent none of his life

I often think that during the first twenty or so years of our lives we are "under the influence" ( so to speak ) then, in response, throughout the rest of our lives, those influences play themselves out. Born into another culture, another time, and our "heart felt" beliefs, those some are prepared to die for, kill for, even force upon others, would have been different. A disturbing thought. What price the "examined life"? 

"Socrates looking in a mirror" The examined life?

Well, enough of that. I'm trying to recover the point of this blog and what led to it. I believe it was once again thinking of the line from the "Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest", Dylan's nothing is revealed. It made me think of a phrase of the zen master Dogen, one I have also loved, that in the whole of the universe nothing is hidden. On the face of it (!) the two are in conflict; and yet perhaps not. Not in a Cosmos where love has no why. 

There is no "why" to be identified with, made our own, yet all is manifest in each and every moment. And the Tao "can be shared but not divided." 

Shared but not divided

For me the only true freedom is to be at one with Reality-as-is; infinite compassion, infinite wisdom, infinite potential. 

In the Divine Comedy Dante begins by finding himself lost in a deep forest, having strayed from the true path. I say "true path", yet here we have the heart of the matter. Exactly what path is "true" and how do we know it to be true?

Here are  various translations:-  

for the straightforward pathway had been lost (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

the right way blurred and lost (Robin Kirkpatrick)

I went astray from the straight road (John Ciardi)

the way ahead was blotted out (Clive James)

gone from the path direct (Henry Francis Cary)

Take your pick, but I think most would capture the main intent and significance. Dante then proceeds to relate just how he recovers the "true" path and arrives safely where "that perfect pardon which is perfect peace" is found. I sought for other versions of this last line but became lost amid the cantos and verses and renderings, unable to identify exactly which expressions corresponded. 

But did find this:-

Thus she began:- "You dull your own  perceptions 

with false imaginings and do not  grasp

what would be clear but for your preconceptions

Which is from the John Ciardi translation and appears relevant, at least to me.

Preconceptions. Good or bad?

Moving on to the Waste Land by T S Eliot, this is generally recognised in literary circles as the greatest ever work of Modernist literature. Not really my cup of tea and I much prefer Dylan's Mr Tamborine Man, who dances "beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free" also "forgetting about today until tomorrow." But each to their own. 

But Eliot had obviously found himself in a place where the way ahead had been blotted out, or blurred, or lost, and needed to try to find his bearings. And he does finish with the word "shantih", repeated three times, which is the way many Hindu Upanishads end, a mantra "conveying the peace within its inner sound" and thus "revises the whole poem from a statement of modern malaise into a sacred and prophetic discourse". Or so I am told.

T S Eliot relaxes in the Waste Land. "I was not even bothering to understand what I was saying" he is reported to have said. At least Dylan said he was at the circus.

Analysis and expounding on the "meaning" of any poem, story, painting or song appears to be a thankless task and obviously can never be definitive. When seeking images to illustrate my Dylan Lyrics Blook I often turned to various attempts by others to give the "meaning" of a song, to provide a hook to  follow. I found more often than not that each song had multiple "meanings" and you begin to wonder if any such meaning tells us more about the expounder than anything else. Which is good, or at least I think so. 

Multiple meanings. Well, two.

Related Quotes:-

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form

 ( The Heart Sutra, Mahayana Buddhist text)

They do Him wrong who take  God in just one particular way; they have the way rather than God

 (Meister Eckhart)

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

(T S Eliot, line from  The Waste Land)

One must be so careful these days 

(another line from The Waste Land)

Those who live with their senses guarded and conquered and is established in the Dharma, delights in uprightness and gentleness; who has gone beyond attachments and has overcome all sorrows; that wise person does not cling to what is seen and heard.

(Sutta-Nipata II, 2:12)

Be careful, not fearful

Finnegans Wake

"Here comes everybody". James Joyce and Finnegans Wake

No, I have not read it. Some have. Supposedly Finnegans Wake is the most difficult book to read in the English language, and having dipped very briefly into its pages I would tend to agree. 

Reading of James Joyce, his long suffering wife, one Nora Barnacle, told of how when Joyce was writing the book she would hear him chuckling to himself long into the night. So it would seem that he at least understood the jokes. 

Nora and James - who is chuckling now?

