There may be some disruption of service for a while as we are undergoing a server upgrade.

Suggested reading: The Green Man, which has been rewritten and expanded.

Also, the funniest blog post I’ve read in ages: The real Barak Obama by James Delingpole.

John Evans

As it’s a blessedly quiet time in politics, I thought I’d do something completely different this week.

Some readers might remember a short story, called The Minister I published here the Easter before last. It received favourable comments so, time for another.

Most TV detectives have deep-seated character flaws. They are often hopeless alcoholics, depressive, and usually totally disorganized.

Why not a detective who is perfect in every way? A Holmes without the drug habit, a Watson with an incisive intelligence, a Rebus who is not endlessly shambolic? You are about to meet him:

Lama Gampopa.

Lama Gampopa looked around calmly, sniffing the air, finding it warm, despite the January chill. His expression was one of benign repose, and he moved with a grace that belied his middle years.

The lama checked in at a modest hotel in Sussex Gardens aware that he was the object of much curiosity. Gampopa was always aware. That was his training, to be conscious of all that was going on around him down to the smallest detail.

He had been sent to London to trace and recover some of the lost treasures that had been looted from the monasteries of Tibet and were now appearing on the art markets of the world. He possessed modest funds to buy back whatever he could, but even the Council knew that the haul would be limited.

One particular artefact was the reason for his present visit. It was a codex — an early form of book — called The Treasure of the Dharma Eye. Hand-printed from wooden blocks onto thick, leathery parchment, the manuscript was said to contain the ultimate secret of Enlightenment from one of the Buddha’s closest disciples.

His contact was Jeremy Richardson, a member of one of the many Tibetan support groups that flourish now in the West. Richardson was a former police inspector with CID and knew his way around the London art scene. He was still relatively young and possessed an affable manner, which pleased Gampopa.

“I’m told you have trained as a detective, Lama?”
“Indeed, that is why I am here.”
“With the Indian police force, no doubt?”
“Oh no, it was less formal than that.”

Richardson’s eyebrows lifted.

“Sherlock Holmes, Inspector.”

The ex-policeman’s eyes widened further.

“I have studied the works of that great detective in meticulous detail,” said the lama earnestly. “I have analyzed his distinctive principles and assimilated them thoroughly.”

Richardson held back a smile, but Gampopa spotted it at once.

“You think I am a little naive, perhaps, learning from books of fiction?”
“Oh, no, Lama. It’s just that we’re not taught that at Hendon.”
“Hendon?”
“Our training college for the Metropolitan police in England.”

“Ah!” Gampopa inclined his head in that peculiar way of his, signifying that he understood. “You will realize by now that our ways are different. We do not distinguish between genres, merely between different degrees of usefulness.”

“Yes, of course … admirable.” said Richardson, only half convinced.
“Holmes has now become part of my method.”
“Your method?”
“I follow the grain of things. Everything has a grain, Inspector: life, history, human nature. Try tearing a piece of newspaper. In one direction you can tear a straight line. In the other, you have no control. I follow the grain. I look for the flaws in the thoughts of others … and all things become apparent.”

A trawl around the auction houses produced little enlightenment. There were few Tibetan items for sale in any of them. Moreover, a threat of European taxes had frightened off many potential sellers who had decamped to New York. Some were holding fire until the financial climate was clearer. It seemed a lost cause.

Over coffee in the Strand, Richardson sounded bleak. “I hope this hasn’t been a wild goose chase for you, Lama?”

“If a goose is not wild, there is no need to chase it, Inspector.” And he sat back in his chair as if all the time ever created was at his disposal.

Richardson watched him closely. He was fascinated by this throw-back from a past age who yet seemed to have such effortless mastery of the modern world. He treats it, Richardson thought, as if it doesn’t exist. He passes through it, notes its variations, and passes on, with that invincible serenity as his trade-mark.

“What would you do, Jeremy, if you had a priceless artefact for sale and were here in London now?”

The ex-inspector noted the first name terms. “Well … it’s hard to say … go to New York … or Switzerland.”

“But would you? Would it not be easier to arrange a private sale? Say through agents. After all, these dealers know the people who would want to buy, and one Tibetan piece is very much like another.”

