ThisLife

"part of the reason TTBs existed was that many of us have a lack of internal arts people in our local lives, to talk with, practice with. I think that partly I've had the attitude, "I don't need anyone, I can go it alone" for long stretches in my internal arts life ... but really my local internal arts social fabric is too thin, thread-bare. It's not healthy, not for any of us. (And I know that there's the other side of the coin that mystics do tend to be loners.)". * * I think that, (if we're genuinely trying to uncover causes for our dissatisfaction with our existence,.... or alternately-put, unhappiness with the apparent mis-match between our ideas about how our existence "should" be and how it actually seems to be).,,,, then I think it's beneficial to also recognise that many of the causes of unhappiness in today's society are precisely the ever-increasing amount of time spent communicating with others using mechanical / technological devices like this. As pleasant as it is to find others of a like-mind here, conversation is usually in two or three short sentences, then it's off to the next topic or thread. This is a quite radically different experience to going out for a hike in nature with the company of a friend. I believe the more we come to use internet sites as a substitute for reality, the more we seriously risk our spiritual life going down the same road as what happened during the explosive technological development of television over the last 50 years. It started off with one channel, black and white, with about a 20 inch screen. Unbelievably basic by today's standards. But the widely unrecognised benefit was that everybody in your community watched the same thing, ( of necessity). So the next day, at school or work there was a common bond of shared experience that you could have a conversation with others about. Now, with wide screen home cinema, Blu Ray, full surround sound, DVDs, and a gazillion channels to choose from, the traditional places for human interaction like pubs, or playing outdoors in the evening for kids,.... are all empty. Largely, people are sat, on their own, surfing the endless TV channels, surfing the web. Sitting inside some room in their house trying to gain the subtle and almost intangible "soul food" that comes from connecting with another living being,..... BUT, sadly via 'virtual reality' on some medium like this. {I use the word "sadly", because 'virtual reality' is unfortunately exactly what the first word says. It's NOT REAL. It cannot deliver the goods any more than gazing longingly at a beautiful photograph of a well-balanced meal, will keep our bodies fit and healthy.} Unfortunately, what we get via technology compared to the 'real experience', is very like the difference between real ice cream, (for anyone who has ever had the good fortune to taste that rare substance), and what comes flowing effortlessly out of the soft ice cream machine at McDonald's. I think your diagnosis is accurate, "It's not healthy for us." The prescription,.... "We need to get out more." NOT that we need to spend more time attempting self-analysis on internet sites like this, with invisible strangers we'll never meet.

Wasn't an alternative 'core' to this thread, (other than the direction it actually ended up taking), the question of whether it would be a good idea to change the name of this thread ? I'll give you a story that happened to me about a week ago as a means to more pictorially put across my feelings on the hypothetical question : A good friend had been staying at our place for a number of weeks. We gave him the bedroom where the house computer was so that he always had an internet reconnection whenever he wanted, and my wife and I used our laptops. One day he called me up and asked me about some information I'd mentioned. He was sat at the chair in front of the monitor while I pulled up the information. In doing so, a list of recent sites I'd been on came up amongst which was this site's name. As he read it, he involuntarily let out a snort of laughter and surprise as he read out loud,.. " Taobums !) I knew instantly why he laughed. At least he did have the grace not to comment any further, but just let the unexpected incident disappear without another mention. But really, I felt an instant embarrassment to have been found visiting a site with as childishly ridiculous a name as "Tao Bums". You quickly get used to it if you hang out here and the whole thing becomes inconsequential and hence invisible. But whisper to any of your un-initiated friends that in your spare time you frequently visit a website called TaoBums,.... And I suspect we would all get a lot of raised, surprised, and 'embarrassed-for-us' eyebrows shoot up. To my ears, the name simply sounds juvenile and trite to any uninitiated person on first hearing it. The word "bum" is just too full of silly and childish connotations to ever merit the remotest corner of space in the name of any organisation that wishes to be taken seriously about anything. Anyway, that's just how I feel about it. I know others will have different opinions.

There are many people who have made their fame and fortune re-jigging the standard "questing hero" plotline which, as pointed out by one reader above. Interestingly, I came across an extract from Kurt Vonnegut a while back where he pointed this out about one of the unquestioned 'heroes' of my teens / early twenties reading,... Hermann Hesse. It was quite a startling revelation to me, as up till that point I'd simply regarded his writings as sheer genius personified. I hadn't realised I'd been carrying the feelings and valuation of a twenty-year-old for almost forty years without examination, or up-grading. I found Kurt Vonnegut's 'whistle' to get my attention, to be much more of a salutary experience than a disillusioning one. Here's his words, anyway,... since they seem to be relevant to this thread : * * "Here are the bare bones of a tale that will always be popular with the young anywhere : A man travels a lot, is often alone. Money is not a serious problem. He seeks spiritual comfort, and avoids marriage and boring work. He is more intelligent than his parents and most of the people he meets. Women like him. So do poor people. So do wise old men. He experiments with sex, finds it nice but not tremendous. He encounters many queerly lovely hints that spiritual comfort really can be found. The world is beautiful. There is magic around. The story has everything but novelty. Nevertheless, the man who tells this age-old tale best is from our modern age; Hermann Hesse. He has been dead for eight years now. He was about my father's age. He was a German, and later a Swiss. He is deeply loved by those among the young who are questing." *

Richard Sylvester: "Perhaps some of us have too much respect for the words of dead Indians. Others of us may have too much respect for the words of dead Hebrew prophets or dead Italian Cardinals. Therefore we do not recognise how over the centuries the mind builds complexity on complexity on top of an original insight into ultimate reality, like the monstrous temple built on top of Nasruddin's dead donkey." * "One day, Nasruddin's father, who was a famous spiritual teacher with a huge temple and many thousands of followers, became so fed up with his wastrel son that he sent him packing with just the clothes he stood up in and his decrepit and aged donkey for company. Nasruddin roamed aimlessly till he was far from home in a strange country. He was miserable and tired and to make matters worse, his donkey suddenly keeled over and died. Nasruddin was so downhearted that he just sat down in the dirt beside the dead donkey and sank his head into his hands. After a while, a group of travellers came by. They saw Nasruddin sitting wretchedly by his donkey's corpse and they said to each other “This poor man has been so saddened by the death of his donkey that he does not even have the heart to bury it. Let us out of charity bury the beast for him.” So they set about burying the donkey and then proceeded on their way, leaving Nasruddin sitting silently by the burial mound. After a while some more travellers came by and seeing Nasruddin and the mound, they thought that perhaps Nasruddin was grieving the loss of a friend. They too took pity on him, saying “See. This poor unhappy man is so saddened by the loss of his friend and travelling companion, that though he has buried him he has no strength to erect a little memorial for him. Let us build a small pile of rocks on the burial mound to comfort the wretched fellow.” So they built a little cairn of rocks and went on their way, leaving Nasruddin sitting silently by the cairn. Some time later another group of travellers came by. Seeing Nasruddin, the mound and the cairn of rocks they thought that perhaps a rather important man, perhaps a teacher, had died and that Nasruddin might be his devoted follower who would not leave his grave. So they determined to build a little mausoleum over the grave to show respect. Nasruddin watched them without saying a word and continued to sit there after they'd left. After a while, another group of travellers came by. Seeing Nasruddin and the rather impressive little building, they thought perhaps that Nasruddin might be a teacher and the mausoleum his temple, built maybe by some followers of his. Out of respect, they added a wing at both ends of the temple, and then sat down by Nasruddin to imbibe his wisdom. Gradually, more and more travellers came by. Each added a little more to the temple, then sat to drink in the spirit of this master, until there was an enormous temple and there were hundreds of followers. Still Nasruddin hadn't said a word. As Nasruddin's fame spread, the hundreds of followers became thousands, until word even reached his father, far away in his own temple, about this great holy man who had so many devotees. Nasruddin's father determined to travel to this teacher to see for himself his great spiritual aura. Eventually he reached the huge temple, and after pushing his way through the great throngs of people he was astonished to see his son, the wastrel Nasruddin, sitting on a great velvet cushion on an ornate golden throne, still not saying a word. As soon as he was able to, his father approached Nasruddin in private and said “My son. I'm amazed. Tell me, how did you become such a great teacher with so many followers?” So Nasruddin told him everything, starting with the dead donkey and finishing with the mighty temple and the crowds of devotees. When he had finished his father looked at him in silence for a moment and then said “That's incredible. Exactly the same thing happened to me.”

I found the title of this thread, "Is Talking About Spirituality and Practices Useful ?", very thought-provoking. It was also extremely interesting reading through various people's ideas about the utility, or otherwise, of such conversations. Personally, I have never been a teacher of any spiritual practice, and though for many years I have been a committed 'seeker',... I've always been a reluctant student. Something in my nature just isn't much attracted to the idea of sitting at a guru's feet. Nevertheless, I have studied fairly rigorously books written by a number of teachers whose ideas resonated with my own nature for whatever reasons. One of these was Richard Sylvester, a Non-Duality teacher currently living in Kent, England. Apparently he experienced full Awakening a number of years ago and afterwards wrote a book called "I Hope You Die Soon". In one section of it he describes the first thoughts that came to him after this experience. I was so taken with them that I wrote them down and filed them away for my future ease of access. Since they seemed to me to have a particular relevance to the question raised in this thread, I thought I would throw them in on the off-chance that they strike a chord with someone here : * * "One thing that was immediately seen is the nature of all the apparent spiritual experiences that arose during the years of searching and following false paths and gurus. Suddenly they are seen for what they really are, emotional and psychological experiences happening to an unreal person and no more significant than putting on a shoe or having a cup of coffee. Spiritual experiences are not difficult to evoke. Meditate intensively, chant for long periods, take certain drugs, go without food or sleep, put yourself in extreme situations. That will probably do it. I had done all of these things and there had been many spiritual experiences. I had chanted for hours and meditated to the beating of mighty Tibetan gongs. I had seen the guru, sitting on a dais in impressive robes, dissolve into golden light before my eyes. Personal identity had refined and dissolved into transcendental bliss. The universe had breathed me as my awareness expanded to fill everything. So what ? There had always been someone there, having the spiritual experience. A person, no matter how refined, had always been present. These events had all happened to ‘me’. None of them had anything more or less to do with liberation than stroking a cat." *

* I'm reading an extraordinary book right now that I would have no hesitation in recommending to anyone who has a love for animals. It's called "The Elephant Whisperer", by Lawrence Anthony. He is the owner of a game reserve in south Africa who tells the story of how a herd of rogue elephants were offered to him and how it changed his life. It is filled with down-to-earth observations about animals, people, and the interactions between them. This morning I came across this short observation he made and I simply had to share it with someone, somewhere. Some things are just too lovely to hold onto for oneself only, and seem to beg to be shared with others : * * "All this activity attracted the attention of other animals and on this occasion it was a bachelor herd of kudu, with their spiral horns so beloved by trophy hunters, who watched with interest. They stood stock still except for their twitching oval ears, taking it all in. The kudu bulls were a reminder to me to be constantly alert. Wildlife is perpetually aware, always ready to flee or fight in an instant. It’s a life thrumming with eternal vigilance, absorbing every miniscule detail of one’s surroundings, continually assessing degrees of safety and danger. It’s knowing where or where not to be, perpetually analysing instinctual information so crucial for survival. Every wild thing is in tune with its surroundings, awake to its fate and in absolute harmony with the planet. Their attention is focussed totally outwards. Humans, on the other hand, tend to focus introspectively on their own lives too often, brooding and magnifying problems that the animal kingdom would not waste a millisecond of energy on. To most people, the magnificent order of the natural world where life and death actually mean something has become unrecognizable." *

* Demons, Fox-Spirits and the Realm of Magic: Popular Taoism {PART TWO} * * These tales of demons and fox-spirits, however far-fetched they may seem, well illustrate the atmosphere prevailing in many a Taoist monastery. The recluses and their followers accepted the reality of the spirits much as we Westerners accept the menace of the millions of invisible germs filling the earth's atmosphere. In those days, I believed that such tales must have at their core some relatively unusual occurrences which the over-credulous Taoists misinterpreted as being of a supernatural character. Since then, I have come to revise that estimate, partly as a result of seeing with my own eyes - if not the forms of devils or fox-spirits, then other manifestations just as inexplicable except in terms of supernatural forces. For example, it was difficult to dismiss the visible exploits of some Taoist adepts in making themselves invulnerable to flame and steel. Throughout the history of China and neighbouring countries there have been many accounts of this art, starting with those Chinese master-swordsmen, who by the use of Taoist charms, made themselves invulnerable in conflict. It is true that during the Boxer uprising of 1900, hundreds of peasants supposedly rendered invulnerable by the power of a minor deity, the monkey-god, were mown down by the guns of foreign soldiers, but they were ignorant men who depended for their invulnerability solely on magical incantations instead of seeking surer methods of attaining it. During the great annual fair at the Abode of Mysterious Origination, when such hosts of pilgrims streamed up the mountain-side that the large dormitories could accommodate only a fraction of their number, leaving hundreds to make use of sleeping-mats spread out on the courtyard flagstones, the recluses put on many demonstrations of abnormal powers for their visitors' benefit, such as almost bloodless piercing of the flesh, and fire-walking, to say nothing of divination, seemingly miraculous healing, and so forth. As to the genuineness of the flesh-piercing and fire-walking, there could be no doubt. After watching what went forward, I came to credit the devotees with the attainment of at least a limited degree of invulnerability. Two possibilities presented themselves: first, temporary invulnerability acquired during a state of trance, perhaps to be explained as the result of an entranced person's being able to make swiftly co-ordinated muscular movements and to take right decisions instantaneously; second, invulnerability acquired by yogic practices leading to an advanced state of consciousness in which the mind assumes direct control over normally involuntary physical activities such as breathing, blood-flow and the self-healing processes with which nature has endowed us. Clearly adepts may be mistaken as to the extent of their attainment, but it does not follow that no such attainments are possible, as my experience during the annual fair at the Abode of Mysterious Origination will show. Like all large temple-fairs in China, this one provided a delightfully varied and colourful scene. Incense-smoke rose in clouds before the altars of the gods whose gilded images and jewelled robes gleamed with the reflected light of innumerable candles, as pilgrim followed pilgrim into the great shrine-hall. In the score or so of courtyards, large and small, altars to less exalted but highly popular deities had been set up, and each was so crowded with worshippers as to leave them no space to prostrate themselves in the customary fashion. Not all these visitors, whether men or women, wore the blue cotton jacket and trousers of peasants; there was a fair sprinkling of people whose silken gowns or Western-style clothes indicated that the monastery had numerous supporters among the educated classes. There were, besides, scarlet-clad layfolk weighed down with heavy chains who had toiled up the mountain thus handicapped in fulfilment of penitential vows generally made for the benefit of sick parents or children. These penitents had progressed from the landing-stage below, prostrating themselves after every three paces. No less to be wondered at were the elderly ladies with tiny golden lilies (feet stunted to a mere three inches in length by being rigidly encased in sodden bandages since early childhood); with slow and faltering steps, they had accomplished the long, steep climb unaided and undaunted. Imagine the disappointment of those old ladies if some scholarly sage had met them at the temple gateway, crying: 'You'll get no exhibitions of vulgar marvels here, for we are true followers of Lao-tzu and have no truck with superstition !' Happily, nothing of the sort happened; the pilgrims were able to feast their eyes on many, many wonders. There was, for example, a pond containing a small island where sat three recluses so rapt in meditation that they were not seen to stir during the festival's three days and two nights; there were displays of fantastic strength and agility by elderly recluses whose feats drew roars of delighted astonishment; and, of course, the two exorcists had been requested to put on a display. This last took the form of a pantomime in which, by means of incantations, a shrieking woman was delivered of a tall black demon with lolling tongue and eyes that shone with living flame, who, leaping menacingly towards the crowd, had to be driven back with ghost-swords fashioned out of ancient copper coins. Though well aware that this was a purely symbolic representation of demon-fighting, the pilgrims were impressed, for they did not doubt that the gaunt exorcists were capable of dealing just as effectually with real demons. In fact, one youth went into convulsions and those grim men, after making some show of curing him on the spot with menacing cries and gestures, carried him off to their quarters, from which he emerged a few hours later apparently in the best of health. Whether that, too, was part of the symbolic performance will appear later. The fire-walking was scheduled to take place in the great courtyard fronting the shrine-hall on the second morning of the fair, and so the score or so of recluses and laymen destined to participate spent the night performing a special ritual to the music of flutes and drums. The pilgrims (husband, wife and little daughter) whom I had invited to unroll their sleeping-mats on the floor of my cell slept peacefully through this preparatory rite, whereas I lay awake for hours enraptured by that infinitely sweet, though disturbingly eerie music. Neither before nor since have I heard its like; the piercingly high notes conjured forth my soul or, to use a more modern expression, sent me on a fabulously joyful trip. Starting up from the deep sleep which had overwhelmed me a little before dawn, I found that the Abbot had sent over a plate of hot sesame-seed-topped buns with a savoury meat stuffing - no doubt a pious offering he had received from one of the pilgrims. Licking the last grains of sesame from my lips, I ran to where, being tall, I could see over the heads of the spectators crowded ten deep around three sides of the courtyard fronting the shrine-hall, the doors of which were closed. As a prelude to an account of matters hard to credit, permit me to quote a passage from the article on fire-walking in the 1965 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: 'While injuries do occur, they seem on the whole to be much less frequent than would be expected . . . especially as the devotees do not apply any artificial preparation before the ordeal to protect their bodies.' Moreover, in countries such as Malaysia with large Chinese communities, fire-walking can occasionally be witnessed to this day during the annual or triennial displays put on by some of the Chinese temples. As to its purpose, whereas the priests or recluses concerned may justifiably be suspected of giving some thought to the temple revenues, the lay participants, being for the most part devotees of the deity invoked, are prompted to undergo the ordeal by eagerness for self-purification in a manner that will spectacularly demonstrate the sacred being's power. As I have said, the rite that took place at the Abode of Mysterious Origination was witnessed from the courtyard fronting the terrace, where stood the shrine-hall flaunting in the early morning sunlight the splendour of its gilt and scarlet pillars, elaborately painted roof-beams, upward-curving eaves and green porcelain roof-tiles. For the first time, I saw it not as a gaudy building out of place in those surroundings, but as one possessing a certain magnificence. A flight of marble steps led down to where a wide space had been cleared by good-naturedly driving back the pilgrim throng. Presently a flock of serving lads appeared carrying iron buckets with long bamboo handles. Bandying excited chatter with the crowd, they ladled red-hot coals on to the ground, thus forming a glowing bed that extended from the bottom step across six or seven yards of flagstones. No sooner had the last coal fallen into place and the boys run off to join the spectators than a thunderous roll issued from a gigantic drum within the shrine-hall; the lacquered doors flew open and a score of barefoot devotees, clad in white garments, appeared on the terrace chanting a refrain to an accompaniment of cymbals and drums. With but a moment's pause, they leapt down the steps straight on to the wide bed of coals; these they traversed at a jog-trot, their feet descending on the glowing mass a dozen times or more. Their pace was neither slow nor yet unduly hurried, as it surely would have been had their flesh been normally sensitive to heat; nor did they look down or pick their way from one to another of those coals whose blackness indicated some slight abatement of temperature. On reaching the bare flagstones beyond, they came to a ragged halt and sat down, lest the pilgrims topple them in their eagerness to examine their unblemished feet. Two or three of them displayed small patches of lightly scorched skin; the rest, supported by the sacred rites and the intensity of their faith, had come through the ordeal unscathed. Any wavering of their minds would have resulted in terrible burns and perhaps disaster; distraught by the fiery agony, they might have fallen on to the live coals. While most of the spectators were marvelling at the devotees' miraculously unscathed flesh, two cynics bent down with knowing smiles to test the heat of the coals. Their sharp ejaculations drew a good deal of laughter, for they had paid for their cynicism by painfully scorched fingers ! Soon after the pilgrims had departed, I called upon one of the Assistant Abbots, a fairly young and erudite recluse surnamed Wu, who had often sought my company and seemed to enjoy our long discussions. On this occasion, after the inevitable exchanges of bows and compliments, we drank tea together in his cell, meanwhile gradually relaxing to the point where we could put aside formality and talk as friends. Asked for an explanation of the feats performed during the fair, he said : 'You see, dear friend from the Western Ocean, mind is all ! Eliminate thought and the mind is no longer to be differentiated from the formless Tao, in which all things and processes originate, however ordinary or extraordinary. By meditating at a level transcending the duality of subject and object, and by cultivating an inflow of vital energy, a devotee can acquire many unusual powers.' He went on to describe what he called the three inferior categories of power. The lowest of all embraced feats attainable by what Westerners would call normal means, though arbitrary distinctions between normal and supernormal are apt to blur in a yogic milieu which tends to encourage recognition of the fact that many apparently supernormal powers - telepathy, for example - are rare only in a society that has allowed some of the human body's latent powers to atrophy. What the Assistant Abbot had to say about purely physical accomplishments was destined to afford me an insight into the Taoist origin of several arts cultivated by the Japanese, such as the smashing of bricks and boards with the naked hand; the ability to withstand extremes of temperature which, for example, enables adepts to stand meditating beneath waterfalls in the depth of winter; and, of course, those methods of combat such as judo and kendo which accord with the principle of utilizing an opponent's strength in such away that the weak effortlessly overcome the strong - a basic Taoist principle. 'Dearest Englishman,' continued my friend (who was fond of using such affectionate expressions, no doubt because he felt that the antiquated and over-elaborate compliments customarily paid by Taoist recluses to their guests had become too stylized to convey genuine warmth of feeling, especially to a foreigner), 'you must know that the lowest of the six categories of power can be attained by all those willing to undergo the severe training involved, without their having to immerse themselves in the mystical contemplation and mental exercises required for the higher yogas. However, you would be right to complain that some of these feats are a waste of time and energy, being only one step removed from vulgar demonstrations of ability to consume more jars of wine, eggs, chickens or roast sucking pigs at a sitting than one's neighbours. 'Next come the second lowest powers, such as those displayed during our recent festival. They, too, are of no real importance. I place them above the lowest category only because the role played by mind is somewhat more obvious. One whose mind is disturbed or wholly occupied by trivialities cannot successfully command his flesh to withstand the effects of fire or metal. Also in this category are the attainment of true invulnerability to sudden death or physical injury, the art of healing oneself or others by thought or touch, and such rare but relatively useless powers as levitation. None of them causes astonishment in one who has grasped the truth that mind is the only reality. All physical processes and objects have their being in mind, which can naturally modify their nature, suspend their action or cause them to vanish, just as a novice who has learnt to be aware that he is dreaming can control the content of his dreams at will. 'The highest of the three inferior categories of power is that of successfully establishing contact with gods and demons, but I doubt if you believe in such things; so it would be useless to elaborate.' His assumption was more or less correct, though my disbelief could no longer be described as adamant. 'Your Reverence,' I remarked at length, 'permit me to ask two questions. First, why do so many of your educated countrymen make mock of what they call Taoist superstition and hocus-pocus, in spite of being aware of the explanation you have so lucidly put forward ? Second, what are the superior three categories of power ?' He smiled. 'The Tao-chia of old accused us recluses of cherishing beliefs and practices but tenuously connected with the teachings of the ancient sages they admired, whereas scholars with a background of modern education charge us with perpetrating frauds in the guise of magic as a means of augmenting the monastic revenues. The former charge does not stand up to scrutiny. The ancient sages planted seeds of knowledge which have grown into trees with a luxuriant array of branches, thereby according with the nature of healthy, potent seed. If Taoism had not developed innumerable branches, it would be said of the sages that the seed they planted was of poor quality. But look to the trunk and follow it down to the roots. Here, in this centre of strange rites and practices, you will find a strong, unbroken connection with the mystical illumination of our patron Chuang-tzu. There has been no separation from our roots, only luxuriance of growth. It is true that hocus-pocus is often perpetrated by unscrupulous persons who, pretending to possess certain power, batten on the purses of the ignorant. But, while the so-called magical feats of avaricious cheats and frauds are mere trickery from start to finish, genuine feats are not uncommon. I tell you frankly, dear guest from a mysterious region, the truth generally lies in the middle.' Shaking with mirth, he sustained my puzzled gaze. 'Put it this way, my friend. You have observed how it was at our great annual festival. What did you see? A vast deal of showmanship, for after all even Taoist communities have to eat; those of us who reach the stage of living upon nourishment drawn from the air are few ! You saw, too, a number of staged effects call them hocus-pocus if you will - which were necessary because our lay-supporters expect to behold marvels, being ignorant of the truth that genuine marvels occur only in response to actual need. For instance, since they brought us no patients possessed by demons, our exorcists had no opportunity to demonstrate their skill and, in any case, the cures must be performed in private, whereas what the pilgrims required was some sort of spectacle. That is why we arranged for a youth to simulate possession during the charade and went through the motions of curing him in public. Yet, because a show was expected of us and we gave it, that does not mean that our remedies for demonic possession and other ills are fraudulent. On the contrary, hundreds of once-sick people in this neighbourhood can testify to the rarely-failing efficacy of those remedies in curing all sorts of maladies, including demon-possession. Dearest guest, did you not also see genuine marvels? Admit then that, of the charges you mentioned, one is untenable and the second true of our monastery only in a sense that is excusable.' I nodded, more or less convinced, and repeated my question about the superior categories of power. 'The superior powers are the fruits of three graduated stages. First comes the ability to prolong life and vigour to the extent of living to a healthy old age, sometimes well beyond the normal life-span. Of this, I have heard you speak before, so I know you are conversant with the general principles. Next comes the achievement of immortality, whatever that is taken to mean. Members of the sect represented by this monastery interpret it as meaning rebirth of the hun-soul in a spiritual body able to exist for aeons; privately, many of us are inclined to doubt that other possibility, fleshly transmutation, although deference to those sages of old who are said to have been transmogrified compels us to discretion in the matter. The highest power is of course, that of keeping the mind perpetually immersed in the Tao so that at death, the finite being merges with its source, thereby gaining the only true immortality.' 'Immortality as an individual?' I asked. 'How can that be? All entities, both physical and subtle, arc subject to growth and decay. At most one can prolong one's existence by a few millenia. Can that be called immortality? Measured against time's immensity, aeons are but fleeting moments. Who would wish to cling to his individuality even as a god, if he knew the bliss of losing it in the Tao? The answer to your question is that total loss is the only lasting gain. The masters of all other achievements are doomed to watch them fade and vanish, whereas the total loser wins forever.' The implications of this philosophy, which as yet I understood but dimly, must be left to a later chapter. In reporting my conversation with the Assistant Abbot Wu, I have willy-nilly strayed from the realm of popular Taoism; or to use my friend's own metaphor, his teaching was beginning to lead me from the branches to the trunk and down towards the roots. Before according with that centrifugal movement, I must describe an important psychic manifestation belonging to what the Assistant Abbot called the uppermost of the three inferior categories of power. In another book, I have described the performance of one of those spirit-possessed mediums still employed as oracles in most overseas Chinese communities. At the Abode of Mysterious Origination, it was customary to consult the spirit-oracle only at times when important decisions had to be made regarding the community's welfare. As I never chanced to be present on such an occasion, I have based the following account on what I was told by the Assistant Abbot Wu. One day a letter from the district magistrate within whose jurisdiction the monastery lay was brought to the Abbot by special messenger. It contained a courteously worded demand that accommodation be prepared for a whole company of Nationalist soldiers who were to form part of a force soon to be dispatched against a recalcitrant provincial army which had advanced its headquarters eastward to a town only about thirty miles up-river from the monastery and sent the government-appointed officials fleeing for their lives. Naturally the letter caused consternation, for Taoists have ever regarded soldiers as the most tragically misguided of human beings and the recluses were aware that the district authorities held much the same opinion of Taoists ! To yield would be disastrous; soldiers were quite capable of stabling their horses in the shrine-hall or the Abbot's private quarters and of driving the recluses with blows to perform military tasks that contravened their principles. On the other hand, not to yield would be to risk the community's dissolution on some such charge as giving passive assistance to the rebels ! Clearly this was a moment to seek oracular advice. The resident spirit-oracle was an unremarkable-looking, rather timid man in his middle thirties whose mediumistic powers had been discovered early and thenceforth assiduously nurtured. I had often seen him about and had put him down as a mild, unobtrusive recluse with no particular standing in the community until Wu revealed his identity. However, from the moment it became known that a consultation was to take place, the oracle emerged into temporary prominence. During the three days of rites that marked the preliminary stage of invoking the irascible deity Kuan Ti to enter the poor fellow's body, even the Abbot bowed to the ground before him as though the dread War God had already taken up his lowly habitation. That fierce divinity - a former general deified by posterity on account of his loyalty, sagacity and brilliant military career - had been selected from among the hosts of heaven as the being most likely to provide a strategy for countering the impiety and generally gross behaviour of soldiers ! Day and night, incense and tall red candles burnt before the crimson-cheeked, green-robed, more than life-sized image, whose handsome beard adorned powerful features set in an expression so forbidding that no Roman emperor or Prussian junker can ever have looked half so intimidating. When the time came for the final rite of invocation, the entire community assembled to perform obeisance; no doubt most of them found it hard to conceal their trepidation, for oracles possessed by the War God had been known to run amok and slaughter several bystanders, whether because their demeanour had inadvertently caused the deity to take umbrage, or, as Wu Tao-shih was more inclined to suppose, because the rapport between deity and oracle-recluse had been marred by some unguessable imperfection. The oracle was ceremoniously led forth in procession and ensconced upon a throne that stood in the great courtyard, with its back to the marble steps leading down from the shrine-hall. To one side, but as far removed from the throne as was consonant with their being within earshot, scribes sat at a table, moistening their brushes and arranging sheets of absorbent rice-paper. Wu Tao-shih remarked that the scholarly recluses chosen for this task were usually so frightened that their calligraphy was apt to be appalling. Flanking the throne at closer range were two wooden racks containing a whole armoury of medieval weapons, these being part of the insignia of imperial generals and also handy in case the War God decided to make an example of the impertinent mortals who had summoned him from the pleasures of his heavenly existence. Wu drew an amusing picture of the mild-eyed oracle who, though clad in the full panoply of a general of old and sitting in an arrogant attitude with booted feet planted wide apart, could hardly bring himself to hold the mighty saw-toothed spear which an attendant had just thrust into his trembling grasp. Next, the unhappy man's glance fell shudderingly upon the array of swords, spears and axes flanking his throne; the very sight of such pain-dealing implements must have filled him with shame and misgiving. Wu himself officiated. Clad in a sombre robe embroidered with protective symbols, expression no doubt guardedly solemn, he stood to one side of the oracle, head politely inclined, hands folded and modestly concealed by his sleeves, stance motionless as an idol's except when he gave the signal for the awesome rite to begin. In response to his high-pitched command, the assembly bowed to the ground, whereat a great tempest of sound swept from the shrine-hall where the temple musicians could be seen through the open doorways frenziedly clashing giant cymbals, thwacking gongs and drums, or blowing at their clarinets as though their cheeks would burst. Wu told me that on such occasions the noise rivalled the din of embattled gods and titans; yet the serried rows of recluses stood like deaf-mutes, not so much as glancing towards the source of that boisterous assault upon their ears. All were staring fixedly at the oracle, whose features now bore too grim and martial an expression to be recognizable as those of their gentle colleague. Even his stature had filled out, giving him the air of a muscular, battle-hardened veteran of a hundred wars. His face and body had begun to twitch, his limbs to jerk; these spasmodic movements, slight at first, rapidly gained momentum, and, leaping to his feet, the terrible figure pranced about, menacingly twirling his saw-toothed spear. Suddenly he clanged its iron butt against his breastplate, whereat the thunderous music ceased abruptly and the musicians faced about, craning their necks as though listening intently. The medium, lost in tranced oblivion, had assumed a look of such malevolent ferocity that the recluses quailed before his dreadful gestures and grimaces, even though his eyes appeared to be focused upon some inner vision; at times only the whites were visible, the pupils having vanished beneath the lids. Presently, with a clash of accoutrements, the dreadful figure resumed its throne, where he crouched with the seeming indolence of a tiger ready to spring. Warily the officiant advanced towards him, timing his steps to the slow, sad melody that now issued from the terrace, where stood a youth bowed gracefully over a slender bamboo flute. As the melody died away, the officiant, employing the theatrical diction proper to ceremonial usage, uttered a question couched in the language which courtiers and the more scholarly military officials were presumed to have spoken on formal occasions a thousand years ago. The oracle, though motionless and attentive, sat with lips drawn back in a smile of such cruel scorn that Wu almost committed the discourtesy of stammering; indeed, having posed his question, he leapt unceremoniously backwards, for the menacing figure had sprung to its feet as though infuriated beyond measure at the temerity of a mere mortal's venturing to approach him. However, instead of plunging his weapon into the offender's breast, he clashed its great blade against his own armour with a prodigious force that snapped the steel as though it had been a shoddy toy. Then, throwing down the haft and seizing a heavy broad-sword in its place, he poured forth a flood of speech in a voice so harsh and grating as to be scarcely recognizable as human. The brushes of the cowering scribes flew over the sheets of paper; to ensure that not a syllable was lost, the one embarked upon a new phrase while his fellow was still completing the phrase just uttered. In two minds as to whether to stick to their task or flee, they nevertheless managed to do as required, though in calligraphy so shaky that, afterwards, not even they could decipher every word. The oracle's torrent of speech broke off, and again the officiant advanced in time to that slow, soft melody. His second question unleashed a further flood of barely intelligible eloquence; but already it was apparent that the divine Kuan Ti's vehicle was close to fainting; the voice had weakened and the gestures had lost much of their ferocity. The answer to the third question tailed off in mid-speech; the oracle slumped backwards against the cushioned throne, head lolling to one side, tears and saliva dribbling from eyes and lips. The strenuous efforts to revive him before the deity left his body having proved unavailing, some attendants ran forward with a couch on which they laid him like a corpse; but, presently emerging from his trance, the poor wretch sucked eagerly at the spout of a teapot someone pressed between his teeth. The strong, hot tea revived him so that he was able to sit up and languidly reach for a second teapot, which he drained at a gulp. Apart from some facial twitching and an air of near-exhaustion, he had resumed his normal appearance and seemed not too much the worse for his harrowing experience. That mild, kindly, rather shrinking soul had after all survived the ordeal of sharing its body with the spirit of the tempestuous War God ! When Wu reached the end of his story, I exclaimed breathlessly: 'How I should love to see the record of your enquiries and the answers delivered by the divinely inspired oracle !' A glare of mock severity escaped the Assistant Abbot before he composed his features into the slow, warm smile I liked so well. 'Dearest barbarian, one would have thought that even you would be sufficiently acquainted with the decorum that governs these grave matters not to demand what cannot with propriety be given. My questions, prepared beforehand in conclave with our Venerable Abbot, have, as you surmised, been recorded for posterity together with the divine Kuan Ti's answers, and the interpretations placed upon them by the Monastery Council. If you wish to view the contents of the book which contains the oracular pronouncements of the last five hundred years, you must stay with us long enough to be offered a place on the Council yourself; for would it not be unwise to make public matters so closely affecting our community's welfare? Nevertheless, I can inform you in rather general terms of what transpired, for an announcement was made to the assembled recluses as soon as the interpretation of the oracle had been agreed upon. Rest assured, most dear and highly esteemed layman, that the divine Kuan Ti's answer was both favourable and in accordance with the events that followed. His advice was to accept the district magistrate's demand to station troops within our sacred precincts with every appearance of patriotic fervour, since it was certain that very few troops, if any, would actually be sent here and that they could easily be induced to remain on their best behaviour for the short duration of their stay. A week or so later - it was, by the way, towards the middle of the Tenth Month last year - a detachment of less than twenty foot-soldiers under the command of a battle-scarred lieutenant arrived. Their appearance was far from reassuring. Neither the officer nor his men looked at all the sort of people to make themselves agreeable to civilians or respect our religious calling. Nevertheless, we easily persuaded that hard-faced officer to enjoin upon his subordinates the strictest accord with our monastic regulations, on pain of being severely disciplined.' Again came the slow, warm smile as he added: 'You know how we Taoists admire that weak and yielding element which placidly reaches its goal despite all obstacles?' 'Certainly, but flint is not to be eroded in a day.' 'Just so. Therefore water finds its way round.' He made a scarcely perceptible gesture which perhaps signified that the soldiers' good behaviour and swift departure had been bought at a mutually agreeable price . 'Good ! I exclaimed, 'But what if other soldiers come?' 'They will not,' he answered with assurance. 'At least, not in the near future. The oracle's communication on that point was straightforward.' His smile faded as he remarked more pensively : 'Regarding the more distant future, say three or four years hence, the oracles pronouncements offered no such comfort. Savage armies will drive the people from their homes along the river and we shall flee with them.' 'Chinese armies ?' 'The oracle vouchsafed no indication of their nationality. Nor was that necessary. Already Japan has swallowed up our Manchurian provinces and encroached upon territory at no great distance from Peking. A tiger waits only to digest its meal before setting off to hunt new prey. War will break out within a year or so, but the enemy will not reach this part of the country until long afterwards.' 'Is that your own estimate of Japan's intentions, or did the divine Kuan Ti inform you of them in detail ?' 'A little of both,' he answered gravely. 'Oracles must, of course, be interpreted in the light of prevailing circumstances. They are seldom altogether clear. Even gods are handicapped when we compel them to speak through the mouths of mortals. That accounts for their alarming response to our invocations. As you will have gathered, even their most favourable prognostications are delivered in a manner likely to discourage those who might otherwise invoke them more often than need be. A medium, unless his powers are rarely used, seldom lasts ten years. Our oracle, for example, is resigned to an early death. Each séance cuts a decade off his life. We honour him deeply for his selfless dedication.' Struck by his use of the word 'compel', I asked: 'Do you mean that a god - a great and powerful divinity like Kuan Ti - can be compelled to enter the medium's body and submit to questioning?' 'Most certainly ! Why else should deities trouble themselves with our affairs? Do not ask me how the compulsion is exerted. That pertains to the most secret part of the preliminary rites.' 'And are ordinary ghosts and spirits equally refactory ?' 'Ghosts !' he answered contemptuously. 