There is a cheap ebook, "Finnegans Wake in 15 Minutes", which offers I would surmise some sort of "bluffers guide" for those seeking to convince others that they are that way inclined. Yes, cheap, but I will save my money.

Whatever, here is the very beginning of Finnegans Wake:- 

 riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Howth Castle - by which the riverruns

I do wonder how anyone could possibly proof read such a book. But leaving that aside, this strange half sentence is in fact the conclusion of the unfinished sentence that closes the book. Thus the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. Joyce, perhaps being of the same mind as William Blake - who said that he "must create a system or be enslaved by anothers" -sought to create a whole new vocabulary. Therefore he ran words into each other, words that lived, words of becoming, combining two thoughts (or more) at once.

A painting by William Blake

Off the top of my head, seeking to be creative and emulate Joyce, what about "agonversary"?  A word that perhaps captures the misery of 50 years of marriage, combining as it does both "agony" and "anniversary". But Joyce conjured up such words in a constant stream, weaving them into his story (I am  assured by some that there is in fact a story) and as I mentioned before, he chuckled his way through the night, humoured by his own inventiveness.

Consulting a Lexicon of the Wake, we have "abnihilisation" which we are told means the annihilation of something back to nothing. Joyce maintained that while he created Ulysses out of next to nothing, he was creating Finnegan's Wake out of nothing itself. Another word ( drawn from the very beginning of the Lexicon as I only downloaded a sample ) is "absintheminded". The combination of an alcoholic drink with the workings of the mind, conjuring up thoughts of absent mindedness. I'm beginning to understand just why Joyce was chuckling. But make up your own mind. 

Deconstructing James Joyce

We also have "accomplasses", in other words (!), young ladies plotting together. "Achdung" I shall leave to your imagination. I love "agleement", which suggests a group of people sharing a joke, all finding it funny.

Joseph Campbell has a book, "Mythic Worlds, Modern Words", which goes into the works of James Joyce in great depth. Campbell sees the works of Joyce as seeking to emulate that of Dante. Dante expressed in the Divine Comedy the essence of his own age, a time of "renaissance", change, where the  previously accepted teachings of the past were all in question. I'm undecided as to whether he pulled it all together or began to tear it all apart. Much the same as our very own times, when far more than that "old time religion" seems no longer to fit the bill.

The cosmology of Dante as envisaged by Botticelli

Campbell asserts that Ulysses was Joyce's Hell, of solid persons interacting and caught in the sway of opposites, of this as opposed to that. Finnegan's Wake was his purgatory. Things are becoming, fluid. Alas, Joyce never lived to present us with his heaven. Though thinking about it, it would surely have been his heaven, not ours? Nevertheless, having room I would hope for mercy and grace. 

Campbell  does say it would have been a short book, based upon the ocean. A relatively simple book. But we shall never know.

"A simple book of the ocean"

Related Quotes:-

"All mythologies are metamorphoses of form of a single great mythological system............ Joyce addresses the problem.........(of the) transition from a provincial limited experience of religion, race, and loyalties to a larger archetypal understanding."

 (Joseph Campbell, speaking of James Joyce)

"What do you do when you don't experience orthodox sentiments? Can you go on accepting the world that lives by them? He is already in exile." 

(Joseph Campbell, speaking of a character of Joyce, Stephen Dedalus, the literary alter ego of Joyce)

"I have never yet been able to conceive how anything can be known to truth by consecutive reasoning........" 

(From the letters of John Keats)

"A poets mind .......is constantly amalgamating disparate experience......the mind of the poet is constantly forming new wholes"

(T S Eliot) 

"All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light"

(James Joyce, from a letter written to Lady Gregory, 1902)

"Mystery of the unconscious? Bah! What about the mystery of consciousness?"

(James Joyce)

Dinner parties

A Dinner Party

Apparently Jean-Paul Sartre once said that "hell is other people". Which seems on the pessimistic side to me, but his theme was the subject of his play "No Exit", a play set in hell. But for Sartre hell had nothing to do with fire and pitchforks, although the gnashing of teeth could possibly have figured. 

No, the hell of Sartre is a lounge room and, as said, the torment is other people. Only a couple, but for Sartre this is more than enough. 

