1 00:00:04,650 --> 00:00:11,580 Can everybody hear me all right before I go on? Yes, yes. 2 00:00:11,580 --> 00:00:17,970 OK, great. Welcome and thank you so much for having me. 3 00:00:17,970 --> 00:00:27,720 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. 4 00:00:27,720 --> 00:00:37,080 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, 5 00:00:37,080 --> 00:00:43,070 so I only wish that I could be there with you physically to enjoy a glass together still. 6 00:00:43,070 --> 00:00:48,090 Maybe what I have to say will whet your appetite for carousing at the dinner later, 7 00:00:48,090 --> 00:00:53,310 so enjoy if that's the case now, before getting to the to the meat of the matter, 8 00:00:53,310 --> 00:01:01,890 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. 9 00:01:01,890 --> 00:01:02,700 So briefly, 10 00:01:02,700 --> 00:01:13,440 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. 11 00:01:13,440 --> 00:01:16,350 This explores how six major classical Chinese, 12 00:01:16,350 --> 00:01:25,860 Buddhist and Persian Islamic philosopher poets expressed profound ambivalence toward their own religious heritage in literary form. 13 00:01:25,860 --> 00:01:31,590 And those portraits, by the way, may not be true to life. 14 00:01:31,590 --> 00:01:38,190 Chapters are devoted to such Buddhist luminaries as Wang Wei Noon in Tang Dynasty China as before, 15 00:01:38,190 --> 00:01:46,770 or the The Buddha of Poetry shown a dishevelled recluse inspired to issue verse from his mountain hideaway. 16 00:01:46,770 --> 00:01:55,200 And Dorgan, founder of the Soto School of Zen Islamic poets featured include attorney Shah Burri, 17 00:01:55,200 --> 00:01:59,850 author of the Mystical Masterpiece The The Cathedral Conference of the Birds. 18 00:01:59,850 --> 00:02:08,910 Maulana Rumi, universally acknowledged as the greatest of all Sufi poets and half is a shirazi the finest of Persian lyricists. 19 00:02:08,910 --> 00:02:16,230 Now why study these poets together? What is it about them that justifies placing them in conversation? 20 00:02:16,230 --> 00:02:21,960 Well, because they embody in acute and I would say very eloquent form a kind of what I am 21 00:02:21,960 --> 00:02:28,620 calling irreligious religiosity that stands astride the orthodoxy heterodox sea 22 00:02:28,620 --> 00:02:35,220 threshold that complicates therefore standard notions of religious belonging and 23 00:02:35,220 --> 00:02:41,730 generates fresh insights into the highly variegated nature of religiosity itself. 24 00:02:41,730 --> 00:02:46,770 That is why I think of the book as a work of what I'm calling comparative religion and why my 25 00:02:46,770 --> 00:02:53,130 talk today is titled on Newman in and in Germany ism or reading religion in your religion. 26 00:02:53,130 --> 00:03:01,530 In the process, of course, I also try to challenge unquestioned assumptions as to the mutual incongruity of Islamic and Buddhist literature 27 00:03:01,530 --> 00:03:09,600 and thought to admittedly drastically diverse and too often mutually antagonistic religious traditions, 28 00:03:09,600 --> 00:03:15,990 and to contribute to the dawning awareness of extensive historical transmissions of literary models 29 00:03:15,990 --> 00:03:22,590 and recurrent conceptual motifs along the silk routes from Buddhist China to Islamic Persia. 30 00:03:22,590 --> 00:03:26,100 So much for the broader project. 31 00:03:26,100 --> 00:03:37,140 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. 32 00:03:37,140 --> 00:03:42,900 As Muslim and as Buddhist, wine is a staple ingredient. 33 00:03:42,900 --> 00:03:45,330 If you like in classical Persian poetry, 34 00:03:45,330 --> 00:03:53,340 where its consumption often serves to differentiate the the cooked connoisseurs from the raw rookies on the spiritual path. 35 00:03:53,340 --> 00:03:54,270 Typically, 36 00:03:54,270 --> 00:04:06,900 those who refuse its inebriated allure do serve on the basis of a strict adherence to religious regulations derided by recues and poet contemplative. 37 00:04:06,900 --> 00:04:18,030 These latter claim to have transcendent in intoxication such extrinsic distinctions in favour of an inner unity of the divine and the mundane. 