1 He may take the iron

„He may take the iron“

All my childhood friends confirm that death and dying have always been among my main topics, especially during our shared LSD trips. Perhaps this curiosity was even particularly fueled by the use of psychedelic drugs? At the same time, these same friends still lament today—albeit with a polite smile—how much I used to get on their nerves with these discussions. Of course, I can no longer remember the exact contents of those conversations, but as far as I can remember, my interest in these topics of death and dying were already pretty particular back then. I could be very cheeky and probing, and I am sure that I took my various questions pretty serious. On the other hand, we probably all tended toward cynicism and exaggeration at the time, especially on LSD—and simply for reasons of self-defence, that is, more or less out of fear. Perhaps my focus on these topics was just an attempt to take the bull by the horns? But my interest in the subject of death was certainly unusual. One must not forget that in the mid-sixties, the horribly mutilated and burned corpses of the Second World War still loomed around mainly in our parents minds, so to speak. My entire family and acquaintances had worked in a huge emergency hospital for soldiers in Bad Godesberg, Germany, in the years around the end of the war. But I only recognized the pain and traumas that still lingered in our parents much later. There was something there, but we young people couldn’t even guess what was being kept hidden, because our parents simply couldn’t and wouldn’t talk about the first postwar years with its horrible pictures and desaster. These topics were taboo, and those memories were just to painful to bear. I do understand that, because such stressful memories simply need time. But while these repressions took on the strangest forms and outgrowths in our parents, we children couldn’t make sense of it by no chance. We couldn´t make sense out of what was often going on with our parents, there associations and fears and sometimes wrath, break downs or hysteria.

My philosophizing took on some buddhist shape when an acquaintance, namely Schnüss, sat across from me in the “Barriere”—a youth pub in Bad Godesberg—looked at me meaningfully and said: Long—that’s what people called me back then—you also bear the mark of Cain, don’t you!? And that’s why you absolutely have to read this! And he pushed a German translation of Henry Steel Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism over to me. “I’ll give it to you,” he said solemnly and meaningfully, “and when you’re done, pass it on to another kindred spirit!” The booklet was printed in Sri Lanka, on the cheapest paper you can imagine, and published by a charitable Buddhist Indian society. Anyway – my interest in Buddhism was awakened. As I read, I was over and over surprised, line by line. This extremely unusual text was very clear and simple in style, as if written for children in the catechism class. But every single word seemed to make sense to me, and many of the questions asked were completely new to me. In fact, just a few weeks later, I gave a lecture on “Buddhism” at our boarding school. Today I would love to know what I said back then. And by the way, our dormitory group—there were four of us—went on LSD research trips several times a week those days. So what might I have said about Buddhism in that environment? People who were there only remember that I radiated religious enthusiasm. But maybe they just say so nowadays to be nice? We young people lived in a very confused and neurotic atmosphere but non the less extremely eventful  and exciting at the same time. The Wirtschaftswunder – sixties, after all. „Wunder“ means magic and there was some kind of magic going on in these after war years in Germany. Germans realized that everything is possible depending on your input?

So my curiosity was piqued, and soon I went to our Godesberg bookstore and asked for a bibliography on Buddhism. The young female employees always giggled when they saw me coming. That was, of course, a bit embarrassing and uncomfortable, but I absolutely wanted to learn more, and at that time, the internet hadn’t even been mentioned in science fiction books. There wasn’t even a digital directory of available books, as I’d like to remind you again, we were still in the sixties. Booksellers learned in their training to search in the two super-thick volumes of available books—the VLB and LIBRI. Huge reference works. Each year, two such volumes were published. In one, the available books were probably sorted by title and topic, in the other by author. The girls—maybe they were still apprentices—had a hard time searching and at first could only offer me a pretty cheap paperback titled “Buddha.” It was a collection of 52 discourses of the historical Buddha, translated from Pali by Dr. Paul Dahlke.

At least: I could get started… Back then, some friends and I called ourselves existentialists and sympathized with Sartre, Kierkegaard, Huysmans, and Camus. These authors opened our eyes to taboos and to commonly accepted ideas that apparently hadn’t been questioned for too long  a time but were still shaping our lives. On top of all, we were in the self-discovery phase of puberty. We suddenly moved more stiffly, confusedly, and strangely. In addition, hashish and LSD entered our lives, the so-called new “youth drugs,” and these drugs were potent. Woah! They changed the sensation of life for young people throughout the Western world, including us extremely much.

Wasn’t the world we lived in ultimately invented by people and then cultivated over thousands of years? And even if the first conscious humans were called Adam and Eve, languages, objects, and creeds only developed gradually, over millennials. The role of words seemed to play a big part. The words with which we named everything and successfully subjugate almost everything. These words were all invented by people, weren’t they? They were really inventions. One could say every word was originally a spell of sound, each for the purpose of subjugating one phenomenon after another. Spells over spells and spells.

There was this wonderful book “Tief Unten” ( “Deep Down” Là-bas, 1891) by Huysmans. Here, behind the familiar and well-known in the underworlds, being and matter wobbled and were hard to pin down. Substance was missing and no handling possible. Everything was coming and vanishing always in flux. And again: underlying and most confusing the sixties was probably, and not only in Germany, the legacy of the Second World War. In Germany our war-traumatized teachers, parents, but also politicians, journalists, and philosophers, did hide in a kind of hardcore materialism, for which they believed to find justification in scientific explanations. And they amusingly liked to call themselves realists. “Realistic” was a very strong and much-used word in the sixties. And the word „facts“. By the way, even from sides of the clergy you would not find different perspectives in those days. The priests were also mostly preoccupied with themselves, the church, and in one way or another overwhelmed by sex as well. In the sixties, a profound identity crisis was brewing for the churches (which were mainly Catholic and Lutheran traditions), so they contemplated mostly the organization of the church itself and less questions of being or meaning. Presumably, even the most devoted among the clergy at the time considered consciousness to be a random product of matter and dynamics, from which identities then developed in extremely extended evolutionary processes. There was a Catholic chaplain who regularly sought contact with me. He was our religion teacher, and after school, he took me in his VW Beetle and asked me about sex and the sin of masturbation. In fact, the first time, I didn’t even know what he meant. And it always ended with, “Come to the confessional on Saturday, then I can absolve you from your sins.” I was, of course, always happy to get rid of him and naturally forgot to actually go to his confessionals. I think he meant well. And he apparently liked to talk about sex.

I regularly read and studied my existentialists back then, but somehow I didn’t really understand them. I was a very slow comprehender and always sensed connections rather than truly understanding figures and facts clear and bright? I chewed, so to speak, very slowly, and it seemed to me myself even particularly slow. Really grasp concepts like existence and matter, and actually understand, touch and use them, I couldn’t manage yet. Okay: Camus’ “The Stranger,” I could follow and he got even close to me. because I felt alien in this world too, just like him. But beyond that basically, we all explored existentialism more or less one-eyed. Only in our desire to open ourselves to unusual questions and to accept no taboos we were united. The crazier, the better. The obviously very vain and self-important Sartre was concerned with self-presentation and importance. He just want to be a great philosopher and get the girls like Simone de Beauvoir? Mister Important? At least, with his view that existence was first and then essence arose out of it he was way ahead. That was amazing! I found Camus honest and sincere in contrast. Kierkegaard, Max Frisch, also Hesse and Huysmans were personally closer to me. They considered themselfs crazy and that´´  s what I could very well relate to. They were like me, like friends, just smarter and more skilled. New worlds opened up between doubt, wonder, and vulnerability. And more and more questions arose. But there were no real answers, there was no meaning to my life except in a very materialistic way. Only very gradually did I get used to the thoughts of philosophies and religions, but searching took me a lot of patience and commitment so to speak, but in this intense researching an questioning, I was actually different from most of my friends. These French and Danish philosophers were, in their times and circumstances, just as lonely and alien as we hippies in the sixties— in our cases not particularly only from drugs but also because of boredom and uselessness— no there was a kind of hopeless emptiness which forced us to ask questions about meaning. And we all recognized, each in their own time, the lies and nonsense of the directions given by the zeitgeist.

Not to forget, a kind of sexual liberation movement was running at full speed, among other things, due to the invention of new easy accessible contraceptives and biological education on sex. And the women who wanted to live out their new freedoms in sexuality didn’t necessarily make life easier for us men. So a whole new universe of intoxication, delusion, feelings, and follies was added. One more reason to look for an emergency exit.

As far as I remember, Huysmans was the most daring among all my authors and heroines. And always the question: What’s actually going on here?…

But please follow me back to Buddha. I had enjoyed a very superficial Catholic upbringing, but I was even confirmed. Confirmation—funnily enough, that means “strengthened”—you get that at fourteen or fifteen, so I was probably with the Catholics for that long, because with confirmation, my Catholic career pretty much ended for good. Probably something went wrong with the strengthening, and the whole wall accidentally toppled over.

Now lets take a moment to laugh.

As I told you I got this collection of Buddha’s discourses and read one discourse after another. I tuned into this special tone and rhythm. I liked sitting upright and studying these discourses in an attentive and solemn mood. And although Dahlke translated the Buddha’s discourses from Pali very soberly and, from today’s perspective, I may say “very superficially,” too, inaccurately, and even poorly, but also lovingly. It sounded a bit stiff, Lutheran, even loveless, and thus somehow scientific and factual and less magical. But since it was so new to me, I still found it atmospheric. Obviously, despite all the sobriety, Dahlke cared deeply about the everyday mood in the community of nuns and monks and Buddhist laypeople. He also  had grown fond of this atmosphere. Thank you, dear Paul! It was really a great joy for me to study these discourses back then.

Eventually, I came across a discourse in which an experienced master disciple of Buddha said to his fellow monks—roughly: “I have followed the teachings of the Blessed One, completed all exercises and meditations. I have fully walked the path, always reverently according to the instructions, and I have attained complete liberation from suffering. Now I am old, and my body is very sick, and this body suffers and causes terrible pain. Therefore, I have decided…to take the iron…”

Huh?

Excuse me? I woke up.

What was going on?

I read it again, but there it was: This master disciple of Buddha wanted to kill himself because continuing to live in his painful body made no sense to him any more. That was crazy! He seemed to regard his body simply as a remnant of his fate, as unnecessary, and therefore he wanted to end it. And I simply hadn’t expected that—Catholic ethically educated—in a pious, religious book. Wasn’t that extremely arrogant, proud, and cynical from a master disciple of Buddha? Okay, I wouldn’t have been surprised with my existentialists, but here in a religious sermon? In a world of humble nuns and monks? The friends of this master disciple then hurried to Buddha and told him what his master disciple intended. They pleaded to Buddha to stop their revered, beloved, enlightened friend from killing himself.

So what would Buddha say?

And here it comes! Listen!

Shock!!

The whole thing stretches over several pages, as the monks cermonially circumbulate the Blessed one, and then approached Buddha, sat down and told Buddha about the plan for self-killing with a knife. These friends and monks were horrified and out of their minds. And then finally the Buddha—I will never forget the moment I read this— the Buddha said:

“He may take the iron.”

Excuse me? What?

No comments, no restrictions, no explanations?

I was really as surprised as probably never before in my life. That was crazy! A religious founder, a saint, an enlightened one has nothing against suicide? He decides quite soberly:

“He may take the iron.”

Without hesitation, clear and distinct: “He may take the iron.”

Could one really so clearly distinguish between the physical body and the enlightened mind, so that after enlightenment, one could simply throw away the body like an old useless piece of underpants? And sorry, but that was the only way I could see and understand it at the time.

Of course, as we grow up, we are shaped by the philosophical and religious attitudes of our times and environments. And in my Christian or neo-liberal environment, dealing with suicide simply didn’t fit in. Only now did I realize that this topic was actually quite taboo. This: “He may take the iron,” really woke me up. An apparently casual and unequivocal affirmation of suicide? This was getting more and more interesting and surprising. I wanted to learn as much as possible and more about this Buddha as quickly as possible.

At this point, I must thank the attentive reader for still being here and reading on, but without this backstory, my crazy comments on the Tibetan Book of the Dead would make much less sense. Sorry to take your time!

A few months later, I found myself in a Hindu commune around Sri Aurobindo in Dormagen (Germany) where I was actually to buy a larger quantity of hashish. Here I first saw a translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. By the way, a beautiful dark blue hard cover edition. The American editor was named Evans-Wentz. The book was based on the translation of a Tibetan lama, who doubted whether his English was good enough for such a philosophical translation. So he asked his friend Evans-Wentz to revise and refine his translation, and this Evans-Wentz also looked for a publisher and first published it under his own name in 1927.

But in Dormagen, on the windowsill, was not the first edition of this translation, but, funnily enough, the revised German translation, which was provided with over 400 footnotes by a German Lama Govinda, and with forewords by C.G. Jung and a then very famous Indologist with the solemn name Sir John Woodroffe.

This ashram in Dormagen was located in a modern bungalow and consisted mainly of a huge hall, probably originally intended as a modern furnished spacious living room for lavish cocktail parties of a German after war economic miracle suddenly rich family. Modern. But there was no furniture in the large room, just a few seat cushions on the floor and some Indian musical instruments leaning against the wall. Denny was playing a sitar, and Jürgen accompanied him on tablas. A large, white, open space—almost empty. Two of the walls consisted of several very large windows without curtains. So there was a lot of natural light. Outside were some similar bungalows in a kind of unfinished satellite suburb. And on one of the windowsills lay this Tibetan Book of the Dead—opened at a page with a black-and-white photo of a typical Tibetan depiction of a mandala with many deities. In front of the book, an incense stick was ceremoniously placed. As an offering? Mind you, I was in a Hindu ashram, not a Buddhist meditation hall. Nevertheless, here was a Buddhist text of Tibetan origin. And that was in fact the only book in the whole room. I found that extraordinary. It had to be a very special book. I would have expected a book by Sri Aurobindo in this ashram, since these were his German students.

When I got back to Godesberg, I immediately rushed to my giggling booksellers and probably with a shining red face ordered this Tibetan Book of the Dead. That felt so intense real and I was in the best mood. I was floating! When I finally held the book in my hands, I felt rich and happy—blissful. Arrived?… What I didn’t know at the time was that the editor of this Book of the Dead—Mr. Evans-Wentz—himself belonged to a Hindu tradition and not a Buddhist one. And so I gradually understood how these 400 footnotes by a real and learned German Buddhist—Lama Anagarika Govinda—came about. And you have to know that Buddhism differs from Hindu traditions—the most spread religions of Buddha’s time and we should not forget that the Buddha himself was a student of so called Hinduisme—so Buddhisme differs from Hinduisme in particular as in the question: What is the soul (Atman)? Buddha came to the conclusion that ther is no soul, no atman. It does not exist at all. But Buddha questioned the existence of a self, or  soul, the ego might be an illusion, simply a habit, a habitual pattern maintained only by memory and time.

One of Buddha’s preferred methods to find the truth, was to patiently listing all conceivable, nameable phenomena: the dharmas. There is a word for each. Really all of them. He asked his students to examine all existing phenomena, their names, their origin, their meaning, their substance and location looking for a soul. But beyond the dharmas they could not find any ego—no atman.

