Banzan In The Butcher's Shop

Do you know the story of Banzan? Before he became a great Zen master, he spent many years in pursuit of enlightenment, but it eluded him. Then, one day, as he was walking in the marketplace, he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer. 'Give me the best piece of meat you have,' said the customer. And the butcher replied, 'Every piece of meat I have is the best. There is no piece of meat here that is not the best.' Upon hearing this, Banzan became enlightened. 

I can see you are waiting for some explanation. When you accept what is, every piece of meat — every moment — is the best. That is enlightenment.

ECKHART TOLLE The Power Of Now

I love this story. What I like most about it is the setting: an ordinary, humble butcher's shop. It's not about enlightenment dawning after many months of rigorous meditation under a banyan tree, or after years of wandering and soul searching in the mountains and deserts, or as a result of disciplined study and ascetic practice under a yogi or other spiritual teacher. No, it's about enlightenment dawning suddenly, and when least expected, in a prosaic, everyday setting. To me this has the ring of authenticity. Perhaps we are mistaken in walking so endlessly and so earnestly the caminos of this world in pursuit of spiritual illumination, when we are more likely to find it — if we remain aware, open and receptive — in the moment NOW, in our own ordinary home, in our wilderness back garden, in the local streets and shops of our town or village.

So, when you're at the butcher's this week picking up your Christmas turkey, sausage meat, gammon joint and pork pies, be sure to eavesdrop on the conversations going on around you. You never know, it might be the start of a whole new life.

Cats And Ducks Are Our Teachers

It's about realising that there are no problems. Only situations.

So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action - just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord.

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now. As you become more deeply aware of this one step, you realize that it already contains within itself all the other steps as well as the destination.

True love has no opposite. If your love has an 'opposite', then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is the ego's substitute for salvation, and for a short time it almost does feel like salvation.

A Buddhist monk once told me: 'All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know.' What he meant, of course, was this: I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them cats. Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons. Just watching them is a meditation.

ECKHART TOLLE The Power Of Now

Two Lives Of Dickens

Charles Dickens

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. EL DOCTOROW

Two biographies have been published recently anticipating the bicentenary of Charles Dickens's birth next February: Becoming Dickens: The Invention Of A Novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life.

Both books mention the meeting Dickens reputedly had with Dostoyevsky in 1862. In a subsequent letter mentioning this momentous encounter, the great Russian novelist recalls his great British counterpart telling him that All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him ... one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Whereupon Dostoyevsky was supposed to have asked: Only two people? 

Whether or not the meeting actually occurred, and whether or not the letter is authentic (it has never been traced, and there is no extant copy), no matter. What's interesting is the Jekyll and Hyde (though Stevenson's novel The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde did not come out until sixteen years after Dickens's death!) 'split personality' Dickens admits to here. Of course, Dostoyevsky himself was fascinated by multifaceted personalities (one of his stories is called The Double) and the dilemmas caused by opposing moralities struggling for ascendance in the same human soul (just look at Raskolnikov in Crime And Punishment).

Dickens, after twenty one years of faithful (so far as we know) marriage to his wife Catherine, began a liaison with the actress Ellen Ternan in 1857 - which continued until his death in 1870. Divorce was barely thinkable for a man in his position at the time, so he separated from Catherine in 1858 but remained married to her. Perhaps guilt about this was at the back of his mind when he made his startling revelation to Dostoyevsky, perhaps not. Who knows?

However, from a personal point of view, the longer I live, and the more I experience life, the more convinced I am that we all have, to a greater or lesser extent, split or multiple personalities. We all have some of the saint and the sinner, the hero and the villain, the good and the bad within us - in varying proportions. And it's only when we get beyond such manifest polarities of our fragile and fearful ego that we can start to experience the unquenchable joy, peace and love which characterises our true Being and Consciousness - as Eckhart Tolle* might say.

* I'll have more to say at a later date about Eckhart Tolle's book The Power Of Now.