“You may be right. There are underground auctions, but they are fiendishly difficult to approach.”

The lama was thoughtful: “But as a bona fide buyer would I not be welcome at such gatherings?”

“You might. But I’m too well known; there’s no chance for me.”

Gampopa smiled. “Then you will give me the contacts, Jeremy, and I will do the rest.”

Richardson spent the afternoon with some old colleagues at the Met, making a list of those who might be able to help Lama Gampopa. But independent enquiries through the known sources proved fruitless. He met up with the lama at his hotel after supper.

“We’ve hit the wall, Lama,” he said wearily. “There’s nothing stirring in the undergrowth.”

The lama smiled slowly. “I think I have had better luck Jeremy, my friend.”
“Don’t tell me … you’ve been following the grain!”
“Think for a moment … who would have his ear to the ground? Why, the best known Tibetophile in the world. If the codex is up for sale in London, don’t you suppose he would be here?”

Richardson was intrigued. “Who are we talking about?”
“Hiram B. Wannamaker the Third.”
“You’re serious?”

“He is known to be a great collector of artefacts. But more than that, he has a genuine interest in our culture, which means more to him than mere objects. And being an American, if he were here in London, the Embassy would almost certainly know about it.”

“That follows. So we must go there first thing…”
“I have already been,” the lama twinkled. “He is staying at Claridges.”
“Then tomorrow…”
“I visited him at once. Luckily, I caught him at afternoon tea.”

Richardson cast a rueful glance at this surprisingly mercurial lama. “And the upshot?”

“The codex is being auctioned at a private house off Park Lane tomorrow morning. Hiram, naturally, is going. And, Jeremy, I am to go as his adviser on the Tibetan language.”

Richardson waited impatiently in the bar at Claridges for the return of the two men. It seemed an age, and he was beginning to feel distinctly left out of things. Eventually, he was asked to go up to Mr Wannamaker’s suite, where Hiram and the lama awaited him. On a small coffee table rested the precious codex. It was almost two feet in length and had an air of great age about it.

“Jeremy, we have it. Hiram has been successful in his bid. But you can’t imagine how much he had to pay.”

Wannamaker seemed overjoyed. “Worth every cent, Mr Richardson. If this document contains the secret of Enlightenment, what possible earthly price could you put on it.”

Lama Gampopa gingerly opened the codex leaf by leaf, examining the sometimes faded script in a gentle rocking movement of his head, like a speed reader.

“It is all here, gentlemen. Everything we expected.”

Richardson could contain himself no longer. “But Lama, doesn’t this mean you’ve lost the codex. Won’t it go to the States now and be buried forever in a private collection?”

“You underestimate me, Mr Richardson,” the American interjected. “Lama Gampopa and I have a deal. He will translate the document for me and tell me the secret of Enlightenment, and I’ll gladly present the codex to the Tibetan community as a gift.”

Richardson gasped. Gampopa had done it, and without even dipping into his funds.

“And now Lama,” said Hiram urgently, “as a down-payment, just read out in English the part which contains the treasure — the greatest secret of all.”

Gampopa drew in an audible breath. “Very well, Hiram, my friend. I have already found the passage. I should warn you it is very profound and may seem a trifle obscure. But I assure you it contains the very essence of life itself.”

“But what does it say?” Hiram could barely restrain himself.

“It says: ‘Thus have I heard: there is a grain in all actions and in all things. Know the grain and follow it. Enlightenment will walk with you every step of the way.”

Hiram blinked.

Gampopa smiled inscrutably.

Copyright © John Evans 2010.

John Evans is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face?

Available from Amazon and all good book sellers.

Syntagma Books is looking for a book cover and page-layout designer for future titles.

Location is not important, but accuracy and fault spotting skills essential. We are not particularly looking for a big design agency, although we don’t rule anyone out at this stage. Home workers with competence, flair and experience are welcome to apply.

Please email examples of work to: john@syntagmabooks.com

Generally, we take matter as solid and real, and we recognize a rather ineffable substance called mind, which in some way interacts with matter to produce our consciousness of the hard, metallic landscape out there. This duality of matter and mind, however, serves to fracture the actual reality of the world and gives rise to all our false notions of separateness and alienation.

Non-materialists do not talk of mind and matter, but of mind and form, where form is not a separate substance like matter, but the shape that mind assumes in this case and that. Mind is the only reality. Form is the way that mind works, its play and way of expressing itself.

“All very well,” say the materialists, “but how do you explain the solidity of the world? If I hit you on the head with this hammer, will you still believe that the hammer is ‘mind only’?” The reply is that both the hammer, the interaction and the pain are all products of mind’s activity.

A stage hypnotist, for example, tells his subject that there is a fierce dog on the stage. Immediately, the subject sees the dog and moves away from it. Later he is told to pat it on the head. Now he feels the solidity of the animal, its skin and bones, its hot breath. To the hypnotised man, the dog is totally real.

The same effect occurs during dreaming. We recognize the absolute presence of the dream world, until, that is, we awaken and realize that it was all the product of our mind.

Objects, then, are concentrations of mind activity brought about by concentration. To the One Mind school of Buddhism, the universe is the vast concentration of the Buddha–mind. We ourselves are clusters of concentrated thought–energy. But since in a single ocean the part is inseparable from the whole, we are also the whole of the contemplating mind.

This “idealism” can be off–putting to many people. We sense a kind of existential abyss here and back away from it. The question we should ask, though, is who is it who is afraid? The answer is that it’s fear that fears because, in a non–dual perspective, the ego–entity does not have a separative existence. It is only its “death” that opens the way to the picture of eternity. In other words, you have to lose your life in order to find it.

The Zen master Huang Po recognized the difficulty: “Men are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing on to which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the real realm of the Buddha–mind.”

The English author Paul Brunton expressed this paradox, or reverse perspective thus, “What the unenlightened regard as substance, that is, the form of things, is really its negation, whereas true substance, that is the essence out of which those forms emerge, is disregarded by them as non–existent. The hardest barricade for our Western understanding to break through is this simple acceptance of the Unmanifest as ultimate reality.”

If you suppose a universe full of nothing, as scientists sometimes do in describing the world before the “big bang”, there is still the void of nothingness, and this space is itself something, and yet nothing.

You can never reach the end of negation, because at that point it slips back into an affirmation. Wherever you want to place the end of the universe, perhaps with a wall, there must be something else beyond the wall, even if it is only nothing, which in itself is something. This is the “plenum void” of the Mahayana, which “holds in it infinite rays of light, and swallows all the multiplicities there are in the world”.

The nothingness of this void would be untenable without a consciousness to void it. Try to imagine, intuitively, an empty space without any form of consciousness to observe it. Thus consciousness and space are identical, as the Chogyam Upanishad implies.

In a world of something and nothing, our normal reality realm, there is always a pit into which we can fall. If we step away from the comforting solidity provided by the ego viewpoint, we are in a dreadful limbo, an emptiness so profound that it is sometimes described as the “dark night of the soul”.

In a world of mind only, however, there is nowhere to fall, nowhere to disappear, nowhere to face obliteration, and, more to the point, there is no “thing” to fall, disappear, or face annihilation.

As Huang Po put it: “That which is before your face is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete.”

“This pure mind, the source of everything, shines forever and on all with the brilliance of its own perfection. But the people of the world do not awake to it, regarding only that which sees, hears, feels and knows as mind. Blinded by their own sight, hearing, feeling and knowing, they do not perceive the spiritual brilliance of the source–substance.”

From: The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face by John Evans. Available soon for Christmas ordering.

John Evans

Recent Related Commentary
For ever and a day
Excerpt: The Eternal Quest For Immortality — Is it staring you in the face? by John Evans
Immortality — new book

Carl Jung, the great Swiss thinker and psychologist, did not mince his words when referring to immortality: “When the summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges … and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation, he who is inwardly great will know that the long expected friend of his soul, the immortal one, has now really come.”

A more perfect apotheosis can hardly be imagined, for Jung had spent his whole life rummaging about in his own mind and that of others. As a scientist he was naturally reticent – colleagues could be dismissive of any apparent “descent into the swamp of mysticism”. However, as the final chapters of his late memoirs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, show, Jung had penetrated to the heart of the matter even while playing the part of a dull, diligent, boffin of the mind.

Coming soon for Christmas ordering.