So a Hindu —this Evans-Wentz—had found a text among the Buddhists in which he believed he recognized that it was about what happens to the self (the soul) when dying and afterwards? The text was to be read aloud to the dying and the dead, and thus the deceased had the chance in the first phases after death, in this initial exceptional state (Tibetan: Bardo), to attain liberation from suffering and pain, hope and fear and self-delusion. In three subsequent phases, in the process of dying, one could also turn future fate to the good in one way or another. In summary: liberation by hearing at the deathbed, and that during the dying process and the first seven weeks immediately after the moment of death! That sounded somehow even easy and inviting.

That this text, which is very widespread among Tibetans, was published by a devout Hindu was, of course, a strange coincidence. Now, Evans-Wentz was friends with Lama Govinda—a real, devout and very German Buddhist who was also reasonably familiar with the Tibetan language. Lama Govinda kindly explained to him that this translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead contained many mistakes and misunderstandings. By the way, I later met Lama Govinda personally, and he could say such things so kindly and amiably that you could never hold it against him. You simply couldn’t hold anything against him. Evans-Wentz then tried to convince his publisher that it would be better if Lama Govinda translated the text anew. But the first editions had been a real commercial success for the publisher, and the publisher didn’t want to give up such a successful bestseller and take any risks. The name Evans-Wentz was now closely associated with this successful book. Evans-Wentz had already become famous in esoteric circles. The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the name Evans-Wentz now belonged together, and the publisher wanted to continue profiting from that. So they only agreed that Lama Govinda should explain and clarify the ambiguous passages in footnotes. When Lama Govinda finally came up with over 400 such footnotes it was to late, it could not be changed anymore without loosing face und credibility. Moreover the publisher chose an essay by the then well-known and popular psychoanalyst C.G. Jung, who already knew and loved the old edition, as a further explanatory introduction. On top of it a foreword by a then well-known British philosopher of Indology, Sir John Woodroffe, was included, who had worked as a judge in India and died in 1938.

So now I—a hippie and acid head from Bad Godesberg —held this book in my hands. And for me, this beautiful, powerful book became especially important. From then on, this Tibetan Book of the Dead lived with me. Always close by. But honestly speaking I did find it very difficult to really follow the texts intellectually. I was simply still too uneducated and just not smart enough. Of course, I did find many super interesting single ideas and statements, but it was still a pretty foreign world, I was diving into. I was basically mostly shaped by the scientific view on things, matter and the world. At that time, a scientific-biological world view was more or less the norm. At that point the belive in science had taken over everywhere. And this “modern” and “realistic” world view and belief was almost insurmountable! And despite existentialism and surrealisme I also was deep rooted in the belief in the existence of matter and soul, or a self. I, too, understood these texts, funnily enough, more like Evans-Wentz, the Hindu. Because it was all still far too new and strange.

But at least I had come to terms with being overwhelmed by all this and lived an exciting, colorful, and quite happy life. We were still at the end of the sixties. But the book lived in me and started to grow roots. Even just—or perhaps mainly—through its mere existence, this book influenced my thinking, feeling, and actions day by day. It’s amazing how effective a text can become even just by its mere existence, and even if it’s just lying around. I really worked my way through with this book word by word, but without really reading it all the way through and without understanding it. My personal guru, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, later published a new translation with commentary together with Francesca Freemantle, a British Tibetologist, and this has become the second most sold translation in Western languages until today. But for years, I carried around this old, thick, blue tome by Evans-Wentz. Even on my 15-month pilgrimage through Asia, the book accompanied me for a long time, and at every opportunity, I studied the footnotes and tried to open myself further up to it. By the way, the best thing about the footnotes was that Lama Govinda quoted countless other books, and so I could simply go to my book store and order books without having to rely on the giggling, silly girls there anymore.

In Asia, I then sought encounters with Tibetan masters and absolutely wanted to learn Tibetan, but that, too, was very difficult for me. I just learn and understand rather slowly. But this noble blue book looked at me every day back then and affected me. Thank you!