The Big Two Hundred
Kurt's skull bowl--Kepala--used ritually in Tibetan Tantric practice
According to the text of the Diamond Sutra (following the clew of the flow of words like strands of the golden hair of the maiden, the Goddess, she who inspires, to whom all songs of the poets are sung), one of the ways in which the WHOLE of "It" (remember, that It--cited in the published writings of the Venerable Chogyam Trungpa, Rimpoche)--may be
VIEWED
IMAGINED
VISUALIZED
DESCRIBED
REPRESENTED
ARRAYED
What we may ask: a translation of the Sanskrit verb as used in the traditional text of the VAJRACCHEDIKATRAJNAPARAMITA SUTRA--The Diamond, the Adamantine, the Diamondcutter--VAJRA (and the VAJRA is one of the nine ways in which "It" may be viewed).
The extraordinary text of this Sutra sets forth nine words which appear as three ranks of three words that is, in a tic-tac-toe pattern.
Associate: pattern as used in the movie Wargames.
The game in Great Britain is known as Naughts and Crosses.
Easily programable, binary logic, Boolean.
But what we'd like to know is why the function of Taoist balance in the game is called CAT?
In Egypt she was called sekhmut, in a way a flip type Sphynx.
The Grid of Ways can be imagined and translated as:
STARS CATARACT LAMP
MAGIC SHOW DEWDROP BUBBLE
CLOUD VAJRA DREAM
Vajra is rDorje (in Tibetan): Lightening bolt or Diamond, and the idea of the Adamantine, that which is Indestructable.
But then, It may be seen as a lamp, much like the very one, a soft white with two hundred watts, recently screwed into the Buddha-based lamp on the V-desk of Jose Que. It was in the light from that lamp, which lends itself to the title of this brief piece, that the following lines of text are spun and laid down in loomings post-Melville, after skald and Norn page for page a network of text, words letter-marked in ink on the white sheet face of the paper which by convention we take as the face of the void.
Spin a yarn.
Untie all the knots in a ball of twine
(in a cave high in the Bhutanese Himalayas
in which there is a hot spring
while the demon of the knotted ball of twine
is known as the SOUNDAY).
The oldest forms of writing: QUIPU--knotted cords
No body knows when the knotting of cords was invented. Germanic lore ascribes the feat to Wotan, or Odin. In this, the deity is of a Culture-bringer archetype, also associated with Hermes in Greece, Thoth in Egypt, and later Mercury in Rome, but Hermes Trismegistus because of the Sacred Jackal Anubis who performed the function of the psychopomp, or the guide for souls in certain out-of-body states, and in association with the Bardo, the State between death and rebirth.
Buddy Meier came across the tiger's claw set in silver and suspended on a chain; it was with other curious objects in the hollow of some old Tibetan's skull which had been converted out of vast esteem to serve as the Grailcup or ritual chalice for dud-si, the juice, amrta ambrosia, Nectar of the Gods, that drink for which Tantalus was punished according the Graves' Greek Myths.
And in Needham, p. 226 among the basic terms for Chinese science is lei, of which no early forms are known. The graph shows HEAD RICE, the phonetic = dog. The semantics are uncertain. Used to mean group, class, or category. Traditionally: Dogs were dogs, even though there were many breeds of dogs looking rather unlike each other.
As now it appears that the life and well-being of most of the people of this planet earth is being given scant attention by the political, economic and military powers associated with national governments, some say the people are being treated like dogs. Like curs or mutts, in fact much less well than the doggies who sit and beg at the feet and under the table of the master, namely the white, European, educated, well-fed, "civilized" representative of the modern totalitarian bureaucratic state, exactly as recognized by Stanley Diamond in In Search of the Primitive, p. 38. Imperialism is now the multinational corporation. The fictive being or persona before the court with life eternal, having inherited that mystique from the Lion kings or yore, who kept it going for political and economic control. But now the Imperialists want it all.
You know how the dogs do it? After some fifty thousand years of companionship, we have something to learn from canis. But like Dominicans?
Even the great tigress, queen of the jungle as royally portrayed in the National Geographic special used by the PBS Channel for a fundraising attraction, in the heat and langour of an afternoon awaiting the arrival of the proverbial monsoon, pays attention to the approach of packs of wild dogs that come down from the hills, presumably in search of water at the waterholes favored by the big cat. They give the approximate odds of seven-to-one, dogs killed by the tiger until the tiger itself was eaten by the dogs, "although no one dog would think of attacking the tiger by itself."
In the Sutra of the Golden Light, the Bodhisatva offers himself to the starving tigress in the middle of the bamboo grove in the heart of the forest. When things go bad for the queen, and the cubs (eight of 'em are shown in the representation on the Tamamushi shrine) run short of tiger's milk, then how must it be for the rest of the forest?
But the tigers superceding nation states become as deer; are the tigers multinational corporations?
If the king were dead, the game was long live the institution of kingship. The merchants, middle class, moneylenders, musicians and men of medicine, just to mentions a few, are the mutts that have ripped up the velvet pantaloons and torn into the hide of just about every so-called king and queen. Andy Warhol found four reigning queens, Salote of Tonga, Elizabeth of England, Beatrix, is it? of Holland or the Netherlands, and a black queen in Africa.
Kurt von Meier
Circa 1975