"BUT ... WHY?" (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #2)

"But why? What do you hope to get out of it?" This is a question I hear a lot, and perhaps the hardest to answer because it is loaded with preconceptions that simply don't apply. A three year retreat is not a career step. Its not even a strategy. Its more like birdsong. Or the timeless look in a horse's eye, the beautiful quiet horse that carries the fierce Tibetan protector deity Palden Lhamo as she rides through a river of blood beneath a starless sky. That horse has no agenda and neither do I. The spirit of three year retreat just looked me in the eye and I said yes. That horse is timeless, graceful and present. I only wish I could be likewise.

I believe - I imagine - that human beings are machines for creating works of art, and that the best works of art are nameless and invisible. For the world to be completely, blessedly itself, it has to befriend the nameless and the invisible. The world, plus the work of art, equals the world. For me, three year retreat is training in that spirit. Only by befriending the nameless and the invisible will I truly be able to meet everyone everywhere. "With diamond-clear intention instill faith everywhere. With mirror-like wisdom stabilise all chaotic minds."

In the passage that follows and which brings this post to an end, a passage from the illimitable pen of Roberto Bolano, for 'work of art' read 'this precious human life', for 'translation' read 'the Tibetan tradition', let 'the attic' be the 21st century and 'the kid' be Shenyen (or you, if you want to come with me), and let one of those battered pages be 'three year retreat', and you will sense what I mean, I'm sure. And for now let the Nightingale just be the Nightingale..

"How to recognise a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarisers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings, not a ploughed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest itself, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale."