Kobo Daishi made a new alphabet
The great Kobo Daishi made a new alphabet, the first alphabet in the Japanese language, and it had this wonderful rhyme which puts the words of the Sutra into poetic form. And to this day, if you go to a traditional Japanese theatre, the rows are numbered, not A, B, C, D…, but according to Kobo’s alphabet. So as you enter the theatre you are reading ‘The blossoms are fragrant…’ – then, “Oh, here’s my seat!” This was an example of wonderful genius which arose from meditation, something entirely new in three fields came out of that. When people say, “Oh meditation, you just go into meditation and there’s nothing new. You come out the same as you went in.” No – such things can come out, like the magnet that becomes a compass when it’s isolated and gives the true direction of north.
One would like a Western example, and there is one, but it’s not well-known in the West, because the West failed to recognise the genius. Christ died and gradually the popular belief grew up that he would come again, and he was to come again in 1000 A.D. at the end of the first millennium. There was widespread expectation that Christ would come again. As a matter of fact, the pope in 1000 A.D. was a really great man – one of the greatest men that the West has ever produced, Pope Sylvester the Second; but he is not well-known. In the West, have you noticed that we apply the word ‘Great’ to mass-murderers generally, starting with the mass-murderer Herod the Great and going on to Frederick the Great of Prussia and Alexander the Great; and if you look through the history of the ‘Greats’ in the West, you’ll find only two, Albertus Magnus, not very well-known today as a Mediaeval philosopher, and Pope Gregory the Great. But Sylvester the Second was a most remarkable man. I don’t know of a life of his in English, but there’s one in French. He went to Cordoba and met the moors and he brought back the Indian numerals and he tried to get Europe to adopt them. If you’ve ever seen the calculations for the Roman system of numerals, which was then the way in which calculations were made, you’ll know. For instance, 7 x 7 – it’s VII x VII and the answer is XLIX – even professional accountants couldn’t memorise the tables more than 5 x 5. They had mnemonics and special means of calculating. So the introduction of what we call the Arabic numerals, which are in fact Indian which came through the Arabs, would have been of immense benefit to Europe, as big a benefit as the introduction of the alphabet in Japan. He introduced them into the monasteries. He nearly united the Western and Eastern churches – and then they poisoned him. So this had to wait for three or four hundred years before those numerals came in and the civilisation of Europe could approach that of the Middle East. So this was a great inspiration, equally as great as that of Kobo in Japan, which was not accepted. But the monasteries kept these things going and there are references to it. It’s not simply to have a genius with new ideas, but to have people who can follow and understand that genius.
In some schools there is a view that there is a sort of cosmic flow, a cosmic current in the whole universe; and that, by living in accordance with calmness, serenity, disciplined activity, reduction of desire and prejudice and meditation, we can come into this flow. That flow will in the end be the Self, the Self will be the flow. There is a view that we have an ideal role that we can play in life and, if we play it, we will have inner serenity – even in very difficult circumstances. There will be an inner serenity and there will be an inner peace – not continuous for some time, but it will be there and will return. But we don’t know what the results will be of the inspirations which come to us from this flow. We can perform the actions, but we don’t know what the results will be. We can’t see the grand pattern as it were. However, one view is that it is possible in meditation – and it can happen naturally – that the great pattern begins to unfold, a much wider pattern than our own little actions.
The comparison is made and, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this, but there is a game called living chess. It’s played on a huge lawn, and sometimes in university campuses. They mark out the enormous square with blacks and whites and the students dress up as knights; and the black queen is a tall girl with magnificent black hair going down there, and the white is the same with blonde hair and a white dress and it all looks very realistic. They glare at each other when they’re opposing, or look at each other when they’re on the same side. The game is played out with two experts who sit at each end. The board is too big for the expert to see and be able to play with those pieces, so he has a little board in his hand. He works out his move on that and says it – and the crier calls, “Knight to King’s Knight Fifth” – [and this is played out by the pieces, with any captured piece being carried off on a stretcher]. Some of the students have a long time to wait before they move, and some don’t move at all through the whole game – but they enter into the spirit of it. When you see this, you notice that some of them have got a little board of their own and they are intensely interested. They can see not only their surroundings and their own moves, but they can see the whole board in miniature. So they understand the role of their moves in the strategy. The particular teacher I’m quoting says it transforms the interest of life when you begin to see that there’s a grand flow of life, which is available and possible to see in the meditation.
Now another example of almost the same thing, but it’s given in completely different terms, in more modern terms – that living chess is very old and was played in India. Sometimes maybe naïve people, or perhaps they want to do some flattery for their own purposes, they tell a pianist, “Aren’t you pianists wonderful”, and the pianist [tries to shrug it off with (false) modesty]. But the person says, “No, I think you’re wonderful because, you see, those people on the flute, they’ve only got one line of music, they just play one note. But you’re playing with two hands, chords, lots of different notes, and no mistakes, and you can sight-read it. It’s almost unbelievable.” Well, pianists like that, and they always say “I won’t hear a word against flute players. They’re very good musicians in their own way and some of my best friends are flute players.”
Titles in this series are:
1. Penetrate deeply into truth
3. Kobo Daishi made a new alphabet
4. People sell themselves cheap
The full talk is: Notes and Anecdotes 1989
© Trevor Leggett