Not having had the pleasure of actually reading the play I cannot comment further. Maybe he makes a good point or two. Reading recently about France during the Nazi Occupation and of the various goings on on the Left Bank of Paris, Sartre comes across as rather a good egg ( as we say in the UK ) and prone to a drink or two. At least, he did after managing to get himself out of a German Concentration Camp. He was also a bit of a bed jumper but I'll leave that aside in respect to my younger readers. 

Anyway, this preamble leads me to the subject of this particular blog, my 101st. Dinner Parties and who would be invited. Sartre?  Difficult to decide. Would he bring with him a copy of "Being and Nothingness" or a bottle of wine? (Or both?) On fear of the former, perhaps no invite for Jean-Paul. So just who would I invite? It's a good game.

Another bundle of laughs from Jean-Paul

First I would have Keith Richards. He has written a superb autobiography, "Life", and it seems he would like as an epitaph on his gravestone "He passed it on". The music of the blues that is, not  his stash of drugs, rather quickly, when stopped by the police. Keef - as he is known - is very well read and  speaks in a slow drawl that suggests inebriation. However it is now believed that his excesses have been curbed and he is "clean". I do believe he would make a fine guest. 

Keith Richards, passing it on. Portrait by band-mate Ronnie Wood

Another would obviously be Thomas Merton. Every other guest would be asked to bring along a bottle or two of their favourite beer as Merton liked to sample the various brews, as  testified to in his Asian Journal. Father Louis, as he was known in his monastery, could say grace before the festivities and then launch into whatever else he wanted to. Cistercian Silence, Zen or yet another story about the snake that lurked in his hermitage woodpile. 

Thomas Merton, AKA Father Louis, I presume far from any snakes

Moving on ( as Father Louis did, rather quickly, upon seeing the snake ) I gave thought long and hard over whether an invite would be extended to John Keats. He was a very ardent person, intense, dedicated to the poetic muse.

Epitaphs have been mentioned. Keats, when facing death in Rome, aged just 25, asked his friend Joseph Severn to have just these words placed on his gravestone:- "Here lies one whose name was writ in water", and also that his name not be given. Severn complied, and the gravestone of Keats merely states "A young English poet" . 

The problem I have with Keats is his habit of indulging in poetry competitions when meeting with friends. He could spin off a few lines at will, fine stuff, fit for the print shop, to be admired by all. Alas, any attempt I made would pale in comparison. I can see the sneer and curl of his lip now as he perused any offering I made. He would be polite, but sometimes that is far worse than jeers. No, thinking about it, I think Mr Keats would have to be excluded.

John Keats

James Joyce? Yes indeed. Yes. I have loved him ever since reading the final word of Ulysses.......Yes. After the long long unpunctuated monologue of the adulterous  Molly Bloom, recounting her  amorous adventures and various other memories......yes. Maybe her words would bring down upon her head the wrath of the pious, yet in full consideration of my very own frailties, she becomes lovable, and life becomes livable. 

When Joyce was asked what he did in the War he said:- "I wrote Ulysses". Joyce also liked a tipple.The only downside is that he often relied upon others to supply the bottles.

Yes, it's Molly Bloom (as portrayed in film)

Finally, for now, Shinran. I must admit that he looks like a bit of a sourpuss in some of the portraits of him, but he did advise those at a wake to have a drink or two to cheer themselves up, so maybe the artists were seeking to bestow him with a gravitas he never actually sought. Here are his words when speaking of his place in our world:-

How joyous I am, my heart and mind being rooted in the Buddha-ground of the universal Vow, and my thoughts and feelings flowing within the dharma-ocean, which is beyond comprehension!

Dharma-Ocean

Actually I thought I was building up quite a guest list by now (without even considering Bob Dylan or Attila the Hun) but looking back see that I have chosen to exclude both Sartre and Keats. My judgemental mind! So I will allow them both in, but perhaps insisting that they occupy a spare corner together. Keats can invite Sartre to compose a spontaneous ode to the proceedings, while Sartre can then proceed to wail and gnash his teeth.

Gnashing teeth

Related Quotes:- 

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”

(Jean-Paul Sartre)

I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police. 

(Keith Richards)

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

(Thomas Merton)

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced. 

(John Keats)

To mingle right action with the action that is not akin to it is called the confused practice. Those that err in this have not attained to the single heart. They know not thankfulness for the grace of the Enlightened One.

(Shinran) 

Echoes of emptiness