'Most of them are delighted to answer a summons. Often enough they come unbidden. But who believes what they say? As with human beings, there are pranksters, liars and fools among them. Summon a ghost who once bore the surname Li and the malevolent or prankish wraith of some departed Wang may arrive in his stead, answering to the name of Li for the sheer pleasure of sowing confusion. As like as not, they were enemies on earth or else have quarrelled in the spirit world, so one can understand how each would enjoy bringing discredit on the other. No oracle in a monastery of good standing depends upon information supplied by common ghosts. Only deities can be looked to for genuine revelations, but they are generally so incensed by our presumption that they make everything as difficult and dangerous as possible. Then again what deity could be expected to relish having to voice his august ideas through a puny mortal ? Imagine yourself trying to communicate with me through the mouth of a toad or butterfly !' This conversation struck me at the time as merely fanciful, for experiences of accurate revelations being delivered by mediums who could not possibly have known my circumstances or even my identity were yet to come. My present belief that, unless the often stupid-looking and illiterate spirit-oracles are in fact amazingly telepathic, they must really be the vehicles of invisible powers is reinforced by what I have read of Tibetan oracle-mediums. Several writers have observed that, during possession, their whole appearance changes - not merely their facial expressions but the very lineaments of their bodies undergo transformations which no actor could counterfeit, sometimes taking on physical proportions quite unlike their own. Such terrifying changes transform them into strangers, so that photographs taken before and during possession resemble those of wholly dissimilar persons. Then again, possession generally confers superhuman strength, enabling the possessed to crumble or snap metal objects which, normally, he could not so much as lift or bend. These fantastic occurrences, recently recorded by dependable witnesses in such places as Kalimpong and Sikkim, continue to this day; the facts are beyond dispute, leaving only their explanation open to argument. Among the possible alternatives to spirit-possession so far put forward, there is none that accounts satisfactorily for all the facts; those who have actually witnessed the workings of spirit-oracles are inclined to recognize them, however reluctantly, as awesome manifestations of occult power. Probably there are fraudulent cases, though it is difficult to imagine how spirit-possession of this sort can be counterfeited convincingly. If is just possible that genuine spirit-oracles or their sponsors now and then resort to subterfuge in order to avoid fiascos when their invocations fail at embarrassing moments. Even so, evidence of fraud in some cases is scarcely ground for the assumption that all cases of possession are fraudulent; at most, proven charlatanism serves to thicken the fog of uncertainty that scientists, disregarding the limitation of their competence, have brought down upon the entire range of paranormal occurrences' It has of course to be accepted that the invocation of gods and spirits is extraneous to the essential requirements of Taoism or any other mystical religion. It seems that induced possession pertains to a whole cluster of beliefs and practices surviving from an era that antedates all recognized religions by two thousand years and more. The same can be said of many components of popular Taoism; far from being comparatively recent accretions upon the teaching of Lao and Chuang, as the scholars would have it, they possess even greater antiquity than the works of those 'founder sages'. Though Taoism offered the world many precious teachings that were but mediocrely exemplified at the Abode of Mysterious Origination, I cherish affectionate memories of such monasteries. There was a spaciousness about the life there, the recluses being, as far as I could judge, completely free to believe and practise what seemed best to each. They could, if they wished, devote themselves to religious rites and to psychic or magic arts, or to acquiring the various categories of life-prolonging and healing powers; but equally they could become immersed in painting, poetry, music or defensive combat, or else in philosophic speculation, in mystical contemplation leading directly to man's highest goal, or in any combination of those diverse pursuits. Though chastity was admired and encouraged, those who found it hard to bear or thought it undesirable were free to return home to wives and sweethearts at certain seasons. There were no dietary restrictions, nor was wine despised, though I never saw it abused. The chief moral enjoinment upon the community was that its members be courteous, tolerant, peace-loving and relatively abstemious. Such rules as governed their lives were of a kind without which few communities could function smoothly - the Abbot or Monastery Council would direct what administrative or other chores must devolve upon the individuals concerned. The one overriding consideration was the preservation of harmony and decorum. Naturally the monastery had to remain solvent, yet those concerned with augmenting the income derived from fast-shrinking endowments of landed property seemed not to attach undue importance to that task, as was the case with the demon-exorcists, who greatly preferred sitting in meditation to the practice of their lucrative art. Rent from endowments apart, the chief sources of revenue were offerings brought by pilgrims, the voluntary donations with which guests like myself repaid the recluses' generous hospitality, and payments in cash or kind for specific services, whether spiritual, medical or otherwise. For example, obsequies for the dead could at the request of the bereaved family be made both colourful and elaborate. But where, cry the scholars, did the sages Lao and Chuang come into all this ? Assuming that such communities lived as admirably as you say, why did they usurp the name Taoist? Had they chosen some other name for their so-called religion, we should have no quarrel with them. Well, in my view, the principles enunciated by Lao and Chuang formed the very warp and woof of the monastic fabric. The recluses were men who lived apart from the world of politics and commerce, seeking neither power nor personal wealth. The wild and lonely setting of the monasteries was ideal for the contemplation of nature's rhythms and transformations. Those recluses who were capable of appreciating the subtle philosophy of the Tao Te Ching made much of it; quotations from its pages and stories from Chuang-tz0 were forever in their mouths. Even those of lower intellectual calibre were relatively well informed about the essentials of Taoist philosophy; the very serving-boys were familiar with the meaning of the Taoist symbols carved or painted on buildings, gateways and garden walls. The humblest kitchen-lad must have been more or less clearly aware of the significance of the Tao as the formless womb of forms, the changeless origin of nature's limitless transformations, and the passive source of all energy and activity, for these were matters proclaimed on every hand, whether by symbols, paintings, liturgies, sermons or informal conversations. Who, finding the word Tao on everybody's lips, could have failed to gain some conception of its meaning ? If this favourable account of popular Taoism causes me to forfeit what small measure of esteem my Buddhist works may have brought me in the world of scholars, I shall shed no tears. The fact is that a real or fabled entity called Lao-tzu has long existed in people's minds as the father of magic as well as of philosophy. This Lao-tzu, who will continue to be of some importance for as long as a belief persists in his having been both magician and philosopher, is anyway closer to being a living force than that other Lao-tzu whose very bones have vanished. The teachings ascribed to him have shaped men's minds and produced results, some picturesque, some salubrious in other ways, and most of them morally uplifting. What difference would it make if it were finally proved that he never existed or that he had no truck with magic ! Faced with such 'proof', I should, like Chuang-tzu at his spouse's funeral, beat my drum and laugh ! *

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* Despite what I wrote as a preamble to the last story I left here, even though summers most welcome outdoor activities and visiting friends have soaked up most of my free time, I decided to grab whatever free moments I could get and endeavour to squeeze in one more tale. My motivation is simply the surprising number of people who seem to find these stories as interesting as I do. As a practical means of showing appreciation, Ive added below another of John Blofelds rare accounts of his Taoist experiences in China during the 1930s since, understandably, on this site they seem to garner the most interested responses. Due to a shortage of free time Ive taken the following chapter on popular Taoism from his book The Secret and Sublime : Taoist Mysteries and Magic, and split it into two sections. The remaining section Ill add later when the fun of summer once again starts its gradual slide into autumn. * * Demons, Fox-Spirits and the Realm of Magic: Popular Taoism {PART ONE} * According to an ancient and once widespread tradition, the founder of Taoism was not Lao-tzu, but the Yellow Emperor who is believed to have reigned more than four-and-a-half millenia ago ! Taoism's magical practices and, above all, its more exotic yogas were largely attributed to him and he was therefore venerated as much as Lao-tzu. In any case, by the third century B.C., it is certain that strange beliefs and practices already antique when Lao-tzu was born, had become co-mingled with that sage's teaching and that the reigning Emperor Shih Huang-ti was an ardent devotee of magic. That Taoism later became an organized religion with monasteries, temples, images, liturgies, rites and other features of the kind is, however, attributed in particular to the efforts of one Chang Tao-ling, known to posterity as the Heavenly Teacher. In the province of Kiangsi, amidst a landscape on which nature has lavished her finest brush-work and mastery of soft colours, stands the Dragon-Tiger Mountain on which Chang Tao-ling was born in the first or second century A.D. Tradition has it that the Venerable Sage Lao-tzu, appearing to him in spirit form, enjoined him to discover the formula for compounding the elixir of immortality. To all appearances, Chang was successful in that task, for he is credited with having ridden heavenwards on a tiger's back in his hundred-and-twenty-third year and with preserving his identity thereafter by successively reincarnating in the bodies of one after another of his own descendants. Each of his specially favoured progeny succeeded in turn to the name Chang Tao-ling, the process continuing until well into the present century. In the eighth century A.D., the Emperor Hsuan Tsung officially proclaimed Heavenly Teacher Chang's jurisdiction over 'all Taoist temples in the world'; and, though in fact there was never a time when that dignitary was accepted, by all the Taoist monastic communities, his sect remained the largest and most popular up to the virtual end of Taoism's existence as an organised religion some twenty years ago. Alas, the Heavenly Teacher is no more ! Yet it scarcely seems possible that a line of pontiffs could endure for close on two thousand years, vanish in our lifetime without trace and, in so doing, cause not a ripple. True, from the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, the pontiffs power had waned from year to year; nevertheless, he had thousands upon thousands of devotees until the last. Exactly when and where he vanished are matters still disputed. Several authorities give different dates and varying accounts of the matter. According to one story, Chiang Kai-sheks government banished him prior to the nineteen-fifties and one Chinese writer claims that the former Heavenly Teacher is now living in-Portuguese Macao where he solaces himself, dragon-wise, amidst dense, rolling clouds - of opium ! No one seems to know for sure what has befallen. Personally I would like to think that the Heavenly Teacher managed to follow the rather disconcerting custom attributed to Taoists of vanishing without trace or, better still, that he was successfully transmogrified. How colourful was the empire ruled by this spiritual potentate - a world of alchemy, divination, magic nostrums, conjurers, oracles, miraculously endowed swordsmen, masters of rain-making, and exorcists skilled in the humbling of fierce demons ! To my lasting regret, I had no opportunity to visit Dragon-Tiger Mountain and pay my respects to that extraordinary figure before he and his mysterious realm had passed beyond human ken. Even so, I was privileged to see many pockets of that realm at a time when most parts of China, especially in the centre and the south, were thickly sprinkled with shrines and temples whose devotees practised the ancient arts, and acknowledged Chang Tao-lings supremacy. Today only the merest traces of those arts linger, even on the outermost fringes of the Chinese world - such as Taiwan Island (to an insignificant extent) and the overseas Chinese settlements in south-east Asia. Scholars, both Chinese and Western, have long regarded Taoism either as a down-to-earth philosophy aimed at living to a ripe old age in comfortable harmony with one's surroundings or, alternatively, as an exalted form of mysticism. Such people are eager to deny - sometimes quite heatedly - that popular Taoism has more than the most tenuous connections with the teachings of its founder sages, Lao and Chuang. Readers who share this view are invited to skip the rest of this chapter lest they grow indignant at my failure to pour scorn on practices often castigated as 'a medley of charlatanism and gross superstition'. For, with sincere apologies to the partisans of 'pure Taoism', I propose to deal kindly and at some length with the so-called aberrations of the Heavenly Teacher's sect. My purpose is to describe Taoism, not in an idealized form but exactly as I found it during what may well prove to have been the last few decades of its corporate existence. The very antiquity of its magical doctrines is a sufficient reason for according them some respect. Then, again, it happens that I generally encountered Taoism in its more popular forms long before being granted any real understanding of its higher mysteries. Besides, I must confess that I thoroughly enjoyed the colourfulness and occasional grimness of its 'magical' aspects. I hope that many readers, whether or not I can persuade them to believe in demons and fox-spirits, will find the stories of them entertaining. Whereas the mountain hermitages of Taoist quietists and philosophers were mostly small, the monasteries containing temples dedicated to the popular divinities of that faith were often large and splendid, though generally located in remote spots chosen for their natural beauty. Once I travelled up a river flowing swiftly, but broad enough for the water to seem almost still. Its rugged banks rose steeply, sometimes forming the base of hills or mountains. Close to the top of one of them grew dense thickets of bamboo with fronds so intensely green that the curving roofs of the monastery, except when sunlight was reflected by their emerald tiles, could barely be distinguished even by an observer eagerly scanning the hilltops from the prow of an approaching junk. From a wooden jetty built for the use of pilgrims, a path lid upwards, curving round folds of the hills in a manner so contrived that, each time its steepness began to seem unbearable, I came upon a level stretch long enough to allow me to regain my breath. In less than three hours a man in his twenties (or an old one, if he had acquired the effortless gait that comes with Taoist training) could reach the monastery's outermost gateway. This was solitary, elaborately roofed arch standing athwart the path with no walls to bar my progress. If for some reason I had chosen to walk around instead of through it, there would have been no obstacle. Its function was to inform pilgrims that they were now to set foot on sacred ground. Attached to its roof was a horizontal gilded tablet some three feet long which bore the words : 'Portal to Heavens Southern Region, (Nan T'ien Men). Beyond this gateway, the wilderness of trees and undergrowth gave place to thickets of feathery bamboo that had doubtless been planted to give the monastery's green-roofed buildings a suitably Taoistic air of not being quite surely where one would expect to find them, or perhaps not anywhere at all. A sudden turn and there, with its back close against the mountain, stood the monastery, looking quite solid and stationary after all, though on other occasions I was to see it present the aspect of a fairy palace floating in a sea of clouds. Unlike a Buddhist monastery, it had been deliberately made asymmetrical. Its outer wall, topped with glazed green tiles, rose and fell with dragon-like undulations to accord with the natural contours of the mountain-side. Beyond the gatehouse rose the roofs of many buildings, some small, some very large, arranged in what struck me as picturesque disorder until I perceived how cunningly a subtle orderliness underlay their seeming disarray. Between the gatehouse and the first of these buildings lay a rock-garden simulating natural scenery; this had counterparts in several of the inner courtyards, but each was constructed in a style so individual as to come as a surprise. By way of contrast, most of the larger courtyards contained somewhat formal arrangements of curiously gnarled trees or flowers and shrubs in porcelain containers. The various residential quarters consisted of rather squat buildings dwarfed by overhanging roofs, whereas the main shrine-hall and the great library beyond were so tall that even the shrine-hall's triple roof with its widespread, fantastically contoured eaves seemed to sit lightly on its walls and pillars. The only displeasing feature was the brightness of the gold and crimson lacquer adorning that huge building (doubtless in imitation of the richly ornamented shrine-halls of Buddhist monasteries, whose splendour was more pleasing to the eye because a strict symmetry and certain other features lent them the appearance of imperial palaces; whereas, in a Taoist setting, magnificence seemed out of place). However, all the other buildings, including the hall which housed the library, had a subdued charm that was all the more noticeable on account of that single imperfection. I need not describe the general appearance of the inhabitants of the Abode of Mysterious Origination or the welcome they accorded me, for all over China Taoist recluses had in common the high-piled hair, curious headgear, long robes and courtly manners of those I had encountered on Mount Nan Yeo. Instead, I shall plunge straight into an account of my first meeting with the Abbot, a fine-looking man with penetrating gaze, silky white beard and cheeks as red as apple-blossom. After prostrating myself as courtesy demanded, I chose a chair standing close to the door of his cell and affected overwhelming diffidence when he invited me to come closer. 'Your Immortality, I would not dare. I am quite unworthy.' Smiling his pleasure at beholding a barbarian grounded in at least the rudiments of civilized behaviour, he disconcerted me by a backward leap on to his bed, drawing up his legs so swiftly as to produce the effect of an illusion. It was extraordinary. One moment he was standing indolently upright; the next, despite his considerable bulk, he was restfully seated cross-legged and poised. Ignoring my surprise, he began to make dignified weaving motions with a horse-tail fly-whisk. No doubt this display had been intended to impress me not so much with his personal prowess as with the remarkable efficacy of Taoist training. At that time, I knew almost nothing of Taoism as a formal religion, for Pien Tao-shih and the hermit of the Western Hills had scarcely mentioned the subject; so I decided to begin to repair my ignorance. 'I have noticed, Your Immortality, that your esteemed monastery has a magnificent shrine-hall containing three great images. To what deities is it dedicated ?' 'The Three Pure Ones ! Enthroned in the centre is the Jade Emperor, embodiment of the First Principle, that is to say of the formless Tao Itself. On one side is a sacred being known as Heaven's Marvellously Responsive Jewel, who represents the harmonious working of the Tao's positive and negative components. On the other side you surely recognized a representation of the Venerable Sage Lao-tzu. You must understand that poorly educated people, unable to comprehend the formless, prefer to pay respect to easily recognizable forms. It is but right to express mysteries in a way they can grasp without too much exertion, otherwise they would fail to pay homage to the Sacred Source and its endless manifestations. Naturally they cannot appreciate the subtle teachings of our great sages; nevertheless, they venerate Lao-tzu for other reasons, such as his having been born white-bearded and deeply wrinkled as a consequence of passing eighty-two years in his mother's womb, or his success in attaining to an immeasurable age. Even though the truth of these matters is disputable, such beliefs help such people to see him as a very mysterious and miraculous person, which is exactly what he was; so they arrive at the inner core of truth despite their unfortunate ignorance. We followers of Chang Tao-ling use methods to suit all kinds of men. If you stay here long enough, you will see for yourself.' Raising a teacup to his lips, the Abbot thus indicated that my first audience was at an end, presumably because there were duties requiring his attention. His reference to Chang Tao-ling told me that the Abode of Mysterious Origination was likely to house some sorcerers or men believed to wrestle with authentic demons. Perhaps I should witness examples of conjuring and exorcism. This prospect proved so fascinating that I promptly abandoned my new-found interest in Taoist religious iconography; for I had read that the Taoist Trinity, like the shrine-halls, liturgies and rites, had been introduced mainly to enable the monasteries to compete with their Buddhist counterparts; whereas magic and demonology were, in a certain sense, authentic components of the ancient Taoist tradition. So it happens that to this day, even my knowledge of the Western Royal Mother is largely confined to that one small detail of her biography which tells us that a thousand youths yielded up their lives to provide her with the means to immortality by expending upon her lovely body their entire stock of vital energy. I suppose, that, like Niang Niang (another Taoist Goddess) and Kuan Yin (a Buddhist Bodhisattva depicted in China as female), she was really a form of the Mother Goddess worshipped under many names throughout the ancient world until, it the West, she was supplanted by - or transmuted into - the Virgin Mary. Depictions of divinity in female form are surely a response to a deep, though sometimes unperceived, human longing. At the time of my first visit to the Abode of Mysterious Origination, my attitude to Taoist magic and demonology was one of frank scepticism coupled with a whimsical half-desire to believe. It was only gradually that certain awe-inspiring occurrences convinced me that benign and evil psychic forces really do exist, though not necessarily in the anthropomorphic forms in which they are generally depicted; and that it is possible, if highly inadvisable, to enter into wary relations with them. Some of the stories that follow are meant not merely to entertain but also to demonstrate that Taoist recluses did manage to penetrate to an eerie realm beyond the confines of most modern people's experience. Following my courtesy call upon the Abbot, whose abrupt dismissal still rankled slightly, I began wandering about the monastery to survey its courtyards and buildings, most of which had features at once charming and fantastic. Unexpectedly I came upon a sight that, by contrast, struck me as utterly revolting. In a deserted corner of the precincts not far from the elegant main gatehouse stood a building which, since it was too large to be a recluses dwelling, must surely be put to some public use, in which case no one would mind if I walked in without permission, just to see what it contained. The picturesquely latticed windows were of painted wood spread with translucent rice-paper, so that I could not peer inside; the door was secured from without by a heavy wooden bar that could easily be removed; so, looking round half-guiltily to make sure that I was not observed, or alternatively to see if there was anyone from whom I could ask leave to enter, I slipped the bar from its sockets and laid it quietly on the ground. The heavy brass-hinged door consisted of two leaves which opened inward; as neither yielded to a gentle exploratory pressure, I pushed one of them rather hard, causing it to revolve on its hinges with a dreadfully loud groan, precipitating me all too abruptly into the gloomy interior. For gloomy it was, and in more senses than one. As my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I realized that my curiosity had plunged me into a veritable chamber of horrors - three of its four walls were fronted with life-sized plaster demons of baleful aspect, busily engaged in punishing the ghosts of errant humans. The tongues of former scandal-mongers had been lanced and split with metal prongs; other delinquents, guilty during their lifetime of crimes specified on labels tied to their ghostly necks, were being sawn in half, pressed against metal spikes, tossed into a lake of fire, forced to sit naked on needle-sharp icicles, or subjected to one or several similarly ingenious tortures, most of them recognizably related to the nature of the poor wretches' crimes. Enthroned in the place of honour opposite the doorway loomed Yen Lo Wang, the dark-visaged Lord of Death, of whom the only kind thing that could be said was that he was not leering like the demons but performing his task as judge with an expression of stern impartiality. Whether the shivering, naked ghost before him had accumulated a stock of virtue that did or did not outweigh its former sins was a matter for mathematical investigation. Calm-faced, rather handsome accountants were seated on either side, totting up the credits and debits, and hell's ferocious, red-eyed lictors stood opposite, ready to pounce upon each ghost found wanting in virtue. The whole scene looked like a grim parody of proceedings in an old-style Chinese courtroom in the days when successive Sons of Heaven ruled the empire from their Purple Palace in Peking in accordance with a code of laws specifying the exact penalty to be attached to each offence. Standing in that murky chamber surrounded by such gruesome reminders of man's devilish inventiveness in devising means of inflicting pain, I found myself temporarily in sympathy with those scholars in whose breasts the Heavenly Teacher's followers aroused feelings of scorn; but, upon reflection, I recalled that Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, and even Buddhists, were wont to depict hell in guises just as revolting, though seldom by means of life-sized statues. Thoughtfully, I walked back towards the pale-gold ray of sunlight sweeping in through the open doorway. I had just slammed the bar back into place when an elderly recluse, whose small head and thin neck brought to mind a tortoise, bore down as if to scold me for my prying. 'That place is better kept locked,' he remarked. 'It might give our honoured guest nightmares.' 'No fear of that, Your Reverence. All the same, permit me to say that I did find the place out of harmony with what little I have heard of your exalted faith.' This seemed to please him, for a radiant smile lit his wrinkled face. 'Quite right,' he said. 'But then, you see, the pilgrims expect that sort of thing, and it is an efficient way of teaching them which offences are especially grave. If you study the figures carefully, you will see that some offences not listed as crimes in this world, such as malevolent gossip, acquisitiveness, arrogance and so forth are rated as being more serious than mere thefts of property. So there is a certain logic in it. Still, we do not like that place and keep it shut except during festivals when the pilgrims come. You may suppose that the bar is there to keep the demons in; in fact the door is secured because we do not like to be reminded of such a blemish to the beauty of our monastery.' 'But you do believe in hell?' 'Do we?' he answered. 'Yes, I suppose we do, officially. Our faith has inherited a good number of ancient beliefs. Those of us who speak out against the more absurd ones are unpopular with the pilgrims. They love to come to this building, you see. Most people have a high opinion of their own merits, don't you think, and can provide a whole list of extenuations to excuse their faults; so the sight of those torments, far from making them shiver, gives them the same sort of pleasure that a man seated beside a charcoal brazier in winter gets from contemplating his good fortune in being safe from the blizzard raging outside. You can scarcely imagine a man so conscious of his own shortcomings that he expects to go to hell. Such objectivity would be unnatural.' Feeling more kindly towards the Taoists, I thanked the old man for his explanation and strolled into a courtyard where two elderly recluses were sitting in the sunshine playing a kind of chess for which three hundred and sixty black and white pebbles are required. Coming as it were straight from hell, I was reminded of those Taoist paintings which depict two bearded ancients engaged in playing chess with human lives; each time white secures an advantage, a life is saved; when black retaliates, some other life is lost. One of the joys of staying in a Taoist monastery was that one could see so many sights identical with what human eyes beheld over a thousand years ago - the same architecture, hair-dos, garments, gestures, manners, occupations and amusements. Among the recluses living permanently at the Abode of Mysterious Origination were two exorcists who, even before I had been told the nature of their dark profession, made me feel ill-at-ease in their presence. Both were men of commanding appearance with preternaturally bright eyes, whose gaze was discomforting and whose complexion was unprepossessingly pallid. They were said to spend much of their time in meditation and to regard the calls upon their special skill as exorcists as a tiresome inconvenience to which they submitted largely out of compassion for their patients. Moreover, the monastery's revenue and public image depended to some extent on displays of marvels. Whether truly high-minded or not, these two strange men were admired by the other recluses, who described them as 'freely expending great measures of their vital energy to relieve the sufferings of demon-tormented beings.' Mastering my instinctive distaste, I went out of my way to ingratiate myself with them in the hope of being allowed to observe the symptoms allegedly caused by demonic possession and to witness the rite of exorcism. This second object proved unattainable, for I learnt that an exorcist has to be left alone with his writhing patient, but those grim recluses did promise to let me see the next patient before one of them drove the demon forth. While waiting for this promise to be fulfilled, I was fortunate enough to hear from the lips of a pilgrim from Canton the nearest approach to an eye-witness account of exorcism that could be expected under the circumstances. This Mr Lee, though a canny trader, struck me as an upright person unlikely to tell tall stories just to create an effect. Cut down to its essentials, his tale was as follows : 'On Mount Lo-fu in my native province of Kwangtung, there is a famous Immortal known as the Cloud Wanderer. Not very long ago, the youngest daughter of my cousin, who is, by the way, a tea-merchant, fell victim to a malady that caused violent seizures. She sickened only months prior to the date fixed for her marriage to a wealthy Hong Kong lawyer, and so her parents naturally concealed her misfortune as far as possible, hoping to have her cured in time for the wedding. In vain they summoned practitioners of western medicine and doctors skilled in our Chinese healing art. Two months were wasted before an intimate friend thought to call in the Cloud Wanderer, who instantly and with good reason diagnosed possession by a member of that particularly vicious type of demon which seeks to prolong its existence by battening on the bodies of healthy youths and maids. Thus they destroy their victims one after another. It is pitiful. ' "Be calm," the Immortal told her parents. Illness might have had a lingering aftermath, whereas when I have compelled this demon to leave her she will be strong and well - unless fatal inroads have already been made on her stock of vital energy. You would have done well to summon me before. 'You know perhaps that exorcists are rather intimidating in appearance, but the Cloud Wanderer did not look the sort of person to cause a young lady to lose her wits on catching sight of him. Very well. I shall tell you. In between her fits, my cousins daughter showed no symptoms of illness beyond a severe lassitude, and she had been reasonably well for several days when the Immortal came to diagnose her complaint. No sooner did her parents bring him to her chamber than a fit came upon her. Writhing like a girl put to torture, she screamed foul abuse, shouting words that no well-raised girl would know, much less employ. ' "Oh, so it's you again !" exclaimed the Immortal sternly. This caused some astonishment for he had never before set eyes on the girl, but in truth the remark was addressed to the demon, whom he had once had occasion to drive from the body of a young boy of the Auyang family in Tungshan. "'How dare you claim acquaintance with me !" replied the demon haughtily. "Go and --- yourself in that ruin of a monastery. It's the only love you'll get, you idle Taoist bone !" 'Offended by such undignified abuse, the Immortal said sternly: "Unless King Yen Lo takes you back to his murky kingdom, I shall destroy you, you weak-minded devil !" So saying, he interlocked his fingers in a sign of great power, whereupon the poor girl shrieked as though stricken and lay cowering back against the wall. Turning to the parents, the Immortal remarked : "You will find there is nothing difficult about his case. In one night I can subdue this paltry demon and make him fly for his life. If by noon tomorrow it is still troubling her, I shall take even sterner measures but remit the fee for my services." 'Well knowing that malevolent demon's vindictiveness, he ordered a room to be cleared of furniture and adornments, commanding the servants to sweep it thoroughly so that, if the girl should happen to be dragged along the ground, her clothes would not be soiled. The following evening, having fasted a full day, he returned and set up an altar to his patron deity. Then, advising my cousin to shut his daughter in a room as far away as possible, lest the demon, hearing the sound of the preliminaries, should torment her with redoubled fury, he lit candles and incense in utensils of heavy pewter and performed the introductory rites behind closed doors. Alas, the clash of his cymbals penetrated to the furthest corners of the house, driving the afflicted girl into a frenzy; the women attending her had to bind her arms for fear she destroy herself. An hour before dawn, the Immortal called for a fine young cockerel and, beheading the bird, scattered its blood about the room as an offering to the spirits he had summoned to assist him. As for the flesh, it was intended to tempt the demon into allowing itself to be ejected from the maidens body. When all was ready, the shrieking girl, whose arms the Immortal now caused to be unbound, was pushed into the room and the door locked behind her. 'What happened next can be imagined, though the Immortal never speaks of his art and one learns of what occurs only from what the patient's household make known when they come to the temple to give thanks to the gods. Hour after hour the frightened parents had to endure listening to the clash of cymbals, heavy footfalls, the clang of metal ritual objects being hurled about the room, laughter, screams and imprecations, and, at last, a struggling and panting as of strong men locked in combat. And the voices ! The Immortal's, loud and challenging; the girls harsh and pitiful by turn; the demon's, now ferociously defiant, now wailing like a wandering ghost's. The mother, believing her daughter was being tortured, was beside herself and tried to break her way into the locked room; her husband had to have her forcibly removed to a neighbour's house. 'Long before noon, the door was flung open and the Immortal, panting and shockingly dishevelled, cried, It is done! When the father and his servants ran in, they found a shambles. Twisted and broken remnants of the pewter incense-burner and candlesticks lay among the splintered fragments of the marble-topped, black-wood altar. The floor, ritually sprinkled with chickens blood, had been fouled with the bones and feathers of the bird, besides lumps of candle-wax and a quantity of ash from the overturned incense-burner. The chicken bones had, of course, been sucked clean of every particle of flesh and marrow. After flinging open the door, the Immortal leant weakly against the wall, fatigued beyond all bearing. As for the poor girl, she lay slumped in a corner, unconscious and scarcely breathing. Tenderly she was carried to a bedroom where a careful examination by the women-folk disclosed no sign of violence. Her pale skin was neither scratched nor bruised, except for wounds where her own nails had torn at her cheeks. Her hair and garments were scarcely more disarranged than they had been at the time when she was pushed into the Immortal's presence. Clearly the main struggle had taken place after the Immortal had conjured the demon forth from her body. Later, the Immortal informed her parents that he could have vanquished the demon within less than an hour if the girls weak state had not made it essential to coax it away from her before resorting to violence. When at last it had responded to his spells, the demon, spying the carcass of the chicken, had promised to go its way in peace; but no sooner had it devoured the bird than, with strength renewed, it made a treacherous attack that nearly cost the Immortal's life ! 'The Immortal, having bathed, donned fresh garments and eaten a great breakfast, pocketed his fee without so much as glancing at the money and departed, saying to the parents: "You have nothing more to fear from the demon, but your honourable daughter's vitality has been drained almost to the point of death. Nourish her well." 'The girl, on regaining consciousness, recalled nothing of what had occurred. She had no more fits, and behaved to her parents with sweet docility, but her strength had been sucked away prior to the Immortal's coming; she was scarcely able to stroll in the garden, supported by the shoulders of her serving maids. Two months later, she fell into a coma and died. So you see, unlike most of the Cloud Wanderer's exploits, the story has a tragic ending, but it constitutes a classic case of exorcism free from abnormal or unlooked-for features.' About a week after hearing Mr Lee's story, I was summoned to the cell occupied by Shen Tao-shih, the younger of the two exorcists residing at the Abode of Mysterious Origination. Motioning me to follow, he led the way to a courtyard surrounded by pilgrim dormitories which were rarely occupied at that time of year. In one of them a lonely figure lay upon a sleeping-platform - a middle-aged peasant woman who seemed to be in a daze, for she paid us no attention but kept pulling idly at her disordered hair and emitting bleating noises. 'She is fortunate enough to be possessed by nothing worse than a water-sprite. It seems that, while she was washing clothes at the margin of the river, it lodged itself in her body. Such sprites are really dangerous only when deep water lies nearby. Her husband brought her up here after spending three sleepless nights preventing her from running off towards the river. Apparently the sprite sleeps throughout most of the day, for the patient seldom shows signs of acute distress until evening approaches.' 'And how do you propose to cure her?' I asked, longing for an invitation to be present at the rite. With fire, naturally, since fire and water are the elements most often at variance with each other.' 'With fire !' I repeated. 'Will not the patient be hurt ?' 'That is like asking me if I know my job as a doctor,' he answered with slight asperity. 'What you suggest is most improbable. Look !' He struck a match and, though it was broad daylight, the sight of the puny flame drew a piercing shriek from the woman, who sprang up and huddled back against the head of her bed moaning pitifully. 'You see how easily water-sprites are intimidated. Tonight, the creature will be taught to leave humans well alone.' Though I pleaded earnestly to be allowed to watch, Shen Tao-shih was adamant. That night, while getting ready for bed in my little guest-cell on the opposite side of the monastery, I heard a distant clash of cymbals that continued for perhaps an hour. That was all. In the morning while I and two or three other guests were breakfasting off rice gruel flavoured with salted river-shrimps, the exorcist strode in with a beaming smile to invite me to see the woman before she left. Putting down my chopsticks, I followed him to where she was standing just outside the guest-refectory door. Her long hair was now neatly arranged in a bun and, though she looked tired and wan, it was obvious that she was altogether in much better shape than when I had seen her last. On being suddenly confronted by a barbarian from the Western Ocean, she instinctively made as if to run; but that, in a Chinese peasant woman, was a normal reaction and quite the reverse of her previous listlessness. By and large, I felt disappointed. I was strongly inclined to suspect that the wily exorcist had diagnosed some minor ailment and, having sought to impress me by alleging a case of possession, administered a suitable remedy before leaving her to get a good night's sleep. And yet ? There had been her horrified shrinking from a match-flame and the noise of cymbals during the night. Casually I produced a cigarette and lit it, watching the woman for signs of fear, but her rather stolid expression did not change. The incident, if not impressive, had certainly been peculiar. In the nineteen-thirties, Taoist exorcism was still widely practised and apparently with success; for, whether the patients were actually possessed by demons or were simply what we should call schizophrenics, there were reliable stories of successful cures being wrought. On the other hand, the more dangerous art of evoking spirits (other than as invisible presences speaking through the mouths of human oracles) had become extremely rare, so that, during my several visits to the Abode of Mysterious Origination, I tried in vain to obtain authentic information about evocation rites. The recluses took it for granted that demon evocation was well within the bounds of possibility, for they had heard or read a great many accounts of this mystery as practised by Taoists, in days gone by; but none could quote a recent case supported by reliable testimony. At length a rather fat, good-natured recluse born in the neighbourhood of Peking, whose powers as a musician were much esteemed, decided to satisfy my curiosity by relating a story concerning a Mongol shaman who, so he assured me, had conjured up a demon in circumstances that pointed to a method similar to Taoist-style evocation. 'The story goes back some years, my friend, say ten or twelve years after the founding of the Republic, when Sun Yat-sen was still the people's idol - a tiresome, demagogic ranter, we Taoists thought him. At that time, I was a serving-lad in the Tung Yu Temple in Peking and knew several members of the family concerned. The chief protagonist was a skin-merchant named Chang I-lo, whose mother and third uncle had long been at loggerheads about a piece of landed property in Pao-ting Fu, their native home. The old lady happened to die rather suddenly of a mysterious ailment and Chang I-lo, convinced that his uncle had poisoned her, indiscreetly voiced this charge to all and sundry. The uncle was certainly an evil-hearted person besides belonging to the cult - a cult whose name it is unwise to mention even among trusted friends. Its followers perform abominable rites that have been illegal for centuries. Dangerous men ! As a boy I kept out of the way of Chang's sinister relative each time he visited our temple. 'As a skin-merchant, Chang I-lo had to travel to Kalgan annually to buy furs and hides from Mongolian trappers who would call at his inn with their goods. In the year his mother died, when he was preparing to visit that city, an assistant working in the medicine-shop near the Tung An market went to see him as if on business and persuaded him to visit a certain Mongol shaman residing in Kalgan, a man renowned for conjuring up the spirits of the dead. By conversing with his departed mother, Chang could discover whether and how his uncle had poisoned her. '"A man may not live beneath the same heaven as the slayer of his parent" remarked the seller of medicines. "If your suspicions are confirmed by so reliable a source, no honourable man will blame you for making away with your uncle. The Law is the Law, of course, and Sun Yat-sen's people have turned it topsy-turvy; so the authorities might take a harsh view of such an act, but people in general will esteem you as a filial son." 'When Chang I-lo reached Kalgan, he learnt that the shaman dwelt in a small yurt (felt tent) pitched near the top of an escarpment a few miles north of the city wall. There was no road, so he hired a young lad to run beside his horse and show him the way. When they had topped a rise which brought them in sight of the yurt, the lad asked for his money, declaring he was afraid to approach it more closely; so Chang paid him off, perhaps glad that it was still early enough for him to be safely back within the city walls before sundown. 'At the entrance to the yurt - a wooden door set in the canvas - he met a smutty-faced Mongol child who motioned him to go straight in. It was dark inside but not too dark to see. On the further side of the stove sat an elderly Mongol lolling back on a pile of old rugs. No less grimy than the boy, he was clad in a tattered yellow ochre robe covered with grease-stains - he probably wiped his chopsticks on it after every meal. The whole place smelled offensively. To the odours of dirt and poverty was added that of rancid butter emanating from some silver lamps burning before the usual sort of Buddhist wall-shrine. Chang felt thoroughly upset. Surely a successful demon-conjurer would be able to afford surroundings of greater elegance ? As it was, there was nothing in the room besides the shrine, the pile of old rugs and a battered bronze tea-kettle bubbling on the stove. 'The shaman greeted him in Mongol, a language all Peking skin-merchants have to know for business reasons. Chang spoke it fluently, whereas the shaman could probably speak very little Chinese, if any. His next words gave Chang a shock. ' "You have come on a grave affair and would speak with your mother." 'Who could remain calm in the face of such prescience? And Chang, I remember, was a rather timid man. But then, it was encouraging to discover that the shaman really did possess unusual powers. ' "Ten silver dollars," was the next pronouncement. My friend, if you know our thrifty Peking merchants, you will understand the working of Chang's mind. Had the Mongol been clad in silks and his yurt furnished with fine rugs and other luxuries, he might easily have extorted forty or even fifty dollars. As it was, observing signs of poverty all around him, Chang foolishly decide d to give him less than had been demanded. Calmly he laid just five silver dollars on the edge of the pile of carpets, shamefacedly adding a sixth when he saw the shaman's look of anger. Such miserliness would have set anyone against him, but it cannot have made any real difference. Later on, the Mongol punished him cruelly, but one can scarcely suppose that petty meanness was the real cause. In my humble opinion, Chang would have needed a very large sum indeed to escape what was in store for him. 'Placing the miserable fee in his sleeve, the Mongol folded his legs as for meditation, carefully tucking in the skirts of his gown to keep his feet from the draught. Chang said later that this surprised him, for the tent was so stuffy that he himself was sweating. Next, the Mongol picked up a hand-drum with metal pellets attached to it by thongs and, twirling it with such strength that the sound resembled hail pelting on a thinly tiled root began to chant. "'Durra-durra-drrrrh ! " went the -drum. "Ooooah aieyee yaaauu" intoned the Mongol in a deep bass voice. You know the sort of thing. Presently his body began to jerk and sway, arms flailing, and now and then his gestures were so menacing that Chang, who was seated on the floor, slid hastily backwards, almost singeing his back against the stove. Suddenly there came a rush of wind. The Mongol emitted piercing yells and the canvas walls of the yurt began straining and trembling - yet the sunlit rents in the material remained as bright as ever and Chang was aware that, though a cold wind raged within the yurt, the steppe outside remained as windless and peaceful as before ! Soon he noticed that the darkness inside had increased; for, though he could still make out the Mongol's violent movements, such details as the grease-stains on his robe were no longer visible. True merchant that he was, Chang's first thought was that an attempt would soon be made to rob him ! 'Noise, noise, noise, then mind-shattering silence ! The wind died as abruptly as the rattling of the drum. No sound to be heard but the tea-kettle's gentle hiss. A long, long silence. So this was the moment ! His departed mother's shade was about to manifest itself. He would hear her voice, perhaps even see her well-loved features ! Holding his breath he grew tense. Tears started to his eyes. ' "Incestuous turtle ! Sister-raping dog ! Stinking lump of human dung ! How dare you impugn the crime of murder to your honoured uncle, impious Chang I-lo !" 'Chang shrank back appalled. How could the unseen owner of that high-pitched, metallic, sneering voice know his name or the accusations he had made in far-away Peking? It was not the voice of anyone known to him, whether now alive or dead, and most certainly not his mother's. Nor could it be the Mongol's, for the abuse had been delivered in impeccable Chinese, the very accents of his home-town, Pao-ting Fu. What manner of person could read his inmost thoughts and parody his intonation? To save his sanity, he seized upon the notion that the foul abuse had after all been hurled at him by the shaman, who had somewhere acquired a perfect knowledge of Chinese. It was all a plot aimed at securing the bag of silver he carried beneath his robe. That was it ! Fear gave way to rage and he was about to set about the tricksters, when a renewed bout of terror intervened; for now he discerned a second and taller figure seated upon the pile of rugs in such a manner that parts of the shaman's face and body should have been hidden. But they were not ! Two figures overlapping and yet both entirely visible ? How could that be ? His mind must be afflicted by an illusion due to the poor light. Whatever comfort he drew from this conclusion did not last long, for he soon saw the hitherto shadowy form acquire the more solid aspect of a burly fellow seated cross-legged, the white soles of his felt Chinese slippers glimmering against the dark material of his robe. Chang's belief that he was the victim of hallucination had already begun to waver when some pieces of ill-cured charcoal in the stove behind him burst into flame, causing a lurid light to shine upon the stranger's face. No comforting doubts remained. Such horribly ill-favoured features set in an expression of such inhuman malevolence could belong only to a fiend ! 'The shaman had performed his task so well that our filial skin-merchant ran shrieking from the yurt, stumbled upon the door-sill and crashed face-down on the dusty earth outside. Scrambling to his feet, he heard amidst bursts of high-pitched laughter the awful words: "No man flees his shadow. No matter where he goes, it follows!" Flinging himself astride his horse, he dug his heels into its flanks before remembering to unhitch the rein from the tethering post. The hateful Mongol child's laughter was now added to the fiend's. 'One can well imagine poor Chang I-lo urging his horse to gallop ever faster, blinding the passers-by with clouds of sand. A day or two later, back in Peking with his load of hides and furs, he poured out the story to his family, including a young cousin from whose lips we were soon to hear it in the Tung Yu Temple. In a way it was laughable; not so, the sequel. Everyone tried to comfort Chang by insisting that he had been deceived in some cruel way for his meanness to the shaman; but Chang I-lo, obsessed by the words "No man flees his shadow", could talk of nothing but arrangements for his funeral. A few days later he fell ill; the physician diagnosed a preponderance of the fire element in the region of his liver, but it is doubtful if he properly understood the nature of the malady. Presently it became known that Chang's wife no longer dared to pass the nights with him, for she would wake up time and time again to find her husband talking loudly to himself between fits of weeping and laughter. What frightened her most was that he seemed to have two voices, one that argued, wept and pleaded in familiar tones; another that shouted threats and obscenities or laughed and murmured in high- pitched accents that seemed to belong to a stranger ! 'Advised to summon a Taoist exorcist, the lady obstinately refused, declaring that Taoists gave people nothing but worthless paper charms in return for good money. On this account, Chang I-lo soon passed away, but not as a result of illness. Early one morning, his wife and servant, coming in to attend to him as usual, found the bed-clothes soaked in blood which had gushed from what the authorities were to describe as self-inflicted knife wounds. You can guess the truth of it. At the funeral there was, of course, much talk of demonic possession until his sinister third uncle, looking decorously mournful, put a stop to it by declaring such superstitious nonsense a disgrace.' On reaching this point, my chubby Taoist friend fell silent, foreseeing no need for further explanation. When I pressed for one, he looked surprised, but complied in his usual genial way. 'Naturally the uncle was at the bottom of all that happened. On learning that I-lo quite rightly suspected him of murder, he must have hastened to Kalgan by train and paid the shaman handsomely to evoke a demon powerful enough to destroy his nephew. The seller of medicines may have been bribed or innocently led into directing Chang I-lo to visit the shaman.' 'But why choose so bizarre and complicated a means of silencing poor Chang?' 'What better alternative had he ? To have poisoned two members of his family within the space of a year would have been dangerous, don't you think? Whereas, since our modern laws take no cognizance of demons, his method was flawless. Chang's family might persuade some individual police-constables to accept the truth, but the police would have been laughed out of court had they attempted to base a murder case on demonic possession !' 'How true ! Thank you for the story, but I do wish you had one about specifically Taoist methods of demon-conjuring.' 'Dear friend, dear friend', exclaimed the recluse amidst hearty laughter, 'you surely do not believe there can be several ways of evoking demons ! Shaman or Taoist, what difference can it make ?' 'But you have not told me how the shaman went about it.' 'Ah,' he replied, shaking his head. 'I wish I knew. Yes, I very much wish I had studied that fascinating art, but where in these days would one find a teacher ! All I can tell you is that some demons are self-existing entities that must be summoned by means of spells and cajolery, whereas others are mental creations of the one who sends them forth. The latter are the more dangerous unless an intended victim, recognizing his tormentor for a mere phantom, boldly slashes at it with a weapon of iron or steel; for then its power departs and the victor is left with a mangled paper doll no longer animated by the magician's psychic breath. Such phantoms are especially dangerous because, unlike natural demons, they cannot be bought off by promises of succulent corpses, jars of fresh blood or similar delicacies. No one would take the trouble to create a phantom by power of mind unless to wreak harm on somebody and, since it draws its existence from its creator, it has no purpose, no aim except to destroy its destined victim. If Chang I-lo's wife had called in a competent Taoist, the type of demon afflicting him would have been determined and suitable measures taken. One does not like to destroy genuine demons except as a last resort. They love their lives as much as we do and have the same rights to existence. Only in the case of a mentally created phantom would a Taoist use violence without giving it the option of departing in peace, for a demon of that class has no life to lose, being a mere extension of the magician's mind; it may therefore be destroyed without compunction, but the sword-stroke must be powerful, swift and effective; were one merely to wound such a phantom, it might rush back and avenge itself by destroying its creator. You may say that the Mongol shaman deserved to die, but to my way of thinking that would have been an unjustifiably drastic punishment' Probably he bore Chang l-lo no ill will, but created the phantom merely to oblige Chang's uncle, just as a swordsmith would forge you a good sword if you paid him well enough. No one punishes the swordsmith for a murder committed with a weapon he was paid to fashion. 'In the case of demons which draw life from the emanations of putrefying corpses, mouldering brooms, rotting rope and so-on, it is enough to destroy the objects from which they took their being, whereupon such demons vanish. There are also, of course, were-tigers and vampire-demons that are so destructive of human life and so greedy for the tender flesh of children that people consider it necessary to destroy them. Even so I feel less drastic measures would meet the case, such as confining them in sealed caves. There are several well-authenticated accounts of were-tigers in the form of women making devoted wives and mothers when they have, for one reason or another, married human husbands. When their true identity is discovered, as is bound to happen sooner or later in the course of a long marriage, they usually slip away into some forest or mountain fastness to escape being slaughtered, without having to resort to devouring their husbands and children as a means of keeping matters secret from the neighbours. 'Men, animals, ghosts, demons - all deserve sympathetic consideration. Formed from the great Tao, Matrix of the Universe, all are equally necessary to nature's Purposes. If we destroy any being without good cause, how can we expect our fellows to treat us less belligerently ? Let live, leave well alone, abstain from exaggerated reactions and one may be sure of remaining on good terms with all the hosts of heaven, earth and hell. Even corpse-devouring demons are capable of gratitude. In my youth, I befriended such a fiend who at that time inhabited a dry well in the Tung Yu Temple. Ever since, it has constituted itself my protector. Now and then it goes astray and devours somebody's chickens, but its sense of loyalty is too strong for it to permit its fellow demons to molest me or my friends. Once when I was passing the night in a bower close to the mountain peak where I sometimes go to gather medicinal herbs, a famished tree-spirit pressed upon me and began to suck my vital energy. Fascinated by its burning gaze, I could make no movement to save myself. The creature would have drained me of blood, breath and semen, leaving me dead, had not my guardian fiend intervened by recounting my poor little virtues in such terms that the tree-spirit, greatly abashed, begged my pardon and went off to hide its shame.' * (to be continued)

* Its summertime at last ! After a winter of rain and long hours of darkness every day, all things internal and external seem joyfully bursting with renewed life and energy again. But, with all the welcome outside activity my ability to keep adding new stories here, (for as long as interest continues), has unfortunately been curtailed quite radically. As well as being outdoors much of the day, plus have visitors staying with us from abroad, my wife and I will soon enough be off on our own summer holidays. So, the story I've added here today may well be my last opportunity until September. However, as a kind of literary celebration of summer, the only attractive choice which appeals to me is to throw in a story which is also correspondingly light-hearted and amusing, but true. For that kind of experience I always return to my long-time favourite author, Gerald Durrell, and his accounts of a childhood spent with his family on the Greek island of Corfu in the early 1930s. As a treat I recently bought myself a copy of the second of three books he wrote about his experiences there, and I'm now about two thirds of my way through. I keep trying to mentally apply my 'reading brakes' in order to slow down enough to be able to savour every page as much as I can,... just to prolong my experience of being on that lovely, sun-drenched island for as long as is humanly possible. With no further ado, heres a chapter from Gerald Durrells wonderful book, "Birds, Beasts and Relatives" : * * Cuttlefish and Crabs Each morning when I awoke, the bedroom would be tiger-striped by the sun peering through the shutters. As usual I would find that the dogs had managed to crawl on to the bed without my realising it and would now be occupying more than their fair share, sleeping deeply and peacefully. Ulysses would be sitting by the window, staring at the bars of golden sunlight, his eyes slit into malevolent disapproval. Outside one could hear the hoarse, jeering crow of a cockerel and the soft murmuring of the hens (a sound soothing as bubbling porridge) as they fed under the orange and lemon trees, the distant clonk of goat bells, sharp chittering of sparrows in the eaves and sudden outburst of wheezing, imploring cries that showed one of the parent swallows had brought a mouthful of food to their brood in the nest beneath my window. I would throw back the sheet and turf the dogs out on to the floor, where they would shake and stretch and yawn, their pink tongues curled like exotic leaves, and then I would go over to the window and throw back the shutters. Leaning out over the sill, the morning sun warm on my naked body, I would scratch thoughtfully at the little pink seals the dogs' fleas had left on my skin, while I got my eyes adjusted to the light. Then I would peer down over the silver olive tops to the beach and the blue sea which lay half a mile away. It was on this beach that, periodically, the fishermen would pull in their nets and when they did so this was always a special occasion for me, since the net dragged to shore from the depths of the blue bay would contain a host of fascinating sea life which was otherwise beyond my reach. If I saw the little fishing-boars bobbing on the water I would get dressed hurriedly and, taking my collecting gear, would run through the olive trees down to the road and along it until I reached the beach. I knew most of the fishermen by name, but there was one who was my special friend, a tall powerful young man with a mop of auburn hair. Inevitably, he was called Spiro after Saint Spiridion, so in order to distinguish him from all the other Spiros I knew, I called him Kokino, or red. Kokino took a great delight in obtaining specimens for me and, although he was not a bit interested in the creatures himself, he got much pleasure from my obvious delight. One day I went down to the beach when the net was half-way in. The fishermen, brown as walnuts, were hauling on the dripping lines, their toes spreading wide in the sand as they pulled the massive bag of the net nearer and nearer to the shore. 'Your health, kyrie Gerry.' Kokino cried to me, waving a large freckled hand in greeting, his mop of hair glinting in the sun like a bonfire. 'Today, we should get some fine animals for you, for we put the net down in a new place. I squatted on the sand and waited patiently while the fishermen, chattering and joking, hauled away steadily. Presently the top of the net was visible in the shallow waters and as it broke surface you could see the glitter and wink of the trapped fish inside it. Hauled out on to the sand it seemed as though the net was alive, pulsating with the fish inside it, and there was the steady, staccato purring noise of their tails, flapping futilely against each other. The baskets were fetched and the fish picked out of the net and cast into them. Red fish, white fish, fish with wine-coloured stripes, scorpion fish like flamboyant tapestries. Sometimes there would be an octopus or a cuttlefish leering up from inside the net with a look of alarm in its human eyes. Once all the edible contents of the net had been safely stowed away in the baskets, it was my turn. In the bottom of the net would be a great heap of stones and sea-weed and it was among this that my trophies lay. Once I found a round flat stone from which grew a perfect coraline tree, pure white. It looked like a young beech tree in winter, its branches bare of leaves and covered with a layer of snow. Sometimes there would be cushion star fish, as thick as a sponge cake and almost as large, the edges not forming pointed arms as with normal star fish, but rounded scallops. These star fish would be of pale fawn with a bright pattern of scarlet blotches. Once I got two incredible crabs whose pincers and legs when pulled in tight fitted with immaculate precision the sides of their oval shells. These crabs were white with a rusty red pattern on the back which looked not unlike an Oriental face. It was hardly what I would call protective colouration and I imagine they must have had few enemies to be able to move about the sea bed wearing such a conspicuous livery. On this particular morning, I was picking over a great pile of weed when Kokino, having stowed away the last of the fish in the baskets, came over to help me. There were the usual assortment of squids the size of a match box, pipe fish, spider crabs and a variety of tiny fish which, in spite of their size, had been unable to escape through the mesh of the net. Suddenly Kokino gave a little grunt half surprise and half amusement, picked something out of a tangled skein of sea-weed and held it out to me on the calloused palm of his hand. I could hardly believe my eyes, for it was a sea horse. Browny green, carefully jointed, looking like some weird chess man, it lay on Kokinos hand, its strange protruding mouth gasping and its tail coiling and uncoiling frantically. Hurriedly I snatched it from him and plunged it into a jar full of sea water, uttering a mental prayer to Saint Spiridion that I would be in time to save it. To my delight it righted itself, then hung suspended in the jar, the tiny fins on each side of its horse's head fluttering themselves into a blur. Pausing only to make sure that it really was all right, I scrabbled through the rest of the weed with the fervour of a gold prospector panning a river bed where he had found a nugget. My diligence was rewarded for in a few minutes I had six sea horses of various sizes hanging suspended in the jar. Enraptured by my good luck, I bid Kokino and the other fishermen a hasty farewell and raced back to the villa. Here I unceremoniously foreclosed on fourteen slow worms and usurped their aquarium to house my new catches. I knew that the oxygen in the jar in which the sea horses were imprisoned would not last for long and if I wanted to keep them alive I would have to move quickly. Carrying the aquarium I raced down to the sea again, washed it out carefully, filled the bottom with sand and dashed back to the villa with it; then I had to run down to the sea again three times with buckets to fill it up with the required amount of water. By the time I had poured the last bucket into it, I was so hot and sweaty I began to wonder whether the sea horses were worth it. But as soon as I tipped them into the aquarium I knew that they were. I had placed a small twiggy dead olive branch in the aquarium which I had anchored to the sand and as the sea horses plopped out of the jar they righted themselves and then, like a group of ponies freshly released in a field, they sped round and round the aquarium, their fins moving so fast that you could not see them and each one gave the appearance of being driven by some small internal motor. Having, as it were, galloped round their new territory, they all made for the olive branch, entwined their tails round it lovingly and stood there gravely at attention. The sea horses were an instant success. They were about the only animal that I had introduced to the villa that earned the family's unanimous approval. Even Larry used to pay furtive visits to my study in order to watch them zooming and bobbing to and fro in their tank. They took up a considerable amount of my time, for I found that the sea water soon grew rancid and in order to keep it clear and fresh I had to go down to the sea with buckets four or five times a day. This was an exhausting process, but I was glad that I kept it up for otherwise I would not have witnessed a very extraordinary sight. One of the sea horses, who was obviously an old specimen since he was nearly black, had a very well-developed paunch. This I merely attributed to age; then I noticed one morning there was a line along the paunch, almost as though it had been slit with a razor blade. I was watching this and wondering whether the sea horses had been fighting and if so what they used as a weapon (for they seemed so defenceless) when to my complete and utter astonishment the slit opened a little wider and out swam a minute and fragile replica of the sea horse. I could hardly believe my eyes, but as soon as the first baby was clear of the pouch and hanging in the clear water, another one joined it and then another and another until there were twenty microscopic sea horses floating round their giant parent like a little cloud of smoke. Terrified lest the other adult sea horses eat the babies, I hurriedly set up another aquarium and placed what I fondly imagined to be the mother and her offspring in it. Keeping two aquariums going with fresh water was an even more Herculean task and I began to feel like a pit-pony, but I was determined to continue until Thursday, when Theodore came to tea, so that I could show him my acquisitions. 'Aha,' he said, peering into the tanks with professional zeal, these are really most interesting. Sea horses are, of course, according to the books, supposed to be found here, but I myself have er , you know , never seen them previously.' I showed Theodore the mother with her swarm of tiny babies. 'No, no,' said Theodore. 'That's not the mother, that's the father.' At first I thought that Theodore was pulling my leg, but he went on to explain that, when the female laid the eggs and they had been fertilized by the male, they were taken into this special brood pouch by the male and there they matured and hatched. What I had thought was a proud mother was in reality a proud father. Soon the strain of keeping my stable of sea horses with a supply of microscopic sea food and fresh water became too great and so with the utmost reluctance I had to take them down to the sea and release them. It was Kokino who, as well as contributing specimens from his nets to my collection, showed me one of the most novel fishing methods I had ever come across. I met him one day down by the shore putting a kerosene tin full of sea water into his rickety little boat. Reposing in the bottom of the tin was a large and soulful looking cuttlefish. Kokino had tied a string round it where the head met the great egg-shaped body. I asked him where he was going and he said he was going to fish for cuttlefish. I was puzzled because his boat did not contain any lines or nets or even a trident. How then did he propose to catch cuttlefish ? 'With love,' said Kokino mysteriously. I felt it was my duty, as a naturalist, to investigate every method of capturing animals, so I asked Kokino whether it was possible for me to accompany him. 'We rowed the boat out into the blue bay until she hung over a couple of fathoms of crystal dear water. Here Kokino took the end of the long string that was attached to the cuttlefish and tied it carefully round his big toe. Then he picked up the cuttlefish and dropped it over the side of the boat. It floated in the water for a brief moment, looking up at us with what seemed to be an incredulous expression, and then, squirting out jets of water, shot off in a series of jerks, trailing the string behind it and soon disappeared into the blue depths. The string trailed gradually over the side of the boat then tautened against Kokino's toe. He lit a cigarette and rumpled his flaming hair. 'Now, he said, grinning at me, 'we will see what love can do.' He bent to his oars and rowed the boat slowly and gently along the surface of the bay, with frequent pauses during which he stared with intense concentration at the string fastened to his toe. Suddenly he gave a little grunt, let the oars fold to the side of the boat like the wings of a moth and, grasping the line, started to pull it in. I leant over the side staring down into the clear water, my eyes straining towards the end of the taut black line. Presently in the depths, a dim blur appeared as Kokino hauled more quickly on the line and the cuttlefish came into sight. As it got closer, I saw, to my astonishment, it was not one cuttlefish but two, locked together in a passionate embrace. Swiftly Kokino hauled them alongside and with a quick flip of the line landed them in the bottom of the boat. So engrossed was the male cuttlefish with his lady love that not even the sudden transition from his watery home to the open air seemed to worry him in the slightest. He was clasping the female so tightly that it took Kokino some time to prise him loose and drop him into the tin of sea water. The novelty of this form of fishing greatly appealed to me, although I had the sneaking feeling that perhaps it was a little unsporting. It was rather like catching dogs by walking around with a bitch in season on the end of a long leash. Within an hour we had caught five male cuttlefish in a comparatively small area of the bay. It amazed me that there should be so dense a population, for they were a creature that you rarely saw unless you went fishing at night. The female cuttlefish, throughout this time, played her part with a sort of stoical indifference, but even so I felt that she should be rewarded, so I prevailed upon Kokino to let her go, which he did with obvious reluctance. I asked him how he knew that the female was ready to attract the males, and he shrugged. 'It is the time,' he said. Could you then at this time, I enquired, put any female on the end of a string and obtain results ? 'Yes,' said Kokino. 'But of course, some females, like some women, are more attractive than others and so you get better results with those.' My mind boggled at the thought of having to work our the comparative merits of two female cuttlefish. I felt it was a great pity that this method could not be employed with other creatures. The idea, for example, of dropping a female sea horse over the side on a length of cotton and then pulling her up in a tangled entourage of passionate males was very appealing. Kokino was, as far as I knew, the only exponent of this peculiar brand of fishing for I never saw any other fisherman employ it and, indeed, the ones I mentioned it to had never even heard of it and were inclined to treat my story with raucous disbelief. This tattered coastline near the villa was particularly rich in sea life and, as the water was comparatively shallow, it made it easier for me to capture things. I had succeeded in inveigling Leslie into making me a boat which greatly facilitated my investigations. This craft, almost circular, flat-bottomed and with a heavy list to starboard, had been christened the Bootlebumtrinket and, next to my donkey, was my most cherished possession. Filling the bottom with jars, tins and nets and taking a large parcel of food with me, I would set sail in the Bootlebumtrinket accompanied by my crew of Widdle, Puke, Roger and, occasionally, Ulysses my owl, should he feel so inclined. We would spend the hot, breathless days exploring remote little bays and rocky and weed-encrusted archipelagos. We had many curious adventures on these expeditions of ours. Once we found a whole acre of sea-bed covered with a great swarm of sea hares, their royal purple, egg-shaped bodies with a neat pleated frill along the edge and two strange protuberances on the head which did in fact look extraordinarily like the long ears of a hare. There were hundreds of them gliding over the rocks and across the sand, all heading towards the south of the island. They did not touch or display any interest in each other, so I assumed it was not a mating gathering, but some form of migration. On another occasion, a group of languid, portly and good-natured dolphins discovered us riding at anchor in a small bay, and, presumably attracted by the friendly colour scheme of orange and white in which the Bootlebumtrinket was painted, disported themselves around us, leaping and splashing, coming up alongside the boat with their grinning faces and breathing deep, passionate sighs at us from their blow holes. A young one, more daring than the adults, even dived under the boat and we felt his back scrape along the Bootlebumtrinket's fat bottom. My attention was equally divided between enjoying this delightful sight and try1ng to quell mutiny on the part of my crew who had all reacted to the arrival of the dolphins in their individual ways. Widdle, never a staunch warrior, had lived up to his name copiously and then crouched shivering in the bows, whining to himself. Puke had decided that the only way to save his life, was to abandon ship and swim for the shore and had to be restrained forcibly, as did Roger who was convinced that, if he was only allowed to jump into the sea with the dolphins, he would be able to kill them all, single-handed, in a matter of moments. It was during one of these expeditions that I came across a magnificent trophy which was, indirectly, to be responsible for leading Leslie into court. The family had all gone into town, with the exception of Leslie who was recovering from a very severe attack of dysentery. It was his first day's convalescence and he lay on the sofa in the drawing-room as weak as a kitten, sipping iced tea and reading a large manual on ballistics. He had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that he did not want me hanging around making a nuisance of myself and so, as I did not want to go into the town, I had taken the dogs out in Bootlebumtrinket. As I rowed along, I discerned on the smooth waters of the bay what I took to be a large patch of yellow sea-weed. Sea-weed was always worth investigating as it invariably contained a host of small life and sometimes, if you were lucky, quite large creatures, so I rowed towards it. But as I got closer, I saw that it was nor sea-weed, but what appeared to be a yellowish-coloured rock. Bur what sort of rock could it be that floated in some twenty feet of water ? As I looked closer, I saw, to my incredulous delight, that it was a fairly large turtle. Shipping the oars and urging the dogs to silence I poised myself in the bows and waited, tense with excitement as the Bootlebumtrinket drifted closer and closer. The turtle, outspread, appeared to be floating on the surface of the sea, soundly asleep. My problem was to capture him before he woke up. The nets and various other equipment I had in the boat had not been designed for the capture of a turtle measuring some three feet in length, so the only way I felt I could achieve success was by diving in, grabbing him and somehow getting him into the boat before he woke up. In my excitement it never occurred to me that the strength possessed by a turtle of this size was considerable and it was unlikely that he was going to give up without a struggle. When the boat was some six feet away I held my breath and dived. I decided to dive under him so as to cut off his retreat, as it were, and as I plunged into the lukewarm water I uttered a brief prayer that the splash I made would not awaken him and that, even if it did, he would be too dozy to execute a rapid retreat. I had dived deep and now I turned on my back and there, suspended above me like an enormous golden guinea, was the turtle. I shot up under him and grabbed him firmly by his front flippers which curved like horny sickles from out of his shell. To my surprise even this action did not wake him and when I rose, gasping, to the surface, still retaining my grasp on his flippers, and shook the water from my eyes, I discovered the reason. The turtle had been dead for a fair length of time, as my nose and the host of tiny fish nibbling at his scaly limbs told me. Disappointing though this was, a dead turtle was better than no turtle at all and so I laboriously towed his body alongside the Bootlebumtrinket and made it fast by one flipper to the side of the boat. The dogs were greatly intrigued, under the impression that this was some exotic and edible delicacy I had procured for their special benefit. The Bootlebumtrinket, owing to her shape, had never been the easiest of craft to steer, and now, with the dead weight of the turtle lashed to one side of her, she showed a tendency to turn in circles. However, after an hour's strenuous rowing, we arrived safely at the jetty and having tied the boat up I hauled the turtle's carcass up on to the shore where I could examine it. It was a Hawksbill turtle, the kind whose shell is used for the manufacture of spectacle frames and whose stuffed carcass you occasionally see in opticians' windows. His head was massive, with a great wrinkled jowl of yellow skin and a swooping beak of a nose that did give him an extraordinarily hawk-like look. The shell was battered in places, presumably by ocean storms or by the snap of a passing shark, and here and there it was decorated with little snow-white clusters of baby barnacles. His underside of pale daffodil-yellow was soft and pliable like thick damp cardboard. I had recently conducted a long and fascinating dissection of a dead terrapin that I had found and I felt this would be an ideal opportunity to compare the turtle's internal anatomy with that of his fresh-water brother, so I went up the hill, borrowed the gardener's wheel-barrow, transported my prize up to the house and laid it out in state on the front veranda. I knew there would be repercussions if I performed my dissection of the turtle inside the house, but I felt that nobody in their right mind would object to the dissection on the front veranda. With my note book at the ready and my rows of saws, scalpels and razor blades neatly laid out as though in an operating theatre, I set to work. I found that the soft yellow plastern came away quite easily, compared with the underside of the terrapin which had taken me three-quarters of an hour to saw through. When the plastern was free, I lifted it off like a cover off a dish and there, underneath, were all the delicious mysteries of the turtle's internal organs displayed, multi-coloured and odoriferous to a degree. So consumed with curiosity was I that I did not even notice the smell. The dogs, however, who normally considered fresh cow dung to be the ideal scent to add piquancy to their love life, disappeared in a disapproving body, sneezing violently. I discovered, to my delight, that the turtle was a female and had a large quantity of half-formed eggs in her. They were about the size of ping-pong balls, soft, round and as orange as a nasturtium. There were fourteen of them and I removed them carefully and laid them in a gleaming, glutinous row on the flagstones. The turtle appeared to have a prodigious quantity of gut, and I decided that I should enter the exact length of this astonishing apparatus in my already blood- stained note book. With the aid of a scalpel I detached the gut from the rear exit of the turtle and then proceeded to pull it out. It seemed never-ending, but before long I had it all laid out carefully across the veranda in a series of loops and twists, like a drunken railway line. One section of it was composed of the stomach, a hideous greyish bag like a water-filled balloon. This obviously was full of the turtles last meal and I felt, in the interest of science, that I ought to check on what it had been eating just prior to its demise. I stuck a scalpel in the grey wobbling mound and slashed experimentally. Immediately the whole stomach bag deflated with a ghastly sighing noise and a stench arose from its interior which made all the other smells pale into insignificance. Even I, fascinated as I was by my investigations, reeled back and had to retreat coughing to wait for the smell to subside. I knew I could get the veranda cleaned up before the family got back from town, but in my excitement, I had completely overlooked the fact that Leslie was convalescing in the drawing-room. The scent of the turtle's interior, so pungent that it seemed almost solid, floated in through the french windows and enveloped the couch on which he lay. My first intimation of this catastrophe was a blood-curdling roar from inside the drawing-room. Before I could do anything sensible, Leslie, swathed in blankets appeared in the french windows' ''What's that bloody awful stink?' he enquired throatily. Then, as his glance fell upon the dismembered turtle and its prettily arranged internal organs spread across the flagstones, his eyes bulged and his face took on a heliotrope tinge' 'What the hell's that ?' I explained, somewhat diffidently, that it was a turtle that I was dissecting. It was a female, I went on hurriedly, hoping to distract Leslie by detail. Here he could see the fascinating eggs that I had extracted from her interior. 'Damn her eggs,' shouted Leslie, making it sound like some strange mediaeval oath. 'Get the bloody thing away from here. It's stinking the place out.' I said that I had almost reached the end of my dissection and that I had then planned to bury all the soft parts and merely keep the skeleton and shell to add to my collection. 'You're doing nothing of the sort,' shouted Leslie. 'You're to take the whole bloody thing and bury it. Then you can come back and scrub the veranda.' Lugaretzia, our cook, attracted by the uproar, appeared in the french window next to Leslie. She opened her mouth to enquire into the nature of this family quarrel when she was struck amidships by the smell of the turtle. Lugaretzia always had fifteen or sixteen ailments worrying her at any given moment, which she cherished with the loving care that other people devote to window-boxes or a Pekinese. At this particular time it was her stomach that was causing her the most trouble. In consequence she gasped two or three times feebly, like a fish, uttered a strangled 'Saint Spiridion ! and fell into Leslies arms in a well-simulated faint. Just at that moment, to my horror, the car containing the rest of the-family swept up the drive and came to a halt below the veranda. 'Hello, dear,' said Mother, getting out of the car and coming up to the steps. 'Did you have a nice morning ? Before I could say anything, the turtle, as it were, got in before me. Mother uttered a couple of strange hiccupping cries, pulled our her handkerchief and clapped it to her nose. ''What,' she demanded indistinctly, is that terrible smell ? 'It's that bloody boy,' roared Leslie from the french windows, making ineffectual attempts to prop the moaning Lugaretzia against the doorjamb. Larry and Margo had now followed Mother up the steps and caught sight of the butchered turtle. 'What . . . ?' began Larry and then he too was seized with a convulsive fit of coughing. 'It's that damned boy,' he said gasping. 'Yes, dear,' said Mother through her handkerchief, Leslies just told me.' 'It's disgusting- wailed Margo, fanning herself with her handkerchief. 'It looks like a railway accident. 'What is it, dear ?' Mother asked me. I explained that it was an exceedingly interesting Hawksbill turtle, female, containing eggs. 'Surely you don't have to chop it up on the veranda ? said Mother. The boys mad, said Larry with conviction. The whole place smells like a bloody whaling ship. I really think youll have to take it somewhere else, dear, said Mother. We cant have this smell on the front veranda. 'Tell him to bury the damned thing,' said Leslie clasping his blankets more firmly about him. 'Why don't you get him adopted by a family of Eskimos ?' enquired Larry. 'They like eating blubber and maggots and things.' 'Larry, don't be disgusting,' said Margo. 'They can't Eat anything like this. The very thought of it makes me feel sick.' 'I think we ought to go inside,' said Mother faintly. 'Perhaps it won't smell as much in there.' If anything, it smells worse in here,' shouted Leslie from the french windows. 'Gerry, dear, you must clean this up,' said Mother as she picked her way delicately over the turtle's entrails, 'and disinfect the flagstones.' The family went inside and I set about the task of clearing up the turtle from the front veranda. Their voices arguing ferociously drifted out to me. 'Bloody menace,' said Leslie. 'Lying here peacefully reading, and I was suddenly seized by the throat.' 'Disgusting,' said Margo. 'I don't wonder Lugaretzia fainted. 'High time he had another tutor,' said Larry. 'You leave the house for five minutes and come back and find him disembowelling Moby Dick on the front porch.' 'I'm sure he didn't mean any harm, said Mother soothingly, 'but it was rather silly of him to do it on the veranda. 'Silly !' said Larry caustically. 'We'll be blundering round the house with gas masks for the next six months. I piled the remains of the turtle into the wheel-barrow and took it up to the top of the hill behind the villa. Here I dug a hole, buried all the soft parts and then placed the shell and the bone structure near the nest of some friendly ants who had, on previous occasions, helped me considerably by picking skeletons clean. The most they had ever tackled had been a very large green lizard, so I was interested to see what they would make of the turtle. They ran towards it, their antennae waving eagerly, stopped, thought about it for a bit, held a little consultation and then retreated in a body. Apparently even the ants were against me. I returned dispiritedly to the villa. Here I found that a thin, whining little man, obviously made belligerent by wine, was arguing with Lugaretzia on the still odoriferous veranda. I enquired what the man wanted. 'He says,' said Lugaretzia, with fine scorn, that Roger has been killing his chickens. 'Turkeys,' corrected the man. Turkeys. Well, turkeys then,' said Lugaretzia, conceding the point. My heart sank. One calamity was being succeeded by another. Roger, we knew, had the most reprehensible habit of killing chickens. He derived a lot of innocent amusement in the spring and summer by chasing swallows. They would drive him into an apoplectic frenzy by zooming past his nose and then flying along the ground just ahead of him while he chased them, bristling with rage, uttering roars of fury. The peasant chickens used to hide in the myrtle bushes and then, just as Roger was passing, they would leap out with a great flutter of wings and insane hysterical cackling right into his path. Roger, I was sure, was convinced that these chickens were a sort of ungainly swallow that he could get to grips with and so, in spite of yells of protest on our part, he would leap on them and kill them with one swift bite, all his hatred of the teasing summer swallows showing in his action. No punishment had any effect on him. He was normally an extremely obedient do, except about this one thing. All we could do was pay recompense to the owners, but only on condition that the corpse of the chicken was produced as evidence. Reluctantly I went in to tell the family that Roger had been at it again. 'Christ !' said Leslie, getting laboriously to his feet. You and your sodding animals. 'Now, now, dear,' said Mother placatingly. 'Gerry can't help it if Roger kills chickens.' 'Turkeys,' said Leslie. 'I bet he'll want a hell of a lot for those.' 'Have you cleared up the veranda, dear ?' enquired Mother. Larry removed a large handkerchief, drenched in eau-de-Cologne, which he had spread over his face. 'Does it smell as though he's cleaned up the veranda ?' he enquired. I said hastily that I was just about to do it and followed Leslie to see the outcome of his conversation with the turkey owner. 'Well,' said Leslie belligerently, striding out on to the veranda, 'what do you want ?' The man cringed, humble, servile and altogether repulsive. 'Be happy, kyrie, be happy,' he greeted Leslie. 'Be happy,' Leslie replied gruffly, in the tone of voice that implied that he hoped the man would be anything but. ''What do you wish to see me about ?' 'My turkeys, kyrie,' said the man deprecatingly. 'I apologise for troubling you, but your dog, you see, he's been killing my turkeys.' ''Well,' said Leslie, 'how many has he killed ?' 'Five, kyrie,' said the man, shaking his head sorrowfully. 'Five of my best turkeys. I am a poor man, kyrie, otherwise I wouldn't have dreamt . . .' 'Five!' said Leslie startled, and turned an enquiring eye on me. I said I thought it was quite possible. If five hysterical turkeys had leapt out of a myrtle bush I could well believe that Roger would have killed them all. For such a benign and friendly dog, he was a ruthless killer when he got started. 'Roger is a good dog,' said Lugaretzia belligerently. She had joined us on the veranda and she obviously viewed the turkey owner with the same dislike as myself. Apart from this, in her eyes Roger could do no wrong. Well, said Leslie, making the best of a bad job, if hes killed five turkeys, hes killed five turkeys. Such is life. Where are the bodies ?' There was a moment of silence. 'The bodies, kyrie ?' queried the turkey owner tentatively. 'The bodics, the bodics, said Leslic imapiently. You know the bodies of the turkeys. You know we cant pay until you produce the bodies. 'But thats not possible, said the turkey owner nervously. What do you mean, not possible ? enquired Leslie. Well, its not possible to bring the bodies, kyrie, said the turkey owner with a flash of inspiration, because your dog has eaten them.' The explosion that this statement provoked was considerable. We all knew that Roger was, if anything, slightly overfed, and that he was of a most fastidious nature. Though he would kill a chicken, nothing would induce him to feed upon the carcass. 'Lies ! Lies!' shrilled Lugaretzia, her eyes swimming with tears of emotion. 'He's a good dog. 'He's never eaten anything in his life that hes killed, shouted Leslie. 'Never. 'But five of my turkeys ! said the little man. Five of them he's eaten !' 'When did he kill them ?' roared Leslie. This morning, kyrie, this morning said the man, crossing himself, 'I saw it myself, and he ate them all. I interrupted to say that Roger had been out that morning in the Bootlebumtrinket with me and, intelligent dog though he was, I did not see how he could be consuming the prodigious quantity of five turkeys on this mans farm and out in the boat with me at the same time. Leslie had had a trying morning. All he had wanted was to lie peacefully on the sofa with his manual of ballistics, but first he had been almost asphyxiated by my investigations into the internal anatomy of the turtle and now he was being faced by a drunken little man, trying to swindle us out of the price of five turkeys. His temper, never under the best of control, bubbled over. 'You're a two-faced liar and a cheat,' he snarled. The little man backed away and his face went white. 'You are the liar and the cheat,' he said with drunken belligerence. 'You are the liar and the cheat. You let your dog kill everybody's chickens and turkeys and then when they come to you for payment, you refuse. You are the liar and the cheat.' Even at that stage, I think that sanity could have prevailed, but the little man made a fatal mistake. He spat copiously and wetly at Leslie's feet. Lugaretzia uttered a shrill wail of horror and grabbed hold of Leslie's arm. Knowing his temper, I grabbed hold of the other one. The little man, appalled into a moment of sobriety, backed away. Leslie quivered like a volcano and Lugaretzia and I hung on like grim death. 'Excreta of a pig,' roared Leslie. 'Illegitimate son of a diseased whore . . .' The fine Greek oaths rolled out, rich, vulgar and biological, and the little man turned from white to pink and from pink to red. He had obviously been unaware of the fact that Leslie had such a command over the fruitier of the Greek insults. 'Youll be sorry,' he quavered. 'You'll be sorry.' He spat once more with a pathetic sort of defiance and then turned and scuttled down the drive. It took the combined efforts of the family and Lugaretzia three-quarters of an hour to calm Leslie down, with the aid of several large brandies. 'Don't you worry about him, kyrie Leslie,' was Lugaretzia's final summing up. 