38 00:04:18,030 --> 00:04:23,250 Now, the Persian poetry of Hafez is a paradigmatic exemplar of such themes. 39 00:04:23,250 --> 00:04:30,060 But what about the Chinese Buddhist poet Hunza? Well, Hanshin, as I mentioned, is typically portrayed as a dishevelled recluse, 40 00:04:30,060 --> 00:04:37,110 something of a Chinese witch whose poetry is as uncouth as its author's mountain hideaway. 41 00:04:37,110 --> 00:04:42,930 The literary sophistication and profusion of Buddhist troupes in his poetry, however, 42 00:04:42,930 --> 00:04:51,900 attest to a thorough knowledge of and adherence to the sutras and strictures studied and practised in his day. 43 00:04:51,900 --> 00:04:57,450 Foremost, amongst the postulates of Tang Dynasty Chun Buddhism to which Hunter unsubscribed 44 00:04:57,450 --> 00:05:03,600 was the notion of forcing or Buddha nature the pure and pre-existing mind, 45 00:05:03,600 --> 00:05:09,130 if you like, whose realisation was the professed goal of Buddhist believers. 46 00:05:09,130 --> 00:05:14,770 And foremost, amongst the precepts to which practitioners adhered in order to serve this, 47 00:05:14,770 --> 00:05:21,340 this intrinsically undefined yet perceptibly entangled mind through worldly pollution was, 48 00:05:21,340 --> 00:05:27,790 of course, the avoidance of any intoxicants or mind altering substances such as wine. 49 00:05:27,790 --> 00:05:32,980 So in this paper, I'm trying to initiate the systematic examination of widespread commonalities that I've 50 00:05:32,980 --> 00:05:38,590 identified between these Islamic and Buddhist poetic formulations of the wine motif. 51 00:05:38,590 --> 00:05:44,860 Specifically, I want to focus on the use of wine inebriation by Hafiz and Hongshan to designate 52 00:05:44,860 --> 00:05:50,530 the original State of Undifferentiated Union for all their copies and unchained, 53 00:05:50,530 --> 00:05:56,980 like other practising Muslims and Buddhist, presumably never indulged in the wine of the grape. 54 00:05:56,980 --> 00:06:07,070 Both were nevertheless drawn to use its inebriated qualities in poetic allusion to the ecstatic apprehension of the divine within. 55 00:06:07,070 --> 00:06:17,000 For both half and hongshan wine in blurring the false distinctions of the analytical mind restores the heart to its original state of purity. 56 00:06:17,000 --> 00:06:26,480 B This conceived as the pre eternal covenant of a lust or the timeless Buddha nature or foresee in the next few minutes, 57 00:06:26,480 --> 00:06:34,100 I would briefly introduce Huff as introduction, as well as the canonical Islamic and Buddhist views on wine and intoxication, 58 00:06:34,100 --> 00:06:42,970 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. 59 00:06:42,970 --> 00:06:46,720 Given that the conference is devoted to Mahayana Buddhism, however, 60 00:06:46,720 --> 00:06:55,360 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. 61 00:06:55,360 --> 00:07:01,450 Given this, I will spend substantially more time introducing Buddhist views concerning wine and inebriation, 62 00:07:01,450 --> 00:07:12,040 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, 63 00:07:12,040 --> 00:07:22,150 though that's rather unlikely. No, but both Harper's and Huntsman have entered the western consciousness as pre-eminent oriental sage poets. 64 00:07:22,150 --> 00:07:28,270 Translations from the Divine Above is regularly regularly appear in the Sufism and mysticism, 65 00:07:28,270 --> 00:07:34,960 as well as the poetry sections of bookstores shelved under such provocative titles as Hafez, 66 00:07:34,960 --> 00:07:45,010 the mystic poets drunk on the wine of the beloved Hafez, drunk with God Angels knocking on the tavern door and my personal favourite. 67 00:07:45,010 --> 00:07:54,070 The subject tonight is Love 60 wild and sweet poems of Hafez, all quite enticing Hafez. 68 00:07:54,070 --> 00:08:02,980 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, 69 00:08:02,980 --> 00:08:08,110 I would say 100 poems and fragments from Hafiz and I say translated in scare quotes. 70 00:08:08,110 --> 00:08:17,390 Because although Emerson's interest in offence was serious and longstanding, he took his harvest from the German translation of the Liverpool star. 71 00:08:17,390 --> 00:08:23,710 Sunshine, meanwhile, owes his popularity, especially in the US, to Gary Snyder and the beat generation. 72 00:08:23,710 --> 00:08:28,990 In the words of lynching Snyder's book of translations Cold Mountain Poems has been, and I quote, 73 00:08:28,990 --> 00:08:38,800 widely read by American college students and poetry lovers for more than half a century, having been published first in 1958. 74 00:08:38,800 --> 00:08:43,510 I wish I could pass around a recent re publication of Snyder's translations, 75 00:08:43,510 --> 00:08:49,660 replete as it is with Chinese inspired English calligraphy and woodblock ink prints. 76 00:08:49,660 --> 00:08:56,830 It's quite, it's quite a sight. Jack Kerouac was deeply influenced by Snyder's rendering of Hamchin, 77 00:08:56,830 --> 00:09:02,920 so much so that three of the poems were reproduced in full in his seminal 1958 novel Dharma Bums, 78 00:09:02,920 --> 00:09:09,730 in which Snyder, the Zen poet, features as one of the lead characters under the name of Jeffrey Rider. 79 00:09:09,730 --> 00:09:14,920 Since then, sunshine has been canonised into the American literary, Buddhist and, of course, 80 00:09:14,920 --> 00:09:22,570 the spiritual traditions as what Snyder refers to him in the preface to his book That is as a mountain madman. 81 00:09:22,570 --> 00:09:33,740 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. 82 00:09:33,740 --> 00:09:42,200 He was married and had at least one son, possibly. He took the official examination for entry into the prestigious prestigious civil service career, 83 00:09:42,200 --> 00:09:50,930 and at some point he shujaa or left home to live as a Buddhist recluse, but almost certainly not an ordained monk. 84 00:09:50,930 --> 00:09:55,580 And he lived in the tintype mountain range in what is now Zhejiang province in southeastern China. 85 00:09:55,580 --> 00:10:02,000 And that's about all we know. So let's turn as promised to wine. 86 00:10:02,000 --> 00:10:05,930 Everyone knows that wine is prohibited in Islam. 87 00:10:05,930 --> 00:10:14,660 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. 88 00:10:14,660 --> 00:10:19,700 In their overview of attitudes to and consumption patterns of wine in Islamic societies. 89 00:10:19,700 --> 00:10:26,960 The hope I can Trotsky cite five Koranic verses that, in their estimation, most directly address the consumption of alcohol. 90 00:10:26,960 --> 00:10:34,970 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. 91 00:10:34,970 --> 00:10:40,790 Perhaps the most explicitly negative statement regarding wine in Japan occurs in verse five ninety one. 92 00:10:40,790 --> 00:10:48,050 Satan's plan is to excite enmity and hatred between you with intoxicants hungry and in bold there and gambling thing, 93 00:10:48,050 --> 00:10:53,240 and hinder you from the remembrance of God and from prayer. At 4:43, 94 00:10:53,240 --> 00:10:57,560 we find this explicit command of you who believe do not approach prayers while 95 00:10:57,560 --> 00:11:03,170 intoxicated cicada again boiled until you can understand all that you say. 96 00:11:03,170 --> 00:11:10,370 So presumably, if you can still understand what you're saying, you're not drunk enough to get out of your prayers. 97 00:11:10,370 --> 00:11:16,700 But on the whole, the Koran expresses what I would call an ambivalent attitude towards wine. 98 00:11:16,700 --> 00:11:20,900 Look at verse two two nine. They ask you about wine and gambling. 99 00:11:20,900 --> 00:11:26,540 Say in them is great sin and some profits for men, but the sin is greater than the prophet. 100 00:11:26,540 --> 00:11:29,810 Not exactly a rigid prohibition. 101 00:11:29,810 --> 00:11:37,070 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, 102 00:11:37,070 --> 00:11:42,920 you get wholesome drink and food. Look in. This also is a sign for those wines. 103 00:11:42,920 --> 00:11:48,290 It's worth noting that the Koranic twin term summary is often translated as wine as I'm doing it here, 104 00:11:48,290 --> 00:11:56,720 but it has a broader meaning from a root that means to cover or to cause mental confusion, to disturb the mind. 105 00:11:56,720 --> 00:12:02,270 It's really only in the hadith literature that wine acquires. It's unequivocally bad name. 106 00:12:02,270 --> 00:12:06,950 The canonical collection of the Prophet Muhammad sayings and teachings known as the safe Muslim, 107 00:12:06,950 --> 00:12:16,100 for example, relates that and I quote Every intoxicant is common and every comer is hot on that is illicit. 108 00:12:16,100 --> 00:12:22,730 And both he and Buhari's collection contain the hadith that defines common as that which befalls the mind. 109 00:12:22,730 --> 00:12:25,310 I want you to keep that phrase in mind. 110 00:12:25,310 --> 00:12:33,850 The Islamic Suna, of course, went on to develop this tendency to the general exclusion of the apparently more moderate early view. 111 00:12:33,850 --> 00:12:39,940 Turning to the Buddhist context, the Buddhist prohibition on wine dates, of course, from the Buddha's are in discourses. 112 00:12:39,940 --> 00:12:43,360 There, he outlines the famous five precepts the punch of Sheela, 113 00:12:43,360 --> 00:12:50,050 incumbent upon both male and female monastics and conducive to good character for all monastic or lay. 114 00:12:50,050 --> 00:12:54,820 These are, of course, abstaining from the destruction of life, taking what is not given sexual misconduct, 115 00:12:54,820 --> 00:12:59,200 full speech and from the use of wines, liquors and intoxicants. 116 00:12:59,200 --> 00:13:05,440 The basis for negligence that I've modified bodies translation here since. 117 00:13:05,440 --> 00:13:10,690 For some reason, he has translated the crucial time in this passage simply as intoxicants, 118 00:13:10,690 --> 00:13:20,920 whereas the compound in fact comprises pseudo alcoholic drinks or wine in my Virgin Media, a type of liqueur and munch of fermented liquors. 119 00:13:20,920 --> 00:13:28,360 More importantly, for my purposes, however, the phrase basis for negligence pummelled the tongue has been left out. 120 00:13:28,360 --> 00:13:34,750 In another passage of the unrooted, an acquired the Buddha says, And how is a family man accomplished in moral discipline? 121 00:13:34,750 --> 00:13:43,930 Well, he abstains from destruction of life, etc. and from wines liquors intoxicants again, the basis for negligence. 122 00:13:43,930 --> 00:13:52,720 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. 123 00:13:52,720 --> 00:13:58,660 They want to draw particular attention to the reason behind the prohibition of intoxicants, including, of course, wine. 124 00:13:58,660 --> 00:14:05,860 But my point applies to any liquor or drug. As the text I just cited stated, intoxicants are the basis for negligence. 125 00:14:05,860 --> 00:14:10,480 Just as we saw them prohibited by the Prophet Muhammad on account of fogging, 126 00:14:10,480 --> 00:14:19,330 the mind given that full awareness of the real state of affairs is equivalent to enlightenment in the Buddhist worldview, 127 00:14:19,330 --> 00:14:26,710 anything that is detrimental to awareness logically enough is considered detrimental to the spiritual path. 128 00:14:26,710 --> 00:14:31,870 The precepts are needed, of course, to guide unruly minds such as ours. 129 00:14:31,870 --> 00:14:38,470 The Buddha himself no longer needs the precepts, not because he is now allowed to do things formerly forbidden, 130 00:14:38,470 --> 00:14:42,190 but because he is exterminated the roots of such actions. 131 00:14:42,190 --> 00:14:49,120 He is fully realised what leader tradition will call his Buddha nature and thereby attain to a state of mental clarity we're in. 132 00:14:49,120 --> 00:14:55,570 He's no longer prey to such useless cravings as there is for intoxication. 133 00:14:55,570 --> 00:15:02,440 So having very briefly surveyed the textual basis for prohibition in wine in both the Islamic and Buddhist contexts. 134 00:15:02,440 --> 00:15:12,080 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, 135 00:15:12,080 --> 00:15:15,440 amongst other classical Persian poets who extolled wine Saadi, 136 00:15:15,440 --> 00:15:24,380 Rumi and, of course, former giant immediately to mind outside of the Persian linguistic context amongst Islamic Arabic language poets. 137 00:15:24,380 --> 00:15:32,870 Abu Nawas stands out as perhaps the pre-eminent exemplar of what have been called the Ebuehi or licentious poets. 138 00:15:32,870 --> 00:15:38,960 It is notoriously difficult to pin any ideological affiliation down on half its. 139 00:15:38,960 --> 00:15:48,170 Famously, he has been classed as the epitome of the Sufi mystic and of the religious hedonist and just about everything in between. 140 00:15:48,170 --> 00:15:54,350 Some of the reason for this is what may be called the ostensibly kind of incoherent nature of his Casals, 141 00:15:54,350 --> 00:16:01,070 by which I am referring to the fact that the individual objeot or couplets the pearls in themselves rarely, 142 00:16:01,070 --> 00:16:08,070 if ever, combined to give the puzzle as a whole, a unified thematic string. 143 00:16:08,070 --> 00:16:17,000 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. 144 00:16:17,000 --> 00:16:24,140 I've decided to embrace this failure by reneging on reading more than a single Kaizala from the entire divine. 145 00:16:24,140 --> 00:16:28,430 And you have it there, I. That's my translation, but I I won't read it out all that. 146 00:16:28,430 --> 00:16:46,990 You just read that for a moment. Now there is, of course, not adequate time to unpack everything going on in this Kaizala, 147 00:16:46,990 --> 00:16:52,630 I just want to point out a few following features in the first debate autistic. 148 00:16:52,630 --> 00:17:02,770 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. 149 00:17:02,770 --> 00:17:11,620 No more wars can mean brutal religious wars and fame or renown by aligning it with nom, which means name and hence renown, 150 00:17:11,620 --> 00:17:17,080 Hafez is already asking for the social and legal distinctions of the nominally religious 151 00:17:17,080 --> 00:17:24,160 polis to be abandoned in favour of wine and wassail for fasting to give way to feasting. 152 00:17:24,160 --> 00:17:34,300 The second mystic develops this theme, reiterating the role of wine in making amends for time lost in the rigid rectitude of extrinsic religiosity. 153 00:17:34,300 --> 00:17:38,470 Make me so drunk that I may not know, continues the third couplet, 154 00:17:38,470 --> 00:17:45,630 in which parfaits makes even more explicit this pre-eminent function of lying to render distinctions obsolete. 155 00:17:45,630 --> 00:17:53,910 BE-HOTTIE, which I have rendered this stupor in this line literally means selflessness or no selfless and by extension, 156 00:17:53,910 --> 00:17:59,760 unconsciousness, the inability to distinguish anything from anything else. 157 00:17:59,760 --> 00:18:03,510 The following lines continue in this vein until with the sixth couple of weeks, 158 00:18:03,510 --> 00:18:09,940 finally see the collocation of wine inebriation with self, a basement made explicit. 159 00:18:09,940 --> 00:18:19,110 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. 160 00:18:19,110 --> 00:18:23,040 The home of peace. Or what a Buddhist might call the peace. 161 00:18:23,040 --> 00:18:31,560 The Shontell, if you like of final liberation, the next debate contain contains perhaps the most wonderful play of the entire poem, 162 00:18:31,560 --> 00:18:36,270 with coloured meaning both heart and hence that which is most inner, 163 00:18:36,270 --> 00:18:44,010 most unchangeable the US and counterfeit the worldly coin for which we have sold very selves. 164 00:18:44,010 --> 00:18:48,910 The final This tick is very dense and so amenable to various translations. 165 00:18:48,910 --> 00:18:58,100 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. 166 00:18:58,100 --> 00:19:02,020 We don't have time today to look more deeply into this than I have. 167 00:19:02,020 --> 00:19:07,060 But anyone familiar with love is in the audience knows that is quite common in his poetry to find 168 00:19:07,060 --> 00:19:13,540 wine used in the sense of bringing a liberator to inebriation freedom from society's balance, 169 00:19:13,540 --> 00:19:19,420 as also from the from the intellects discrimination purchase. 