On the Path

California Path, Danielle Rosa

Working in California doing various kinds of data processing left me free to pursue my own internal goals. I wasn’t clinging to a traditional religion, but I did begin to feel its lack. At first I searched literature, resonating to the spirit I found in the language of certain writers, not others. During the early 1980’s it was the surrealists who followed from the boy-prophet Rimbaud, and led to Henry Miller and the American Beat writers. My guide was Wallace Fowlie, a writer, translator and teacher who wrote “the prophet or the visionary is the man who daily lives the metaphysical problems of his age. How to live is the theme of all prophets. Peace is always the goal.”

Toward the end of this surrealist seam of writers, I found Gary Snyder, a Californian who was a friend of Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg. Snyder studied Zen in Japan and wrote essays on nature and life which met me exactly where I was. According to Snyder, “the man of wide international experience, much learning and leisure – luxurious product of our long and sophisticated history – may with good reason wish to live simply, with few tools and minimal clothes, close to nature.”

A biography of Su Tungpo, The Gay Genius by Lin Yutang, captivated me. Su Tungpo was a Song dynasty (11^th Century) poet and politician continually in trouble with centralized imperial rule. He was exiled to remote places whenever he was in disgrace, but seemed to care little whether he was in high places or low. Once he wrote of walking in a garden late at night with a friend: “It looked like a transparent pool with the shadows of water grass in it, but they were really the shadows of bamboos and pine trees cast by the moonlight. Isn’t there a moon every night? And aren’t there bamboos and pine trees everywhere? But there are few carefree people like the two of us.”

This literature wasn’t completely new to me. In high school I had found a book of translations of Chinese poetry by Arthur Waley that I loved. I was very fond of Kawabata’s novels as I found them. In the early 1980’s I was also working in a company influenced by Chinese and Japanese architects, who embodied a tradition quite different than my own. One of my best friends at the time had grown up in Hong Kong. Living on what has become known as the Pacific Rim, I began to see myself as having Asian values.

And then I discovered John Blofeld, who in wonderful language expressed these values. Blofeld studied with the great 20^th century Chinese Buddhist Hsu Yun, but also described the centuries of Taoist learning that sustained China in his book Taoism: The Road to Immortality. Blofeld traveled much in China, meeting Taoists who showed him that “when nature is taken as a guide, a friend, living becomes almost effortless, tranquil, joyous even. Care departs; serenity takes over.” He described the Taoist concept of the “indivisibility and indeed identity of spirit and matter.”

What is fascinating about Taoism is its essentially feminine logic. In the Tao Te Ching, we find that “the valley spirit is undying; it is called the mysterious female, whose portal is known as the fundament of heaven and earth.” Taoist hermits retreated from worldly achievements, fame and money in order to live broadly and freely, like water. Blofeld says, “By being content with little and not giving a rap for what the neighbours think, one can attain a very large measure of freedom, shedding care and worry in a trice.”

All of this helped me understand my own deep needs for peace and freedom. Blofeld wrote of the conviction of the educated Chinese that “life itself, flowing in accordance with mysterious natural laws that operate in sweeping cycles of change, is charged with spiritual significance,” and said “true spiritual life must depend on something more solid than belief: namely the direct apprehension of realities that cannot be conveyed in words.”

Having established this base camp, I continued to explore, delighting in the poetry of Basho and the physical and mental explorations of Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard. I turned to many other books, including Deng Ming-Dao’s Scholar Warrior: An Introduction to the Tao in Everyday Life. As I began to study tai chi and qigong, I was reminded by Deng Ming-Dao that “It is only with discipline and perseverance that you will reach your goals. Discipline is freedom, and the companion to imagination.”

Beginning the practice of tai chi with the San Francisco students of Master Tung Kai-ying in 1989, I found a living tradition of moving meditation which quieted my mind and answered my needs for community and disciplined study. Instead of reading, tai chi requires physical practice, attuning the body, mind and heart. It can be done anywhere, on an island in Maine or under the trees at a California YMCA camp. Thus the search resulted not in a religion, but a practice; a path which excludes no part of life and is anchored in the truly ancient subculture Gary Snyder describes in The Real Work: “The subculture is the main line and what we see around us is the anomaly.”

In Nature’s Stricter Lessons, this path is given to Marty. Paul has slipped easily back into his cultural Christianity, leavened somewhat by his readings in Bonhoeffer, and unapologetically open to the growing Darwinian theses about the origins of man. Line’s social justice ideals are not based in any particular religion, though she has been influenced by her husband’s expansive Jewish family, and by the herbalists and healers she knows. She has no problem bringing up her children to a strict morality and an understanding of the love and kindness embodied in the Golden Rule.