The Trackless Way

I like the whole idea of a "trackless way". I think because it answers to my own experience - I often see and recognise that I am now where I am more in spite of any explicit beliefs I have sought to follow than because of them. Where I am is another matter entirely, but lets not go there! 

A trackless way

St John of the Cross, a Christian mystic, once said that if we wished "to be sure of the road we tread on then we should close our eyes and walk in the dark". Another way of seeing it is that we can seek to set the sails but then must wait for the wind to blow, for "heaven to do it's will".

Another trackless way

Well, I'm waffling as usual. It's just that I was reading from Joseph Campbell's "Creative Mythology" and soon hit upon a section entitled "The Trackless Way". In this Campbell says, in speaking of a western philosopher called Schopenhauer, that he:- 

(in his doctrine) of the metaphysical ground of the unique character of each and every human individual he stood worlds apart from the indifference of all Indian thought to individuation. The goal in India, whether in Hinduism, Buddhism, or Jainism, is to purge away individuality........

Schopenhauer

In fact, it seems that Mr Campbell often seeks to distinguish between Occidental and Oriental mythology. Does he come to conclusions? Maybe not. In a trackless land, definitive conclusions can be misguided. Regarding individualism, where do the words of the Buddhist zen master fit, as quoted in my last blog? 

"See that bamboo, how short it is. See that bamboo, how long it is". 

And what price suchness or the depictions in Pure Land Buddhism of the Lotus Flower, a flower that is seen to symbolise the uniqueness of each of us? So it seems that Indian Buddhism has morphed, via the Silk Road, via Mahayana, into "individuality", no matter what its first "goal" might have been, or is declared to be. 

The Silk Road - were "east" and "west" met?

Getting back to the trackless, there was an exchange of letters between Thomas Merton and a young child, Grace Sisson, a daughter of one of his friends. Grace had sent him a picture she had drawn showing a house. Merton wrote back that he thought the house beautiful but regretted that it had no road leading up to the front door. Grace then sent him a new drawing, this time with a path to the door. Merton then spoke of "the road to joy that is mysteriously revealed to us without our exactly realising it."

I think often we can make demands of Reality, that it must needs be a certain way before it can convince us that all manner of things shall be well. Perhaps some people we will see as "clever", as having "insight", and we perk our ears up when they speak or write. Others are cast into the outer darkness (!) as lacking in whatever we perceive to be "wisdom". Yet much can be found in the most unlikely of places; in fact, as far as I understand Buddhism, bodhisattvas - enlightenment beings who seek the good of all - come in all shapes and sizes. 

All shapes and sizes

All this is part of the trackless way. We just need to be receptive, open, cease to cherish opinions. Even listen to the children.

Related Quotes:- The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded. 

(Gustave Flaubert)