170 00:19:19,420 --> 00:19:26,590 And I'll skip the purging there. The following line from another poem is typical in this respect my intellect the left Herman. 171 00:19:26,590 --> 00:19:32,270 If this be wine, I have seen beforehand what happens in the house of my religion. 172 00:19:32,270 --> 00:19:35,380 Now this is a particularly nice example in that an explicitly acquaintance 173 00:19:35,380 --> 00:19:40,450 the abandonment of intellectual discrimination with true authentic religion, 174 00:19:40,450 --> 00:19:49,420 as opposed to the focus on external correctness characteristic of nominal rectitude and the analytical intellect, 175 00:19:49,420 --> 00:19:52,870 Hough has occasionally uses the Islamic motif of the day of our last, 176 00:19:52,870 --> 00:19:59,410 in which the the primordial covenant between creator and created was sealed or more frequently. 177 00:19:59,410 --> 00:20:01,840 He uses the top also, said Rawls, 178 00:20:01,840 --> 00:20:11,200 the innermost secret or mystery hidden to all but the lover and beloved to express this mystical state of Ultimate Union, 179 00:20:11,200 --> 00:20:18,610 the state in which all distinctions fade away in the presence of the one and only true being. 180 00:20:18,610 --> 00:20:27,610 And it is wine that characteristically allows this state to ensue precisely by lowering the walls of inhibition, 181 00:20:27,610 --> 00:20:33,000 clearing the ground of difference and distance between the two. 182 00:20:33,000 --> 00:20:38,280 And just as Hafiz is not alone in extolling the virtues of common in the Persian poetic tradition, 183 00:20:38,280 --> 00:20:45,720 Sahar Shan is, of course, far from being the only classical Chinese poet poet enamoured of it show. 184 00:20:45,720 --> 00:20:50,010 Others include Libye, often regarded as China's greatest poet for her. 185 00:20:50,010 --> 00:20:58,860 Wine was a frequent theme, so much so that the probably apocryphal story of his death goes that he drowned while trying drunk, 186 00:20:58,860 --> 00:21:03,570 of course, to embrace the moon reflected in a pond. 187 00:21:03,570 --> 00:21:11,040 Tom Yuan Ming, meanwhile, like Hongshan, is classed as a recluse poet, though in his case it was Daoism rather than Buddhism, 188 00:21:11,040 --> 00:21:17,980 which inspired works such as the famous tea, drinking wine or ginger poems. 189 00:21:17,980 --> 00:21:23,860 Sometimes use of line imagery mirrors that of half as across several key themes. 190 00:21:23,860 --> 00:21:33,100 Thus, for example, we find wine embraced in carpe diem terms as the agent of oblivion, the omniscient, 191 00:21:33,100 --> 00:21:39,880 if you will, of the myriad channels of life in the world where there's wine, let's call on each other to drink. 192 00:21:39,880 --> 00:21:46,380 Where there's meat, let's hail on each other to eat. Sooner or later, we'll be in the underworld. 193 00:21:46,380 --> 00:21:52,330 I'm sorry. Let's act with strength while long and strong, etc., etc. 194 00:21:52,330 --> 00:22:00,790 We also find verses such as the following in which Hansan hunch on conceives of wine as a lubricant to poetic creativity. 195 00:22:00,790 --> 00:22:08,800 One which enables entrance into the state of mind needful for the distillation of thought into verse. 196 00:22:08,800 --> 00:22:17,320 My scroll filled with poems of talented genius. My jugs flew with sageman wine, etc., etc. I'll let you read the rest. 197 00:22:17,320 --> 00:22:25,660 I should note that cite the talented genius in the first line is an honorific referring to scholar officials and Sageman Wine Showroom. 198 00:22:25,660 --> 00:22:33,670 Joel is one of the colloquial names given to pure, unadulterated wine after it was banned by the Statesmen and Poets Hotel. 199 00:22:33,670 --> 00:22:39,130 Toward the end of the Three Kingdoms period in the early third century. 200 00:22:39,130 --> 00:22:45,880 But rather than continuing to list the related but diverse uses to which hunching puts wine in his poetry, 201 00:22:45,880 --> 00:22:51,520 I want to concentrate on a poem in which it enables not transcendence or entrance, 202 00:22:51,520 --> 00:23:00,220 but the return to the recollection of that most inwardly present absence of distinctions. 