Can everybody hear me all right before I go on? Yes, yes.
OK, great. Welcome and thank you so much for having me.
I am here, obviously, as mentioned in avatar form, but it's a real pleasure to see especially some familiar faces in the in the audience there.
Now today I'm going to be speaking about wine. Now I realise that it's early morning there in in Oxford, but it's already early evening here,
so I only wish that I could be there with you physically to enjoy a glass together still.
Maybe what I have to say will whet your appetite for carousing at the dinner later,
so enjoy if that's the case now, before getting to the to the meat of the matter,
I want to place what I what I will see today into the context of the of the broader project of which this paper forms part.
So briefly,
what I'm presenting today is the final portion of writing of a of a third book titled Irreligious Literature's Poetry Between Buddhism and Islam.
This explores how six major classical Chinese,
Buddhist and Persian Islamic philosopher poets expressed profound ambivalence toward their own religious heritage in literary form.
And those portraits, by the way, may not be true to life.
Chapters are devoted to such Buddhist luminaries as Wang Wei Noon in Tang Dynasty China as before,
or the The Buddha of Poetry shown a dishevelled recluse inspired to issue verse from his mountain hideaway.
And Dorgan, founder of the Soto School of Zen Islamic poets featured include attorney Shah Burri,
author of the Mystical Masterpiece The The Cathedral Conference of the Birds.
Maulana Rumi, universally acknowledged as the greatest of all Sufi poets and half is a shirazi the finest of Persian lyricists.
Now why study these poets together? What is it about them that justifies placing them in conversation?
Well, because they embody in acute and I would say very eloquent form a kind of what I am
calling irreligious religiosity that stands astride the orthodoxy heterodox sea
threshold that complicates therefore standard notions of religious belonging and
generates fresh insights into the highly variegated nature of religiosity itself.
That is why I think of the book as a work of what I'm calling comparative religion and why my
talk today is titled on Newman in and in Germany ism or reading religion in your religion.
In the process, of course, I also try to challenge unquestioned assumptions as to the mutual incongruity of Islamic and Buddhist literature
and thought to admittedly drastically diverse and too often mutually antagonistic religious traditions,
and to contribute to the dawning awareness of extensive historical transmissions of literary models
and recurrent conceptual motifs along the silk routes from Buddhist China to Islamic Persia.
So much for the broader project.
Today I am focussing on two poets half his invention and how their poetry draws on the wine motif to undermine their own stated religious identities.
As Muslim and as Buddhist, wine is a staple ingredient.
If you like in classical Persian poetry,
where its consumption often serves to differentiate the the cooked connoisseurs from the raw rookies on the spiritual path.
Typically,
those who refuse its inebriated allure do serve on the basis of a strict adherence to religious regulations derided by recues and poet contemplative.
These latter claim to have transcendent in intoxication such extrinsic distinctions in favour of an inner unity of the divine and the mundane.
Now, the Persian poetry of Hafez is a paradigmatic exemplar of such themes.
But what about the Chinese Buddhist poet Hunza? Well, Hanshin, as I mentioned, is typically portrayed as a dishevelled recluse,
something of a Chinese witch whose poetry is as uncouth as its author's mountain hideaway.
The literary sophistication and profusion of Buddhist troupes in his poetry, however,
attest to a thorough knowledge of and adherence to the sutras and strictures studied and practised in his day.
Foremost, amongst the postulates of Tang Dynasty Chun Buddhism to which Hunter unsubscribed
was the notion of forcing or Buddha nature the pure and pre-existing mind,
if you like, whose realisation was the professed goal of Buddhist believers.
And foremost, amongst the precepts to which practitioners adhered in order to serve this,
this intrinsically undefined yet perceptibly entangled mind through worldly pollution was,
of course, the avoidance of any intoxicants or mind altering substances such as wine.
So in this paper, I'm trying to initiate the systematic examination of widespread commonalities that I've
identified between these Islamic and Buddhist poetic formulations of the wine motif.
Specifically, I want to focus on the use of wine inebriation by Hafiz and Hongshan to designate
the original State of Undifferentiated Union for all their copies and unchained,
like other practising Muslims and Buddhist, presumably never indulged in the wine of the grape.
Both were nevertheless drawn to use its inebriated qualities in poetic allusion to the ecstatic apprehension of the divine within.
For both half and hongshan wine in blurring the false distinctions of the analytical mind restores the heart to its original state of purity.
B This conceived as the pre eternal covenant of a lust or the timeless Buddha nature or foresee in the next few minutes,
I would briefly introduce Huff as introduction, as well as the canonical Islamic and Buddhist views on wine and intoxication,
before going on to discuss Hafez's use of the wine motif in one of his poems and how it relates to the abandonment of discriminatory discernment.
Given that the conference is devoted to Mahayana Buddhism, however,
I assume that everybody here is far more interested in Huntsman than they are in Huffins and to Buddhist rather than Islamic thought in literature.
Given this, I will spend substantially more time introducing Buddhist views concerning wine and inebriation,
as well as Buddha nature and discussing a handful of Huntsman's poems made maybe latter be as sweet as the ruby red green grapes of Shiraz,
though that's rather unlikely. No, but both Harper's and Huntsman have entered the western consciousness as pre-eminent oriental sage poets.
Translations from the Divine Above is regularly regularly appear in the Sufism and mysticism,
as well as the poetry sections of bookstores shelved under such provocative titles as Hafez,
the mystic poets drunk on the wine of the beloved Hafez, drunk with God Angels knocking on the tavern door and my personal favourite.
The subject tonight is Love 60 wild and sweet poems of Hafez, all quite enticing Hafez.
His name has been known to Western readers since at least the mid-19th century, when Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote on and translated some of some,
I would say 100 poems and fragments from Hafiz and I say translated in scare quotes.
Because although Emerson's interest in offence was serious and longstanding, he took his harvest from the German translation of the Liverpool star.
Sunshine, meanwhile, owes his popularity, especially in the US, to Gary Snyder and the beat generation.
In the words of lynching Snyder's book of translations Cold Mountain Poems has been, and I quote,
widely read by American college students and poetry lovers for more than half a century, having been published first in 1958.
I wish I could pass around a recent re publication of Snyder's translations,
replete as it is with Chinese inspired English calligraphy and woodblock ink prints.
It's quite, it's quite a sight. Jack Kerouac was deeply influenced by Snyder's rendering of Hamchin,
so much so that three of the poems were reproduced in full in his seminal 1958 novel Dharma Bums,
in which Snyder, the Zen poet, features as one of the lead characters under the name of Jeffrey Rider.
Since then, sunshine has been canonised into the American literary, Buddhist and, of course,
the spiritual traditions as what Snyder refers to him in the preface to his book That is as a mountain madman.
In the old Chinese line of Ragged Hermits. As for the man himself, we know as little about one man's life as we do about that of Hafetz.
He was married and had at least one son, possibly. He took the official examination for entry into the prestigious prestigious civil service career,
and at some point he shujaa or left home to live as a Buddhist recluse, but almost certainly not an ordained monk.
And he lived in the tintype mountain range in what is now Zhejiang province in southeastern China.
And that's about all we know. So let's turn as promised to wine.
Everyone knows that wine is prohibited in Islam.
That said, wine has never been absent from Islamic societies, as anyone who has spent any time living in any of them will well know.
In their overview of attitudes to and consumption patterns of wine in Islamic societies.
The hope I can Trotsky cite five Koranic verses that, in their estimation, most directly address the consumption of alcohol.
And I want to thank four of these, and I've used the translation of usefully, but I've modernised its kind of King James ish terminology.
Perhaps the most explicitly negative statement regarding wine in Japan occurs in verse five ninety one.
Satan's plan is to excite enmity and hatred between you with intoxicants hungry and in bold there and gambling thing,
and hinder you from the remembrance of God and from prayer. At 4:43,
we find this explicit command of you who believe do not approach prayers while
intoxicated cicada again boiled until you can understand all that you say.
So presumably, if you can still understand what you're saying, you're not drunk enough to get out of your prayers.
But on the whole, the Koran expresses what I would call an ambivalent attitude towards wine.
Look at verse two two nine. They ask you about wine and gambling.
Say in them is great sin and some profits for men, but the sin is greater than the prophet.
Not exactly a rigid prohibition.
And lastly, the 16 67 seems to imply that wine is fit food for the wines and from the fruit of the date palm of the vine,
you get wholesome drink and food. Look in. This also is a sign for those wines.
It's worth noting that the Koranic twin term summary is often translated as wine as I'm doing it here,
but it has a broader meaning from a root that means to cover or to cause mental confusion, to disturb the mind.
It's really only in the hadith literature that wine acquires. It's unequivocally bad name.
The canonical collection of the Prophet Muhammad sayings and teachings known as the safe Muslim,
for example, relates that and I quote Every intoxicant is common and every comer is hot on that is illicit.
And both he and Buhari's collection contain the hadith that defines common as that which befalls the mind.
I want you to keep that phrase in mind.
The Islamic Suna, of course, went on to develop this tendency to the general exclusion of the apparently more moderate early view.
Turning to the Buddhist context, the Buddhist prohibition on wine dates, of course, from the Buddha's are in discourses.
There, he outlines the famous five precepts the punch of Sheela,
incumbent upon both male and female monastics and conducive to good character for all monastic or lay.
These are, of course, abstaining from the destruction of life, taking what is not given sexual misconduct,
full speech and from the use of wines, liquors and intoxicants.
The basis for negligence that I've modified bodies translation here since.
For some reason, he has translated the crucial time in this passage simply as intoxicants,
whereas the compound in fact comprises pseudo alcoholic drinks or wine in my Virgin Media, a type of liqueur and munch of fermented liquors.
More importantly, for my purposes, however, the phrase basis for negligence pummelled the tongue has been left out.
In another passage of the unrooted, an acquired the Buddha says, And how is a family man accomplished in moral discipline?
Well, he abstains from destruction of life, etc. and from wines liquors intoxicants again, the basis for negligence.
And note that in an exactly parallel passage, just a few lines later, in the original text, the Buddha applies the same precepts to the women.
They want to draw particular attention to the reason behind the prohibition of intoxicants, including, of course, wine.
But my point applies to any liquor or drug. As the text I just cited stated, intoxicants are the basis for negligence.
Just as we saw them prohibited by the Prophet Muhammad on account of fogging,
the mind given that full awareness of the real state of affairs is equivalent to enlightenment in the Buddhist worldview,
anything that is detrimental to awareness logically enough is considered detrimental to the spiritual path.
The precepts are needed, of course, to guide unruly minds such as ours.
The Buddha himself no longer needs the precepts, not because he is now allowed to do things formerly forbidden,
but because he is exterminated the roots of such actions.
He is fully realised what leader tradition will call his Buddha nature and thereby attain to a state of mental clarity we're in.
He's no longer prey to such useless cravings as there is for intoxication.
So having very briefly surveyed the textual basis for prohibition in wine in both the Islamic and Buddhist contexts.
Let's turn to the polls. Half of Shiraz is, of course, far from being the only near or Middle Eastern poet to extol wine,
amongst other classical Persian poets who extolled wine Saadi,
Rumi and, of course, former giant immediately to mind outside of the Persian linguistic context amongst Islamic Arabic language poets.
Abu Nawas stands out as perhaps the pre-eminent exemplar of what have been called the Ebuehi or licentious poets.
It is notoriously difficult to pin any ideological affiliation down on half its.
Famously, he has been classed as the epitome of the Sufi mystic and of the religious hedonist and just about everything in between.
Some of the reason for this is what may be called the ostensibly kind of incoherent nature of his Casals,
by which I am referring to the fact that the individual objeot or couplets the pearls in themselves rarely,
if ever, combined to give the puzzle as a whole, a unified thematic string.
Now, wine is omnipresent in Hafetz, so any attempt to do it justice here, even if I were speaking just about him, would inevitably fail.
I've decided to embrace this failure by reneging on reading more than a single Kaizala from the entire divine.
And you have it there, I. That's my translation, but I I won't read it out all that.
You just read that for a moment. Now there is, of course, not adequate time to unpack everything going on in this Kaizala,
I just want to point out a few following features in the first debate autistic.
There is an alliteration in the original of normals or no laws and names in my translation, which sets up a nice and very deliberate play.
No more wars can mean brutal religious wars and fame or renown by aligning it with nom, which means name and hence renown,
Hafez is already asking for the social and legal distinctions of the nominally religious
polis to be abandoned in favour of wine and wassail for fasting to give way to feasting.
The second mystic develops this theme, reiterating the role of wine in making amends for time lost in the rigid rectitude of extrinsic religiosity.
Make me so drunk that I may not know, continues the third couplet,
in which parfaits makes even more explicit this pre-eminent function of lying to render distinctions obsolete.
BE-HOTTIE, which I have rendered this stupor in this line literally means selflessness or no selfless and by extension,
unconsciousness, the inability to distinguish anything from anything else.
The following lines continue in this vein until with the sixth couple of weeks,
finally see the collocation of wine inebriation with self, a basement made explicit.
Whereas the aesthetic is high and mighty, the drunken debauchery is so lowly he is passed into the bottle floor of the House of Peace.
The home of peace. Or what a Buddhist might call the peace.
The Shontell, if you like of final liberation, the next debate contain contains perhaps the most wonderful play of the entire poem,
with coloured meaning both heart and hence that which is most inner,
most unchangeable the US and counterfeit the worldly coin for which we have sold very selves.
The final This tick is very dense and so amenable to various translations.
Suffice it to say here that wine is identified here again as that which enables one to lose oneself to lose one's will wake.
We don't have time today to look more deeply into this than I have.
But anyone familiar with love is in the audience knows that is quite common in his poetry to find
wine used in the sense of bringing a liberator to inebriation freedom from society's balance,
as also from the from the intellects discrimination purchase.
And I'll skip the purging there. The following line from another poem is typical in this respect my intellect the left Herman.
If this be wine, I have seen beforehand what happens in the house of my religion.
Now this is a particularly nice example in that an explicitly acquaintance
the abandonment of intellectual discrimination with true authentic religion,
as opposed to the focus on external correctness characteristic of nominal rectitude and the analytical intellect,
Hough has occasionally uses the Islamic motif of the day of our last,
in which the the primordial covenant between creator and created was sealed or more frequently.
He uses the top also, said Rawls,
the innermost secret or mystery hidden to all but the lover and beloved to express this mystical state of Ultimate Union,
the state in which all distinctions fade away in the presence of the one and only true being.
And it is wine that characteristically allows this state to ensue precisely by lowering the walls of inhibition,
clearing the ground of difference and distance between the two.
And just as Hafiz is not alone in extolling the virtues of common in the Persian poetic tradition,
Sahar Shan is, of course, far from being the only classical Chinese poet poet enamoured of it show.
Others include Libye, often regarded as China's greatest poet for her.
Wine was a frequent theme, so much so that the probably apocryphal story of his death goes that he drowned while trying drunk,
of course, to embrace the moon reflected in a pond.
Tom Yuan Ming, meanwhile, like Hongshan, is classed as a recluse poet, though in his case it was Daoism rather than Buddhism,
which inspired works such as the famous tea, drinking wine or ginger poems.
Sometimes use of line imagery mirrors that of half as across several key themes.
Thus, for example, we find wine embraced in carpe diem terms as the agent of oblivion, the omniscient,
if you will, of the myriad channels of life in the world where there's wine, let's call on each other to drink.
Where there's meat, let's hail on each other to eat. Sooner or later, we'll be in the underworld.
I'm sorry. Let's act with strength while long and strong, etc., etc.
We also find verses such as the following in which Hansan hunch on conceives of wine as a lubricant to poetic creativity.
One which enables entrance into the state of mind needful for the distillation of thought into verse.
My scroll filled with poems of talented genius. My jugs flew with sageman wine, etc., etc. I'll let you read the rest.
I should note that cite the talented genius in the first line is an honorific referring to scholar officials and Sageman Wine Showroom.
Joel is one of the colloquial names given to pure, unadulterated wine after it was banned by the Statesmen and Poets Hotel.
Toward the end of the Three Kingdoms period in the early third century.
But rather than continuing to list the related but diverse uses to which hunching puts wine in his poetry,
I want to concentrate on a poem in which it enables not transcendence or entrance,
but the return to the recollection of that most inwardly present absence of distinctions.
A month when farmers escape the summer heat, who will enjoy a cup of wine together, they've scattered mountain fruits here and there.
I laid wine goblets all around reeds and Russia's will serve as many leaves of plantings in for plates once drunk,
said propped mount, soumettre a tiny bowl.
Here, wine leads to the state of non discernment between big and small and by extension of all mental distinctions of Chicago care.
The motif of massive Mount Sue through the The Axis M.D., the physical and spiritual centre of the Cosmos being no bigger than the smallest of things,
of course, is a stock figure taken from since critic Buddhist texts think, for example, of Book five,
the trinity of Imoke show some version of the demon like you can use Desha, wherein visual acuity tells shoddy Pietro that for all,
sorry for that to target her in the body sutra there is liberation called inconceivable a chant your name of your moksha, right?
Which phrase? Birth kumara Jeeva entrance. I'll translate as your chart.
It will mean Booker and Yisa, right? And that the bodhisattva who resides there can put soda into a mustard seed and
managed to do so without enlarging the mustard seed or shrinking the mountain.
Getting back to hunch on the smallest of things is clearly a metaphor for the Buddha nature referred to in the following poem.
1000 lives, 10000 deaths, when will it end?
Life and death come and go revolving of a deluded feelings not to know the priceless jewel within a heart is to go like a blind us trusting its feet.
In this last poem, the mention of the priceless jewel like the treasure inside your rogue mentioned in
another a clearly references to a widely known parable from a source well known.
No doubt too many of you, the Saddam Up America suit all the lunch in the Lotus.
The fifth of the seven parables contained in the Sutra describes, as you no doubt recall,
a man who having drunk wine goes to sleep in the house of a friend while he is asleep.
The friends there is a series,
a jewel of priceless worth into the lining of his robe and then departs when the man awakens, unaware of what has happened.
He sets off for another country where he undergoes great hardship.
Later, he again meets the friend who let him know of the precious jewel that has all along been sewn into his work.
That was Burton Watson, one of the lotuses translators into English, as written in this and the other parables.
And I quote the crux of the problem is not faulty reasoning or wayward behaviour,
but simply ignorance of the true nature of one's situation or abilities.
This true nature of this priceless jewel or treasure is transparently nothing
other than what the Chinese Buddhist tradition called Forsey the Buddha nature,
or relatedly, to target the god of all who lives on. And I am not going to get into discussions about how really needs to rule lights on here.
Suffice it to say for present purposes that the Buddha nature is the pure and inherent seed in all Cindy and beaks,
including, of course, ourselves, by means of which by virtue of which we may gain enlightenment.
We are all inherently endowed with this jewel of enlightenment, but we are not aware of this.
And so we suffer. And what we suffer from is, in a sense, separation, separation from reality,
from what wisdom would call and the real, and from what the Buddhist tradition calls general war at the time.
The true vastness of things, how things are really on this perspective is simply as such bereft of distinctions.
It is our ignorance that leads us to separating reality into individual things.
Really, however, if only we could wipe the dust from our eyes.
Reality, as it is, is shorn of any conceptual distinctions or evaluations.
Recall in this context, one of my favourite lines from the Godejohn is one of my yarmulke Kartika.
How how do we attain that, right, how do we attain this, this peacefulness not conceptualised?
Well, the crux of the Buddha nature doctrine as I see it and indeed of the whole notion of sudden enlightenment do that
it underwrites is that the realisation of enlightenment is I would like to put it an epistemological effect,
not an ontological one. That is, we do not need to change anything about the world to be truly free of suffering.
We only need to come to know how the world really is.
And we do that precisely without distinguishing or as chom thinkers will go on to say, without thinking or conceptualising.
Also again, for Jungian wine is a particularly efficacious means to this end, or at least the motif of wine in his poetry.
As the few examples I have deduced, hopefully sure, wine is a means toward this realisation.
And this is precisely insofar as it blurs conventional distinctions so as to allow the ultimate interrelated unity of the Buddha nature to manifest.
To conclude, then, I propose that the wine motif found in the work of religious poets such as Hafiz and Hongshan presents
us with an instance of irreligious literature literature that uses a feature inimical to the religion,
such as in this case, inebriation to arrive at a truth that is very much central to that tradition.
But what is the proper Unical approach to take towards attacks that were identifiably Buddhist nonetheless exhibits overtly non Buddhist,
even anti Buddhist features?
What methodological or theoretical lenses are appropriate for scholars of religion when working on such irreligious literatures?
How do we read these on the scriptures? Well, I think I probably have about a minute left.
So the short story is that you'll just have to read the book. But suffice it,
in short for the present talk to say that I believe that we need to approach these texts in a manner that does
not seek to force them into four concluded categorical boxes as Buddhist or Islamic or mystical or mealy.
And Nermeen ism, I see as the deliberate overturning of religious victims the refusal to abide by legal strictures and moral or social norms.
This is different. We find here a genuinely problematic genre of religious literature in the sense that this
corpus of texts deliberately undermines the very religious sources it springs from,
even as it simultaneously reinterprets prohibited substances as the very substance of religiosity itself.
All I can say is cheers to that. And thank you, and I very much welcome your questions.