34. On Crossing Life's Spiritual and Psychological Borders

Dearly Beloved,

Many of us are thinking now about travelling abroad for Summer holidays which involves crossing physical borders. Perhaps the most significant borders we cross in our lives are psychological and spiritual. These can be small moves like thinking about, deciding and enacting a charitable donation, or perhaps failing to do so.

Sometimes psychological borders are extensive and require years to cross. John, my Ph.D. supervisor traversed such a border. He was a distinguished academic who had studied and supervised research into birds and Primates in Africa. He had done his own D.Phil. just down the road from St Clement's at Jesus College. When I first arrived in the department in 1970 he was away for a year in the USA at Stanford University. 

When he returned everyone who had previously known him said that he had totally changed from a driven academic who was difficult socially, to the most laid back and sociable of people. He had attended the Esalen Institute on the rugged Big Sur coast of California and participated in “encounter group” sessions and these had such a huge influence on him that it changed both his personality and his life. 

It is difficult nowadays to judge what went on in these groups in 1970 because their activities have been buried by layers of subsequent abstraction and obscure theorising. The objectives was to form a group and gain greater understanding of oneself and the other people in a group. That involved realising and understanding and breaking down one's own social fears and social inhibitions and helping others do likewise. The original questions seemed to be “what is it like to be yourself; what is it like to be lonely?” The emphasis was on less thinking, more feeling. Esalen and its diverse activities is often credited with providing the foundation to modern counter culture.

On returning to England John separated from his wife and instead went to live with a marriage guidance counselor. He instituted his own Esalen type encounter groups in the local city and spent less and less time dealing with his academic duties. Shortly after I left the department and before he finally took early retirement from the University, he travelled to the Zanskar area of Ladakh where he studied polyandry and promoted it as a reasonable alternative to the norm of exclusive couples found in most other cultures, asserting that male jealousy was absent from such communities. He later spent time in Tibet with hermits and studied their lives and beliefs. These experiences seem to have encouraged him to embrace Buddhism and he later studied and promoted Chan which is also better known by its Japanese term, Zen, and was given permission to teach by Shen Yen 57th generational dharma heir of Linji Yiuxuan in the Lindji school.

As a result of his other interests I had very little supervision from John but eventually passed my Ph.D. viva and left the department. Some years later I met my old supervisor and he enthusiastically told me he had now been accepted as a Chan Master. In 2011 many of his old students had a week-end get together to celebrate his 80th birthday and my wife and I attended. During dinner some wit pointed out that it had been calculated that I had been given approximately two and a half minutes supervision a week over my entire studentship. This caused some laughter but in his speech to the company, John took the opportunity to apologise for his neglect of my studies and those of another student, which we, in our timeless way, much appreciated.

On Monday morning, after the gathering ended John went back to his home in an old farm on top of the Mendips which lay at the end of a long track, symbolic of his retreat from ordinary life. He sat down in a chair in his sitting room to rest, never to rise again, and died of natural causes. So just over a week later a small group of us academics attended John's funeral. Here is my record of that occasion written to my old fellow students who were unable to be present:

“This turned out to be a major Buddhist event attended by 170 people of which at least 18 were in monks or nuns robes. The monks came from at least three different groups, Zen nuns from a nunnery near Hexam, a group of monks who had travelled all the way from the Dharma Drum Temple in New York and, most important of all, monks dressed in black from the Western Chan Fellowship with whom John worked as a Chan Master. 

A monk officiated, dressed in ceremonial robes with a scarlet thickly woven band over his shoulder and back, who carried a fly whisk as a symbol of his monastic status. One of the objectives of the service was to posthumously confer on John the status of a monk, with those of us in the congregation answering for him. This included witnessing the symbolic shaving of John's head, symbolising the cutting of human attachments, a ceremony in which a razor was brandished before and over John's coffin. 

The coffin had been placed on a small altar complete with food offerings and a portrait of John dressed in a red jacket. A Buddha mandala was placed on the wall behind. Most of the congregation seemed to be Buddhist as demonstrated by the volume of the enthusiastic chanting led by a nun from the Hexam group. The order of service ran to sixteen pages. The prayers, chants and regalia spoke of the extraordinary complexity of ideas about human conduct and being which John had embraced.” Likewise the complexity of the fate of the soul after death is extraordinary in Buddhist cosmology. We can however be more conclusive about the fate of the body: “Accompanied by the only repetitive chant of the service, John's body finally rolled through the little doors to be consigned to the flames” and passed through its last frontier.

Peace,

Paul.

Completed: 31 July 2021.

Photo: Paul Munton.
At Evening in Winter, The Plane Trees on Jesus Green, Cambridge.



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