203 00:23:00,220 --> 00:23:07,090 A month when farmers escape the summer heat, who will enjoy a cup of wine together, they've scattered mountain fruits here and there. 204 00:23:07,090 --> 00:23:15,070 I laid wine goblets all around reeds and Russia's will serve as many leaves of plantings in for plates once drunk, 205 00:23:15,070 --> 00:23:19,530 said propped mount, soumettre a tiny bowl. 206 00:23:19,530 --> 00:23:29,130 Here, wine leads to the state of non discernment between big and small and by extension of all mental distinctions of Chicago care. 207 00:23:29,130 --> 00:23:37,470 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, 208 00:23:37,470 --> 00:23:44,760 of course, is a stock figure taken from since critic Buddhist texts think, for example, of Book five, 209 00:23:44,760 --> 00:23:53,580 the trinity of Imoke show some version of the demon like you can use Desha, wherein visual acuity tells shoddy Pietro that for all, 210 00:23:53,580 --> 00:24:01,860 sorry for that to target her in the body sutra there is liberation called inconceivable a chant your name of your moksha, right? 211 00:24:01,860 --> 00:24:06,180 Which phrase? Birth kumara Jeeva entrance. I'll translate as your chart. 212 00:24:06,180 --> 00:24:13,980 It will mean Booker and Yisa, right? And that the bodhisattva who resides there can put soda into a mustard seed and 213 00:24:13,980 --> 00:24:19,460 managed to do so without enlarging the mustard seed or shrinking the mountain. 214 00:24:19,460 --> 00:24:28,280 Getting back to hunch on the smallest of things is clearly a metaphor for the Buddha nature referred to in the following poem. 215 00:24:28,280 --> 00:24:31,550 1000 lives, 10000 deaths, when will it end? 216 00:24:31,550 --> 00:24:42,170 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. 217 00:24:42,170 --> 00:24:47,990 In this last poem, the mention of the priceless jewel like the treasure inside your rogue mentioned in 218 00:24:47,990 --> 00:24:53,330 another a clearly references to a widely known parable from a source well known. 219 00:24:53,330 --> 00:25:00,950 No doubt too many of you, the Saddam Up America suit all the lunch in the Lotus. 220 00:25:00,950 --> 00:25:05,720 The fifth of the seven parables contained in the Sutra describes, as you no doubt recall, 221 00:25:05,720 --> 00:25:10,880 a man who having drunk wine goes to sleep in the house of a friend while he is asleep. 222 00:25:10,880 --> 00:25:12,380 The friends there is a series, 223 00:25:12,380 --> 00:25:20,480 a jewel of priceless worth into the lining of his robe and then departs when the man awakens, unaware of what has happened. 224 00:25:20,480 --> 00:25:24,440 He sets off for another country where he undergoes great hardship. 225 00:25:24,440 --> 00:25:31,820 Later, he again meets the friend who let him know of the precious jewel that has all along been sewn into his work. 226 00:25:31,820 --> 00:25:38,270 That was Burton Watson, one of the lotuses translators into English, as written in this and the other parables. 227 00:25:38,270 --> 00:25:43,340 And I quote the crux of the problem is not faulty reasoning or wayward behaviour, 228 00:25:43,340 --> 00:25:49,370 but simply ignorance of the true nature of one's situation or abilities. 229 00:25:49,370 --> 00:25:54,350 This true nature of this priceless jewel or treasure is transparently nothing 230 00:25:54,350 --> 00:25:58,610 other than what the Chinese Buddhist tradition called Forsey the Buddha nature, 231 00:25:58,610 --> 00:26:08,870 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. 232 00:26:08,870 --> 00:26:16,880 Suffice it to say for present purposes that the Buddha nature is the pure and inherent seed in all Cindy and beaks, 233 00:26:16,880 --> 00:26:22,490 including, of course, ourselves, by means of which by virtue of which we may gain enlightenment. 