A Life of Bankei by John M Evans. Part of the Zen Masters Series.

It is interesting that the issues we now associate with the term “political correctness” arose even in Bankei’s day.

At one public meeting a woman stood up, unintimidated by the eminence of the master. She spoke with some heat: “You know that women are not allowed to climb the sacred mountains,” she said. “And we are not allowed into the precincts either. Why is it said that women have deep karma and that this bars us from such things?”

Bankei sensed he was now in the realm of politics not spirit, so he passed it off with a jest. “You know,” he said to the woman, “that there is a nunnery in Kamakura?” She nodded. “Unfortunately, it’s closed to men!”

Women, he knew, were often treated badly by institutionalized clergy who liked to carve a cosy exclusive niche for themselves. But Bankei was aware that enlightenment was barred to no-one. However, as an administrative problem he could only give a view and hope that it would have some effect on others.

A rather stern, middle-aged monk addressed him from the floor. “In the past,” he began, “great masters like Engo and Daie used koan to lead their students to enlightenment. Why do you not do so?”

Bankei used a stock reply, he was often asked this one. “Did the great masters before the two you name also use koan?” The monk sat down discomfited. It had been a long day, despite the bright weather. Bankei brought the session to a close, thanked the visitors for their efforts in coming to see him and urged them all to take very good care of themselves.

Bankei’s enlightenment eventually came after fourteen years of unremitting labour. In the final days, as did the Buddha before him, he brought himself to the brink of death before nature relented and gave him the vision he had so long sought.

From the day he had been asked to leave his home at the age of eleven, the young Bankei had looked in vain for a competent Zen teacher. In the absence of one, he had tried a number of other options, including the constant repetition of the name of Amida Buddha. This had induced a temporary samadhi, but brought him no nearer to “clarifying his bright virtue”.

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A Life of Bankei by John M Evans. Part of the Zen Masters Series.

Thanks to the work of biologist Rupert Sheldrake, we are now more aware of the sensory situation of man than we were. In a recent book, The Sense of Being Stared At, Sheldrake suggests that we are surrounded by what he calls morphic fields. These personal fields stretch out from our bodies as a kind of extended mind-stuff and are responsible for all the unexplained phenomena we pigeon-hole under the term ”psi” — ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and others. As Sheldrake asserts, there is a mass of scientific corroboration for these “powers” of the human and animal minds, and his own experiments dramatically confirm them.

Within the notion of morphic fields, Sheldrake also includes morphogenetic fields, which act as the blueprint and creative principle behind the formation of all creatures, like ghostly Platonic forms.

In Rupert Sheldrake’s own words: “Morphic fields also underlie our perceptions, thoughts and other mental processes. The morphic fields of mental activities are called mental fields. Through [these], the extended mind reaches out into the environment through attention and intention, and connects with other members of social groups. These fields help to explain telepathy, the sense of being stared at, clairvoyance and psychokinesis. They may also help in the understanding of premonitions and precognitions through intentions projecting into the future.”

Sheldrake’s ideas on morphogenetic fields explain many grey areas in conventional understanding, especially in the science of genes and DNA. For example: “My suggestion is that morphic fields help impose order and pattern in this sensitive chaos [in the brain], and interact with the brain through their ordering activity. They contain an inherent memory, through morphic resonance. They also project out far beyond the brain through attention and intention.”

These hypotheses are so compelling that it surely cannot be long before the rest of science catches up, despite the earthquake that would follow in the scientific establishment.

But Zen Master Bankei was aware of all this more than three hundred years ago but under a different name : the Unborn Buddha-mind.

Bankei Yotaku, birth name Muchi, came from a family which had been doctors with the rank of samurai for many generations. As a child he was extremely independent and wilful, but with a sensitive intelligence that partly mitigated his faults. He was also extremely brave. At an annual stone-throwing contest, it was always Bankei who refused to give ground and took his side to victory.

His schooling was something of a problem, despite his natural aptitude. Calligraphy was not a favourite subject, especially the endless copying of the hundreds of Chinese characters, which is a fundamental part of a Japanese education, even today. He was often observed cutting classes early in order to avoid this tedious task. Another wearisome lesson involved reciting passages from the four great Confucian classics until the student knew them by heart.

It was during one of the Confucian classes, while reading a text from The Great Learning, that Bankei had a powerful insight. As the teacher spoke the words, “The way of great learning is to clarify bright virtue,” Bankei’s attention was riveted. On asking what “bright virtue” was, he received only stock answers which did not satisfy his curiosity. It was as if he was being prompted by old memories or very deep insights. His overriding desire was that this bright virtue should apply to him personally and not just be expressed in empty words, no matter how high-sounding. He wanted enlightenment, not definitions, and the search would occupy him totally for the next fourteen years.

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Readers who follow our other websites across Syntagma Media’s network will know we have for a while had an informal supplement, or grouping of blogs, concerned with spiritual and paranormal topics.

Now that A Spirit of Place is no longer with us, owing to the author losing interest in writing about places she had never visited, we have just two sites left in this section: this one and Supernatural, authored by Deborah Woehr.

However, in September we are going to extend the group with a number of new sites based on different topic areas. One we are very hopeful of setting up arrived as a result of A Spirit of Place and may manifest in the form of a blog written directly from Arunachala, that mystical place which was the home of Ramana Maharshi in the first half of the 20th century.

Others are in the pipeline and will make up a new supplement called MetaSyntagma. Stay tuned for more information.

Another month, another book about “cosmic ordering”. Another text telling us, at inordinate length, how to “ask the universe for everything we’ve ever wanted”.

If Jonathan Cainer’s book was just like that I wouldn’t be reviewing it here. Unusually for a psychological can-do book of this genre, Cainer is more concerned with some genuine spiritual principles, and the book is full of insights and intuitions that continue to strike chords as the text progresses.

Jonathan Cainer is an astrologer who writes a column for the UK Daily Mail and a number of websites. His work is often described as “spookily accurate” even though the most people read are their Sun sign forecasts which can be said to describe one-twelfth of the population. Spookily accurate, however, is how I would describe Cosmic Ordering — how to make your dreams come true. Don’t let the subtitle put you off, it was probably concocted by the marketing folk over at Collins, the publisher.

Where this book differs from the ones we’ve seen before, is that Cainer puts himself in the role of the “force” or “entity” — call it what you will — that fulfils your cosmic orders (for want of a better phrase).

At first I thought, “he can’t possible keep this up” — playing “God” is a difficult enough task even for God. But somehow he pulls it off. There’s a feeling of genuineness about the writing and a depth of nuance that prevents it becoming yet another get-rich-quick slim volume. Here’s a small sample of the text:

There is another factor that can come into play here too. No matter how many chances I put before you, you have to seize them and make them work. That requires a degree of level-headedness on your part, but passion and perspective are like sunshine and starlight — you rarely see both at the same time. As soon as you have a lot of one, the other vanishes.

This book is now at half-price at Amazon.co.uk (£3.99/$7.38). Well worth the entry fee for an interesting read whether you believe in ordering from the cosmos or not.