234 00:26:22,490 --> 00:26:27,200 We are all inherently endowed with this jewel of enlightenment, but we are not aware of this. 235 00:26:27,200 --> 00:26:34,580 And so we suffer. And what we suffer from is, in a sense, separation, separation from reality, 236 00:26:34,580 --> 00:26:41,510 from what wisdom would call and the real, and from what the Buddhist tradition calls general war at the time. 237 00:26:41,510 --> 00:26:52,340 The true vastness of things, how things are really on this perspective is simply as such bereft of distinctions. 238 00:26:52,340 --> 00:26:57,800 It is our ignorance that leads us to separating reality into individual things. 239 00:26:57,800 --> 00:27:01,850 Really, however, if only we could wipe the dust from our eyes. 240 00:27:01,850 --> 00:27:08,600 Reality, as it is, is shorn of any conceptual distinctions or evaluations. 241 00:27:08,600 --> 00:27:14,820 Recall in this context, one of my favourite lines from the Godejohn is one of my yarmulke Kartika. 242 00:27:14,820 --> 00:27:22,350 How how do we attain that, right, how do we attain this, this peacefulness not conceptualised? 243 00:27:22,350 --> 00:27:28,650 Well, the crux of the Buddha nature doctrine as I see it and indeed of the whole notion of sudden enlightenment do that 244 00:27:28,650 --> 00:27:36,570 it underwrites is that the realisation of enlightenment is I would like to put it an epistemological effect, 245 00:27:36,570 --> 00:27:45,120 not an ontological one. That is, we do not need to change anything about the world to be truly free of suffering. 246 00:27:45,120 --> 00:27:49,830 We only need to come to know how the world really is. 247 00:27:49,830 --> 00:27:58,230 And we do that precisely without distinguishing or as chom thinkers will go on to say, without thinking or conceptualising. 248 00:27:58,230 --> 00:28:08,520 Also again, for Jungian wine is a particularly efficacious means to this end, or at least the motif of wine in his poetry. 249 00:28:08,520 --> 00:28:13,950 As the few examples I have deduced, hopefully sure, wine is a means toward this realisation. 250 00:28:13,950 --> 00:28:25,700 And this is precisely insofar as it blurs conventional distinctions so as to allow the ultimate interrelated unity of the Buddha nature to manifest. 251 00:28:25,700 --> 00:28:34,760 To conclude, then, I propose that the wine motif found in the work of religious poets such as Hafiz and Hongshan presents 252 00:28:34,760 --> 00:28:42,050 us with an instance of irreligious literature literature that uses a feature inimical to the religion, 253 00:28:42,050 --> 00:28:49,460 such as in this case, inebriation to arrive at a truth that is very much central to that tradition. 254 00:28:49,460 --> 00:28:57,950 But what is the proper Unical approach to take towards attacks that were identifiably Buddhist nonetheless exhibits overtly non Buddhist, 255 00:28:57,950 --> 00:29:00,440 even anti Buddhist features? 256 00:29:00,440 --> 00:29:07,670 What methodological or theoretical lenses are appropriate for scholars of religion when working on such irreligious literatures? 257 00:29:07,670 --> 00:29:13,640 How do we read these on the scriptures? Well, I think I probably have about a minute left. 258 00:29:13,640 --> 00:29:18,440 So the short story is that you'll just have to read the book. But suffice it, 259 00:29:18,440 --> 00:29:24,830 in short for the present talk to say that I believe that we need to approach these texts in a manner that does 260 00:29:24,830 --> 00:29:34,130 not seek to force them into four concluded categorical boxes as Buddhist or Islamic or mystical or mealy. 261 00:29:34,130 --> 00:29:44,960 And Nermeen ism, I see as the deliberate overturning of religious victims the refusal to abide by legal strictures and moral or social norms. 262 00:29:44,960 --> 00:29:52,490 This is different. We find here a genuinely problematic genre of religious literature in the sense that this 263 00:29:52,490 --> 00:29:58,880 corpus of texts deliberately undermines the very religious sources it springs from, 264 00:29:58,880 --> 00:30:07,880 even as it simultaneously reinterprets prohibited substances as the very substance of religiosity itself. 265 00:30:07,880 --> 00:30:15,006 All I can say is cheers to that. And thank you, and I very much welcome your questions.