'He's well known in the village as a bad character. Don't you worry about him.' But we were forced to worry about him, for the next thing we knew, he had sued Leslie for not paying his debts and for defamation of character. Spiro, when told the news was furious. 'Gollys, Mrs Durrells, he said, his eyes red with wrath. Why don'ts yous lets Masters Leslies shoot the son of a bitch ?' 'I don't think that would really solve anything, Spiro,, said Mother. ''What we want to know now is whether this man has any chance of winning his case. Winnings !' said Spiro with fine scorn. That bastard wont wins anything. You just leaves it to me. Ill fixes it. Now, don't so and do anything rash, Spiro, said Mother. 'It'll only make matters worse. 'I won'ts do anythings rash, Mrs Durrells. But Ill fixes that bastard.' For several days he went about with an air of conspiratorial gloom, his bushy eyebrows tangled in a frown of immense concentration, only answering our questions monosyllabically. Then, one day, a fortnight or so before the case was due to be heard, we were all in town on a shopping spree. Eventually, weighed down by our purchases, we made our way to the broad, tree-lined Esplanade and sat there having , a drink an passing the time of day with our numerous acquaintances who passed. Presently, Spiro, who had been glaring furtively about him with the air of a man who had many enemies, suddenly stiffened. He hitched his great belly up and leant across the table. 'Master Leslies, you sees that mans over there, that one with the white hair ?' He pointed a sausage-like finger at a small neat little man who was placidly sipping a cup of coffee under the trees. 'Well, what about him ? enquired Leslie. 'Hes the judges,' said Spiro. What judge ?' said Leslie bewildered. The judges who is going to tries your case, said Spiro. I wants you go to over there and talks to him. 'Do you think thats wise ?, said Larry. He might think you're trying to muck about with the course of justice and give you ten years in prison or something.' 'Gollys, nos,' said Spiro aghast at such a thought. 'He wouldn't puts Master Leslies in prison. He knows betters thens to do thats while I ams here.' 'But even so, Spiro, don't you think he'll think it a little funny if Leslie suddenly starts talking to him ?' asked Mother worriedly. 'Gollys nos,' said Spiro. He glanced about him to make sure that we weren't overheard, leant forward and whispered. 'He collects stamps.' The family looked bewildered. 'You mean he's a philatelist ?' said Larry at length. 'No, no, Master Larrys,' said Spiro. 'He's not one of them. He's a married man and he's gots two childrens.' The whole conversation seemed to be getting even more involved than the normal ones that we had with Spiro. ''What,' said Leslie patiently, 'has his collecting stamps got to do with it ?' 'I will takes you over there,' said Spiro, laying bare for the first time the Machiavellian intricacies of his plot, 'and yous tells hims that you will get him some stamps from England.' 'But that's bribery,' said Margo shocked. 'It isn't bribery, Misses Margos,' said Spiro, 'he collects stamps. He wants stamps.' 'I should think if you tried to bribe him with stamps he'd give you about five hundred years penal servitude,' said Larry to Leslie, judiciously. I asked eagerly whether, if Leslie was condemned, he would be sent to Vido, the convict settlement on a small island that lay in the sparkling sea half a mile or so away from the town. 'No, no, dear,' said Mother, getting increasingly flustered. 'Leslie won't be sent to Vido.' I felt this was rather a pity. I already had one convict friend, serving a sentence for the murder of his wife, who lived on Vido. He was a 'trusty' and so had been allowed to build his own boat and row home for the weekends. He had given me a monstrous black-backed gull which tyrannized all my pets and the family. I felt that, exciting though it was to have a real murderer as a friend, it would have been better to have Leslie incarcerated on Vido so that he too could come home for the weekends. To have a convict brother would, I felt, be rather exotic. 'I don't see that if I just go and talk to him it can do any harm,' said Leslie. 'I wouldn't,' said Margo. 'Remember, theres many a slip without a stitch.' 'I do think you ought to be careful, dear,' said Mother. 'I can see it all,' said Larry with relish. Leslie with a ball and chain; Spiro too, probably, as an accessory. Margo knitting them warm socks for the winter, Mother sending them food parcels and anti-lice ointment.' Oh, do stop it, Larry, said Mother crossly. This is no laughing matter.' 'All you've gots to dos is to talks to him, Master Leslies, said Spiro earnestly. 'Honest to Gods you've got to, otherwise I can't fixes it.' Spiro had, prior to this, never let us down. His advice had always been sound and, even if it hadn't been legal, we had never so far, come to grief. 'All right,' said Leslie, 'let's give it a bash. 'Do be careful, dear,' said Mother as Leslie and Spiro rose and walked over to where the judge was sitting. The judge greeted them charmingly and for half an hour Leslie and Spiro sat at his table sipping coffee while Leslie talked to him in voluble, but inaccurate Greek. Presently the judge rose and left them with much hand-shaking and bowing. They returned to our table where we waited agog for the news. 'Charming old boy,' said Leslie. 'Couldn't have been nicer. I promised to get him some stamps. Who do we know in England who collects them ?' 'Well, your father used to,' said Mother. 'He was a very keen philatelist when he was alive.' 'Gollys, don't says that, Mrs Durrells,' said Spiro, in genuine anguish. A short pause ensued while the family explained to him the meaning of the word philatelist. 'I still don't see how this is going to help the case,' said Larry. 'Even if you inundate him with penny blacks.' 'Never yous minds, Masters Larrys,' said Spiro, -darkly' 'I said I'd fixes it and I will. You just leaves it to me" For the next few days Leslie, convinced that Spiro could obstruct the course of justice, wrote to everybody he could think of in England and demanded stamps. The result was that our mail increased three-fold and practically every free space in the villa was taken up by piles of stamps which, whenever a wind blew, would drift like autumn leaves across the room to the vociferous, snarling delight of the dogs. Many of the stamps began to look slightly the worse for wear. 'You're not going to give him those are you ?' said Larry disdainfully surveying a pile of mangled, semi-masticated stamps that Leslie had rescued from the jaws of Roger half an hour previously. ''Well, stamps are supposed to be old, aren't they ?' said Leslie belligerently. 'Old, perhaps, said Larry, 'but surely not covered with enough spittle to give him hydrophobia.' 'Well, if you can think of a better bloody plan, why don't you suggest it ?' enquired Leslie. 'My dear fellow, I don't mind,' said Larry. ''When the judge is running around biting all his colleagues and you are languishing in a Greek prison, don't blame me.' 'All I ask is that you mind your own bloody business,' said Leslie loudly. 'Now, now, dear, Larry's only trying to be helpful,' said Mother. 'Helpful, snarled Leslie, making a grab at a group of stamps that were being blown off the table. 'He's just interfering as usual.' ''Well, dear,' said Mother adjusting her spectacles, I do think he may be right, you know. After all, some of those stamps do look a little, well, you know, second-hand.' He wants stamps and he's bloody well going to get stamps,' said Leslie. And stamps the poor judge got, in a bewildering variety of sizes, shapes, colours and stages of disintegration. Then another thing happened that increased Leslie's confidence in winning the case one hundredfold. We discovered that the turkey man, whom Larry constantly referred to as Crippenopoulos, had been unwise enough to subpoena Lugaretzia, as a witness for the prosecution . Lugaretzia, furious, wanted to refuse until it was explained to her that she could not. 'Imagine that man calling me as a witness to help him,' she said. ''Well, don't you worry, kyrie Leslie, I'll tell the court how he forced you to swear at him and call him . . .' The family rose in a body and vociferously informed Lugaretzia that she was not to do anything of the sort. It took us half an hour to impress upon her what she should and should not say. At the end of it, since Lugaretzia, like most Corfiots, was not very strong on logic, we felt somewhat jaded. ''Well, with her as witness for the prosecution,' said Larry, 'I should think you'll probably get the death sentence.' 'Larry, dear, don't say things like that,' said Mother. 'It's not funny even in a joke.' 'I'm not joking,' said Larry. 'Rubbish,' said Leslie uneasily. 'I'm sure she'll be all right.' 'I think it would be much safer to disguise Margo as Lugaretzia,' said Larry, judicially. ''With her sweeping command over the Greek language she would probably do you considerably less harm.' 'Yes,' said Margo excitedly, struck for the first time by Larry's perspicacity, 'Why can't I be a witness ?' 'Don't be damned silly,' said Leslie. You weren't there. How can you be a witness ?' 'I was almost there,' said Margo. 'I was in the kitchen.' 'That's all you need,' said Larry to Leslie. 'Margo and Lugaretzia in the witness box and you won't even need a judge. You'll probably be lynched by the mob.' When the day of the case dawned, Mother rallied the family. 'It's ridiculous for us all to go,' said Larry. 'If Leslie wants to get himself into prison, that's his affair. I don't see why we should be dragged into it. Besides, I wanted to do some writing this morning. 'It's our duty to go,' said Mother firmly. ''We must put on a bold front. After all, I don't want people to think that I'm rearing a family of gaol birds.' So we all put on our best clothes and sat waiting patiently until Spiro came to collect us. 'Now, don'ts yous worries, Master Leslies,' he scowled, with the air of a warder in the condemned cell. 'Everything's going to be O.K.s.' But in spite of this prophecy, Larry insisted on reciting The Ballad of Reading Gaol as we drove into town, much to Leslie's annoyance. The court-room was a bustle of uncoordinated activity. People sipped little cups of coffee, other people shuffled through piles of papers in an aimless but dedicated way and there was lots of chatter and laughter. Crippenopoulos was there in his best suit, but avoided our eye. Lugaretzia, for some reason best known to herself was dad entirely in black. It was, as Larry pointed out, a premature move. Surely she should have reserved her mourning for after the trial. 'Now, Master Leslies,' said Spiro, you stands there, and I stands there and translates for you. 'What for ?' enquired Leslie,' bewildered. Because you don'ts speaks Greeks, said Spiro. 'Really, Spiro,' protested Larry, l admit his Greek is not Homeric, but it is surely perfectly adequate ?' 'Masters Larrys,' said' Spiro scowling earnestly, Master Leslies mustn'ts speaks Greeks.' Before we could enquire more deeply into this, there was a general scuffling and the judge came in. He took his seat and his eyes roved round the court and then, catching sight of Leslie, he beamed and bowed. Hanging judges always smile like that,' said Larry. 'Larry, dear, do stop it,' said Mother. you're making me nervous.' There was a long pause while what was presumably the Clerk of the Court read our the indictment. Then Crippenopoulos was called to give his evidence. He put on a lovely performance, at once servile and indignant, placating but indignant. The judge was obviously impressed and I began to get quite excited. Perhaps I would have a convict for a brother after all. Then it was Leslies turn. 'You are accused,' said the judge, Of having used defamatory and insulting language to this man and endeavouring to deprive him of rightful payment for the loss of five turkeys, killed by your dog.' Leslie stared blank-faced at the judge. Whats he say ?' he enquired of Spiro. Spiro hitched his stomach up. 'He says, Masters Leslies,' and his voice was so pitched that it rumbled through the court-room like thunder, 'He says that you insults this mans and that you tries to swindle him out of moneys for his turkeys.' 'That's ridiculous,' said Leslie firmly. He was about to go on when Spiro held up a hand like a ham and stopped him. He turned to the judge. 'The kyrios denies the charge,' he said. 'It would be impossible for him to be guilty anyway, because he doesn't speak Greek.' 'Christ !' groaned Larry sepulchrally. 'I hope Spiro knows what he's doing.' ''What's he saying ? What's he doing ?' said Mother nervously. 'As far as I can see, putting a noose round Leslie's neck,' said Larry. The judge, who had had so many coffees with Leslie, who had received so many stamps from him, and who had had so many conversations in Greek with him, stared at Leslie impassively. Even if the judge had not known Leslie personally it would have been impossible for him not to know that Leslie had some command over the Greek language. Nothing anyone did in Corfu was sacrosanct and if you were a foreigner, of course, the interest in and the knowledge of your private affairs was that much greater. We waited with bated breath for the judge's reactions. Spiro had his massive head slightly lowered like a bull about to charge. 'I see,' said the judge dryly. He shuffled some papers aimlessly for a moment and then glanced up. 'I understand,' he said, 'that the prosecution have a witness. I suppose we had better hear her.' It was Lugaretzia's big moment. She rose to her feet, folded her arms and stared majestically at the judge, her normally pale face pink with excitement, her soulful eyes glowing. 'You are Lugaretzia Condos, and you are employed by these people as a cook?' enquired the judge. 'Yes,' said Lugaretzia, 'and a kinder, more generous family you could not wish to meet. Why, only the other day they gave me a frock for myself and for my daughter and it was only a month or two ago that I asked the kyrios . . ., 'Yes,' interrupted the judge, 'I see. Well, this has not got much relevance to the case. I understand that you were there when this man called to see about his turkeys. Now tell me in your own words what happened.' Larry groaned. 'If she tells him in her own words, they'll get Leslie for sure,' he said. 'Well, said Lugaretzia, glancing round the court to make sure she had everybody's attention, 'The kyrios had been very ill, very ill indeed. At times we despaired for his life. I kept suggesting cupping to his mother, but she wouldn't hear of it...' Would you mind getting to the point?' said the judge. 'Well,' said Lugaretzia reluctantly abandoning the subject of illness, which was always a favourite topic with her, it was the kyrios's first day up and he was very weak. Then this man, she said, pointing a scornful finger at Crippenopoulos, arrived dead drunk and said that their dog had killed five of his turkeys. Now the dog wouldn't do that, kyrie judge. A sweeter, kinder, nobler dog was never seen in Corfu.' 'The dog is not on trial,' said the judge. Well,' said Lugaretzia, 'when the kyrios said, quite rightly, that he would have to see the corpses before he paid the man, the man said he couldn't show them because the dog had eaten them. This is ridiculous, as you can well imagine, kyrie judge, as no dog could eat five turkeys.' 'You are supposed to be a witness for the prosecution, arent you ?' said the judge. 'I ask only because your story doesnt tally with the complainants.' 'Him,' said Lugaretzia, 'you don't want to trust him. Hes a drunkard and a liar and it is well known in the village that he has got two wives. 'So you are telling me,' said the judge, endeavouring to sort out this confusion, 'that the kyrios didn't swear at him in Greek and refuse payment for the turkeys.' 'Of course he didn't,' said Lugaretzia.' A kinder, finer, more upstanding kyrios...' 'Yes, yes, all right,' said the judge. He sat pondering for some time while we all waited in suspense, then he glanced up and looked at Crippenopoulos. 'I can see no evidence,' he said, 'that the Englishman has behaved in the way you have suggested. Firstly he does not speak Greek.' 'He does speak Greek,' shouted Crippenopoulos wrathfully. 'He called me a ...' 'Will you be quiet,' said the judge coldly. 'Firstly, as I was saying he does not speak Greek. Secondly, your own witness denies all knowledge of the incident. It seems to me clear that you endeavoured to extract payment for turkeys which had not, in fact, been killed and eaten by the defendant's dog. However, you are not on trial here for that, so I will merely find the defendant not guilty, and you will have to pay the costs.' Immediately pandemonium reigned. Crippenopoulos was on his feet, purple with rage, shouting at the top of his voice and calling on Saint Spiridion's aid. Spiro, bellowing like a bull, embraced Leslie, kissed him on both cheeks and was followed by the weeping Lugaretzia who did likewise. It was some time before we managed to extricate ourselves from the court and jubilantly we went down to the Esplanade and sat at a table under the trees to celebrate. Presently the judge came past and we rose in a body to thank him and invite him to sit and have a drink with us. He refused the drink shyly and then fixed Leslie with a penetrating eye. 'I wouldn't like you to think,' he said, 'that justice in Corfu is always dispensed like that, but I had a long conversation with Spiro about the case and after some deliberation I decided that your crime was not as bad as the man's. I hoped it might teach him not to swindle foreigners in future.' Well, I really am most grateful to you,' said Leslie. The judge gave a little bow. He glanced at his watch. Well, I must be going,' he said. By the way, thank you so much tor those stamps you sent me yesterday. Among them were two quite rare ones which were new to my collection. Raising his hat he trotted off across the Esplanade. *

* This age of skyrocketing technological advances has probably left most users like myself, feeling that everything just happens with the merest click of a button. These stories below, however, are done in a rather time-consuming way, (largely because my computer skills and savvy are very limited indeed). They are all taken directly from my own collection of books, and individual pages of each story are then put through the OCR, (Optical Character Reader) on our home scanner. Perhaps because ours is a pretty basic model the process of correcting the scanner’s inaccuracies then takes me many days to complete. So, I think quite carefully about what I add here. This one I have chosen below is again from John Blofeld’s magical stories of his years spent in China in the 1930’s, before Communism changed that country forever and virtually eradicated its past. Perhaps unsurprisingly, (since this is a Taoist Forum after all), the most seemingly appreciated stories here have been either accounts of spiritual seeking in Asia during the last century, or of daily living as experienced by Tibetan people during that same century, (again, before the tidal wave of Chinese Communism engulfed their country.) So, since giving the reader whatever he or she enjoys the most should be the major decider,… today I’ll bring out for you another of John Blofeld’s accounts of his extraordinary encounters with Taoist recluses in ‘Old China.’ I don’t know if this information will add anything worthwhile to anyone’s approach and subsequent experience reading of this story, but it certainly has not been a mere five-minute ‘copy and paste’ job involved in bringing it here. For me, the time and effort involved is a kind of ‘paying homage’ to a most extraordinary man whom I deeply respect. John Blofeld was consumed by an inner for spiritual truth and for experiencing the last living remnants of ancient Chinese culture. All of his books are now out of print, and some quite hard to come by. The extracted chapter below was taken from his book : “The Secret and Sublime : Taoist Mysteries and Magic” * * Stumbling Upon Taoism: (Some Taoist Recluses) In my early twenties, I was fortunate enough to spend some years in Peking. In those days, arriving there from the West was like travelling back to another century. Everything was different - streets, houses, gardens, people, costumes and household objects, as well as language, food, and manners. Within the battlemented walls of that ancient city a large measure of China's traditional culture still survived; the old ways had not yet been shattered by modern innovations; the devastating Japanese occupation was still to come; as for communists, they scarcely, if ever, entered people’s thoughts. Innumerable rays of the past splendours of the imperial capital continued to shed their light. With so much beauty lying about me, I was seldom tempted to venture beyond Peking's outer gateways, but now and then I would visit a lovely range of hills rising to the north-west of the city; and once I happened to pass a night there in a small Taoist temple that lay securely in a sheltered fold. It was autumn. The trees cascading down the hillside presented a gorgeous display of scarlet, crimson, copper, bronze and gold, interspersed with the dark-green foliage of ancient cedars noted for their silvery- white bark. The aged temple showed signs of neglect, but its mossy tiles and weathered grey-brick walls still resisted inclement weather after five whole centuries of existence. It was inhabited by a solitary recluse, a dignified figure clad in Taoist garb who looked about eighty. His lace was a network of wrinkles, his grey beard was flecked with white, but his movements had the grace and alertness one comes to expect of elderly Taoists, whose extraordinary exercises preserve health and youthful vigour for many decades. I admired his antique clothes - a long robe of bronze-coloured cloth with enormous flapping sleeves resembling the wings of butterflies, and a curious stiff hat from the centre of which protruded a topknot of grey hair secured by an elaborately carved peg, A pretty ten-year-old child, long-haired and wearing a sky-blue robe, appeared; it was impossible to determine whether it was a boy or a girl. This child served us with pale-green tea in thick earthenware bowls, and some saucers of pine kernels, melon seeds, and sweetmeats made of rice flour. My host, whose name was Ch'ing-t'an Hsien-jen, (the Immortal of the Limpid Pool) soon called for heated wine, which the child brought in a narrow porcelain jar placed in a bowl of warm water to maintain its temperature at a higher level than is common for Western-style wines. Yellowish-green in colour, the mild wine tasted delicately of herbs. At first our conversation followed the usual stilted lines, host and guest courteously requesting details about each other; but when he perceived I was eager to learn something of Taoism, the recluse became less formal. Between the first and second jars, he persuaded me to don a padded Taoist gown as a protection against the evening chill, and led me into the main courtyard where he showed me several curious objects, including a rockery composed of fantastically shaped stones brought by some long-departed emperor from close to the frontier of Burma. This cunningly fashioned landscape, complete with mountains, grottoes, pools and winding river, produced the illusion of a distant scene. Half-closing my eyes, I could imagine a great range of mountains with contours pleasingly grotesque. 'And this !' he said, pointing to a plinth on which stood an oblong basin of dull-coloured earthenware containing a landscape created on a truly minute scale ; clearly the work of a gifted artist, it was perfect in every detail. Idly I asked why the plinth was so tall and his answer plunged me into a world of fantasy. 'You see, it is not just an ornament, but the present dwelling of the Great Master Po Yun who was abbot here three hundred years ago. It would be disrespectful to place it closer to the ground.' 'You mean his spirit lives here ?' 'Certainly. His body, too. It is his whim to be tiny and he is generally invisible; but, as you see, the Immortal eats and drinks like humans, though very little and not often. He chose to assume the stature of a very small dragon-fly, so they say.’ I gazed at some of the tiny dishes and at three empty goblets no bigger than daisies, noting that one of the dishes contained finely chopped minced vegetables and mushrooms. Naturally I could not make myself believe in the existence of that minute, invisible being; but out of courtesy, bowed low before his ‘dwelling', thus winning from my host an approving smile. This fantasy was the one irrational feature of his otherwise admirably sane and lucid conversation. With Taoists one had rather to expect such anomalies - a sure taste for beauty and a capacity for profound mystical or philosophical thought mingled with the most puzzling ingredients. I was sure that the old gentleman was not joking but I have never known what he really meant. Shyness prevented me from pursuing the matter further. Leading me back indoors, he broached a second little jar of heated wine; its contents gave me the courage to ask him why he, too, bore the title, ‘Immortal’. 'My disciples are foolish,, he smiled. ‘They choose to think I shall live forever in this body. Such simple-minded people ! When the ancients spoke of the possible transmogrification of the human body, they were hinting in guarded terms at a much more subtle reality.' 'And yet, Your Immortality, I have heard that certain learned Taoists do believe they can transmogrify their mortal flesh into spirit able to fly through the air and endure for aeons.’ 'No doubt, no doubt !’ he answered, by no means disconcerted. 'It would not do to contradict them. I spoke thoughtlessly.’ He fell silent and presently we turned to other matters. 'Tell me,’ I said, when for the tenth or eleventh time we had completed the antique ceremony of rising from our seats, carrying the tiny wine-cups to our lips with the fingertips of both hands, quaffing them solemnly, bowing low to low to each other and resuming our seats, 'what exactly do Taoist recluses do ?’ 'Such a question !’ he roared in mock indignation. ‘Be very sure we do not.' 'Do not what ?’ For a moment I thought my understanding of his Chinese was at fault, but suddenly he laughed and said: ‘Wu-wei (non-action) is our cardinal principle. You must know that asking a Taoist what he does is like asking a Confucian how he sins !' 'I beg Your Immortality's pardon,’ I replied, joining in his laughter. 'Perhaps I should have asked what exactly it is that you do not ?' 'Much better my young friend. I like you. Chinese youths these days mostly treat us as if we were innkeepers with nothing better to occupy us than looking after travellers. I shall tell you a secret. We do as well as don't, but then, you see, it is a special Taoist kind of doing. Not to do at all would make a recluse as useless as a dead pine-tree. Do you know the meaning of the Sublime Tao ?' I nodded. 'The Sublime Tao is what we Westerners call Ultimate Reality. At least I think so. Is it not the totality of being, the beginning and end of all existence? From the Tao we come; to the Tao we go - something like that? ‘Something like that,’ he repeated. ‘You may be - forgive me – a barbarian, but you do apprehend a fragment of the meaning, which is more than can be said for those -noisy undergraduates from Tsinghua who visit these hills at weekends. Permit me to expound wu-wei. It only appears to mean “action rooted in not-ness”. What it really means is “action rooted in non-being”. And what is non-being ? It is the Great Non-Being, a name for the Sublime Tao which is the formless matrix of a myriad forms. As I interpret it, wu-wei simply means “action rooted in the Tao”. What we shun is calculated activity, which can never be spontaneous, harmonious, free !' His voice had taken on a liturgical solemnity and this lapse into a priestly role seemed to amuse him, for he smiled deprecatingly and went on more softly : ‘Activity in itself is not harmful, but it must be just an instinctive response to immediate needs. Calculation or self-interested forethought leads to demon-action. Only activity proceeding from a mind that resembles a calm, deep pool of stillness can be free from undesirable results. Therefore I rise two hours before dawn and sit in meditation until noon, cultivating perfect inner stillness. When no thought moves, I feel the pulsing of the Tao. Then I am one with the plants whose sap pulses through their leaves, one with the stars pulsing with the glowing energy of fire. Because my thoughts are stilled, the Tao flows through me, its movement unimpeded. My words and actions are a natural, uncalculated response to present circumstances. A tree growing in the shadow of a wall does not think “in order to live, I must bend my leaves towards the sunshine and drink the water with my roots". It does those things spontaneously. Its spontaneous activity proceeding from stillness fulfils its needs.' 'Does the Tao resemble Shang-Ti, the Supreme God of the Christians ?' 'Certainly not. The Tao does not declare : "Let this or that be so" or "I shall do thus and thus". Nor is it separate from spirits, people, animals, rocks or plants. It is not just the source of being, but the being of all beings, the fullness and the nothingness of all things. Acting spontaneously, exerting no will, it acts gloriously. By according with its action, I, who am eighty-three years old, may hope to live perhaps for another thirty years - another fifty even; but not many people attain that great age in their fleshly bodies. Flesh must die, for the Tao, though changeless, is ever changing and none of its myriad creations endures long.' 'Why then do Taoists think so much in terms of immortality?' 'By personal immortality is sometimes meant relative immortality, the ability to endure a few aeons in some bodily or spiritual form. What arc aeons in comparison with the everlasting Tao ? Only the Tao as Being-Non-Being is truly immortal; the entities it forms never cease to change. Their constituents must ultimately dissolve.' 'Could a Taoist achieve even relative immortality if he were living in Peking or some other great city ?' 'It would be more difficult. What is needed to prolong life even by a few decades is perfect serenity, the result of freedom from restriction. How is that possible in a city where man-made laws and man-made custom compel us to behave like demons ?' It had grown late. Before leading me to my bedroom, he offered to give me some yogic teaching in the morning, breaking his meditation to explain its principles. Such an opportunity was too rare to be missed, even though it entailed rising hours before dawn and though autumn nights in those hills were, by my standards, bitterly cold. When he came to call me, I was asleep on the hard wooden bed, wrapped in a cocoon of wadded quilts. Teeth chattering, I donned the robe he had lent me, throwing a quilt over it like a cloak. As for the Immortal, he seemed scarcely to notice the cold. Wearing nothing over his robe, which was but lightly padded, he led me to his own room, where the image of a youthful deity enthroned behind a simple altar gazed down on us. The painted eyes seemed fixed on mine with a disconcerting expression of faint surprise. Lighting incense and candles, my host signalled to me to join him in making three full prostrations. Then he stood chanting melodiously the words of a sacred text lying open on the altar. To mark the rhythm he tapped a mallet against a hollow block of wood identical with the wooden-fish drums used in Buddhist temples. When this short rite was finished, he ordered me to sit on his bed with a second quilt about my shoulders and made sure that I was comfortable. Taking up a position cross-legged on a cushion placed on the ground, he embarked on some curious breathing-exercises so that the ch'i (universal psychic vitality) would circulate freely through his body. At the beginning he made violent motions of the arms, his sleeves flapping like wings. The next stage consisted of a rotating movement made by the muscles of his abdomen; despite the cold, he lifted up his robe to reveal his stomach, which looked as if it might contain a writhing python. Presently he grew still and his breathing subsided until no sound was audible. Simultaneously all movements of his body ceased. To all appearances, I was alone with a corpse sitting upright on the floor. How long this endured, I do not know. Barely able to keep awake, I saw the room grow light, and presently noticed that his eyes, long shut, were open and fixed on me. 'So you see, my young friend, how it is done. The preliminary exercises were designed to induce circulation of the ch'i. Later, I grew calm and my breathing became imperceptible even to myself. Meanwhile, my consciousness was directed to my nostrils, to promote awareness of the rhythm of my breathing. Next I concentrated on the Mysterious Gate of the Square Inch, which lies midway between the eyes; there it normally stays unwaveringly until noon.' 'What do you feel at such times?' 'I have no feeling. Though bliss arises, it is not my bliss, but an attribute of the Tao shining through that ghost, my body.' 'And then?' 'What else ? Go now to have your breakfast. I shall re-enter absorption in the Tao and so remain until midday. If you are obliged to leave earlier, pray excuse my not seeing you off, for, when you come to think of it, I shall not be here.’ Dismissing me with a wave, he resumed his meditation' When the child came in to serve my breakfast of millet-porridge and pickled bean-curd, I was still doubtful whether it was a boy or a girl. In answer to my question, came a high-pitched giggle. 'A boy, of course. Can't you see ? Grandfather will laugh when I tell him.' 'So you are grandson to the Immortal of the Limpid Pool ! You must be proud.' 'Yes, yes. I'm the lucky one of the family. All my brothers and sisters go to school to learn nonsense, but Grandfather keeps me beside him to learn real things. I'm going to be an Immortal with a body of pure white weightless jade. I shall be able to fly like a bird - no, an airplane, all over the world.' 'Did your grandfather tell you that ?' 'Oh, no. Everyone says so, though. Grandfather just smiles when I ask him. He knows it's true, but he's afraid of my being proud, you know. Still, I'm a Taoist, so I'll never be proud. Pride's just silly. I shall love being able to fly, but then anyone could do the same if he had Grandfather to teach him - even a girl, I should think.' 'What do you know about the Tao ?' I asked with deep interest. 'The Tao ? Oh, the Tao is big, big, big.' He spread out his arms to show me. 'Everything you see or hear or touch has the Tao. It's everywhere - in me, in you. No, that's wrong. Grandfather says it is me and you. I can fly from here to the Dipper Star, but not get away from the Tao. Do you know what Grandfather said yesterday ?' 'What was that ?' 'Someone rode up here, you see, and his horse left its yellow droppings outside our gate. Grandfather was pleased when I asked if those droppings were the Tao. He called them beautiful. I said, "Grandfather, they stink," and he said, "Yes, Little Five, they stink of Tao." I was shocked, you know, but Grandfather says if I keep my nose clean, everything will smell as sweetly as flowers.' I grinned.'Why do you laugh at me ?' he asked indignantly. 'If Grandfather says so, it must be true. Perhaps your nose needs cleaning, too.' 'I’m sure it does, Little Five. If your grandfather became my teacher, I'd learn how to make it clean once and for all.' I left soon after breakfast, climbing further into the hills so as to reach a large Buddhist temple which was the real object of my journey. The sun-dappled ground was carpeted with leaves and the birds were chorusing Taoistic approval. Following the narrow pathway, I reflected on what I had learnt, already wondering whether certain aspects of Taoism could be woven into a non-Taoist's way of living, and very curious about the whole subject. * Visits to other Taoists followed; the more I came into contact with Taoist recluses, the more I found their beliefs to be an extraordinary mixture of lofty wisdom and what struck me then as laughable or even puerile fantasies. This is well illustrated by my meeting on Mount Nan Yeo with a certain Pien Tao-shih, and so I shall relate the story in some detail. Nan Yeo, most southerly of Taoism's Five Sacred Peaks, is in Hunan province. Monasteries and the cells of anchorites cling to its precipitous slopes in profusion; buildings on the upper slopes are, as often as not, veiled by mist and clouds or, as some would say, by the breath of dragons. While making for a celebrated temple about halfway to the summit, I lost my way; a thick white mist descended, causing me to take a wrong turn and follow an undulating path curving round to the cold north face of the mountain where habitations were sparse. Unlike the route I had diverged from, it led past no shrines or buildings, but was solitary and wild. Presently the mist deepened and I wondered uneasily whether I should find shelter for the night. Stories of bandits, wild beasts and demons came flooding into my mind, so that I was overjoyed to find that the path stopped short before a low grey wall. There was a moon-gate with panels of faded scarlet lacquer beneath an oblong board bearing in gold calligraphy the legend: ‘Yun Hai Tung (Grotto of the Sea of Clouds)'. I was just in time. One of the gate's two leaves stood slightly ajar, but already a Taoist greybeard was preparing to bolt it for the night. 'Ho there, Distinguished Immortal,' I panted. I was hoping to find shelter.' He pushed open the gate, and, peering at me curiously through the wisps of cloud, hurried forward to make me welcome with elaborate courtesy. Raising and lowering his clasped hands effusively, he addressed me in archaic manner. 'Welcome, sir. Welcome to such poor comforts as our humble dwelling can offer. Night is upon us. If you will deign to accept frugal meals of coarse vegetables and cold spring water, we shall endeavour to make your visit bearable for as long as you care to honour us with your illustrious company.' 'No, no, this humble person dare not put you to such trouble,' I answered politely, but a chilly rain was falling and I hurried towards the ancient wooden gates. Stepping over a high sill, I entered a courtyard with rows of one-storey dwellings to left and right and a medium-sized shrine-hall opposite the gate. The greybeard shouted to make my presence known and an elderly man hurried out of a doorway to receive me. Dressed in a simple robe of blue cloth, he wore a most peculiar hat, tall and rectangular, which hid his topknot completely. Despite his years, he possessed a certain youthful grace of movement and eyes of extraordinary brilliance. To my relief, he did not keep me standing in the icy rain exchanging compliments, but seized my hand and pulled me under the broad eaves, calling for someone to attend to the 'distinguished guest'. Later I discovered he was the Abbot. Meanwhile a couple of young boys, also in Taoist garb, came running out to lead me to a guest room. The hospitality of that hermitage, though less than luxurious, was heart-warming. My room, which adjoined the shrine-hall, was small, but it was furnished with heavy old wooden pieces, including a great bed boxed in on three sides and curtained on the fourth. I noticed a couple of wall-scrolls, one displaying fine calligraphy in the ancient seal-style, the other depicting an elderly sage apparently feeling quite at home, though seated on a cloud-girt rock. On the table near my bed stood a porcelain vase containing a few branches of some sort of fruit-blossom. One of the boys brought me a copper hand-basin of pleasantly hot water. Bowing low, he urged me to wash quickly, hinting that delay would mean keeping everybody from their dinner. As soon as I entered the refectory, eight or nine recluses converged upon the round table, insisting that I take the seat of honour facing the doorway; however, in view of my youth, etiquette required that I accept it only after making a great fuss, and so at last the Abbot seized my arm and literally forced me to sit where bidden. The food consisted of some five or six dishes; as they had certainly had no time to prepare anything special for an unexpected guest, it was clear that these recluses did themselves fairly well. Rice was not brought in until the close of the meal, as the serving lads kept refilling our wine cups from heated pewter containers, and it was a rule not to serve rice until all had finished drinking. From what I remember, there was little difference in the appearance of my hosts, except as regards age. All wore the traditional Taoist habit, but there was a pleasing variety of colour, and the Abbot, who had changed his strange hat for another with a hole at the crown) now displayed a hair-peg of heavy white jade. We drank a fair amount of the darkly yellow wine, but it was so mild that I felt no effect beyond a comforting mellowness. The food consisted largely of vegetables, but there were slivers of meat which could not have been the case in a Buddhist monastery, and the pumpkin soup, served in the vegetable's thick green rind, contained the flesh and bones of a whole chicken. Following the usual custom, my hosts kept apologizing for what they described as the execrable food and each time it was up to me to find new ways of declaring that it was a veritable banquet. It would have been bad manners to ask erudite questions at table; even so, the level of conversation revealed that these were not innkeeper-type recluses of a kind sometimes found in more accessible monasteries, but men well-versed in Taoist literary works. Indeed, my coming upon that little hermitage proved a great piece of luck. By the end of the meal I had decided to stay on for several days so as to learn more about the Tao – the Mysterious Womb of the Myriad Objects. It turned out that the Abbot was a serene but rather taciturn man; however, when I sought him out the following morning, he kindly sent for a relatively young colleague called Pien Tao-shih, whom he ordered to remain entirely at my disposal for the duration of my stay. My new mentor's cell was furnished with little more than the barest necessities, but I shall never forget it. To relieve the room's austerity, he had laid out a few treasures on the top of the bookcase, including a piece of stone shaped like one of those fantastic mountains in Chinese landscape paintings; this rested on a finely carved blackwood stand. There was also a small bronze ox fashioned of creamy jade, but what held my eye was the strangest kind of picture I had ever seen. Mounted elaborately on a strip of fine grey silk and brocaded rollers, it consisted of a vertical panel of off-white paper, completely blank. Watching my expression, Pien Tao-shih said smiling : 'No, it is complete. The best of paintings hanging from one’s wall becomes so familiar that one doesn't notice it for days on end and its beauty seems to wane. On this picture, I imagine whatever scene I choose. Today it happens to be a pine-shrouded waterfall; tomorrow I think I shall decide on a tortoise or a crane. On your last day here, there will be a portrait of you riding away on - what is it to be, a horse or a camel ?' 'An elephant !' I cried. 'Magnificent ! A snow-white elephant with pink eyes and a pale-grey tail. You will be wearing a purple robe with an exceedingly wide black hat and carrying a paper parasol.' ‘Thank you. I am eager to receive some teaching about the Tao. Before we get down to it, I wonder if you would care to show me the sights of your distinguished hermitage ?' He led me through the shrine-hall, an oblong building running the whole width of the courtyard. Grasses were sprouting from cracks between the .green tiles on its heavy upward-curving roof, which was supported on faded red pillars of wood. Three of the walls were of dark-grey brick: the fourth, which faced the courtyard, was composed of a long row of wooden doors, their upper halves latticed with translucent rice-paper. As only one of the doors stood open, the interior was gloomy. The three statues and their altars had a shabby look. In the centre was an effigy of Hsi Wang Mu (Royal Mother Residing in the Western Heaven), her gilded flesh shrouded in robes bedecked with seed-pearls. To her right was an effigy of Lu Tung-pin, a Taoist Immortal regarded as the hermitage's patron deity. His painted face, lightly bearded, looked calm and benign, unlike the fierce red face of Kwan-Ti, the deified warrior, enthroned on the left. Pien Tao-shih bowed perfunctorily to the effigy of Lu Tung-pin and we walked through a small back-door that led straight into the grotto. Here, too, it was gloomy. The water in a pool at our feet looked almost black. On the farther side were some rock-formations with niches containing demonic figures of mud-filled plaster in various stages of decay. Altogether the effect was dreary; yet, for a reason that escaped me, the grotto's atmosphere inspired a notable feeling of serenity. 'Is that surprising ?' inquired Pien Tao-shih. 'This is our meditation cave and has been so for centuries. Who knows how many gifted sages - Immortals even - have given it something of their peace ?’ Feeling chilly, we soon returned to his cell and one of the boys brought in a brazier of glowing charcoal complete with tripod and kettle. Pien served tea from a very plain but quite attractive old teapot which was never washed, so that its porous interior, encrusted with the deposits of many thousand brewings, gave even quite ordinary tea-leaves an exquisite flavour. When we were settled comfortably with our tea-cups, he talked and talked with a kind of gentle enthusiasm. Of the many things we discussed on that occasion and during the rest of my stay, I particularly remember the story of his life, which had already embraced many aspects of Taoism. His father, though deeply immersed in Taoist learning, had been strictly a Tao-chia, an upholder of Lao-tzu’s philosophy, who avoided all commerce with invisible beings, since to approach gods would be presumptuous and to approach demons, dangerous. Young Pien, however, had become intoxicated by the contents of the library in his ancestral home, which contained hundreds of treatises on magic, alchemy, exorcism and similar pursuits. At the age of fourteen, he had run away from home and implored the first man he met wearing Taoist robes to accept him as a pupil-servant. Unfortunately his new master had turned out to be a married man living at home with two wives and a brood of children, whom he supported in luxury by operating a shrine dedicated to an Ever-Rewarding Sky Dragon situated in the heart of the city. There he practised magic, divination and the concoction of medicinal potions for his clientele. 'The man was a charlatan?' Pien Tao-shih reflected. 'That could be so. In some ways undoubtedly, yet not altogether. He had made himself truly invulnerable to steel and poison. A charlatan could not do that. Also his charms and predictions worked when he really took pains with them for his wealthier clients. I disliked him only because he was unprincipled in perverting sacred knowledge for commercial gain.' Saving up his wages, young Pien had one day slipped away and travelled up the Yangtze River to one of the great temples built close to its banks. For a while he had been content there, living in a community of over a hundred recluses, some of whom were monks whereas others were married and went home to their families for a few months each year. The monastery had departments where esoteric studies were conducted - a system of medicine combining herbal remedies with magic charms, alchemy, the evocation and casting out of demons; various kinds of divination including the use of spirit-possessed human oracles and a very small department of chess where a game with three hundred and sixty pieces was taught. Some of his colleagues specialized in attaining psychic powers, but Pien was not very informative about this. 'It sounds a wonderful place,' I remarked. 'What persuaded you to leave it ?’ 'He looked surprised. 'You can see such things in most big monasteries, I suppose ; though, for an outsider, it might be different. Sincere followers of the Way are not fond of display and false ones soon cease to be impressive. I left because none of those things is important. Most of my colleagues were frittering away their time on the pursuit of trifles, don't you think ?' One day luck had come his way. A visiting recluse from his present hermitage had described his community as a congenial little band dedicated to the uninterrupted practice of Taoist yoga and meditation aimed at achieving healthy and serene longevity that would culminate in nothing less than immortality. Living on an unfrequented part of the mountain, they were visited by enough travellers and pilgrims to contribute to their support without constituting a continual distraction. 'And so I followed him here,' Pien concluded. 'It is a perfect life, you see. Living without women is difficult at my age; living with them is even worse. So some of us have reached a compromise, going off to Hengyang city for two or three months a year, but otherwise living as recluses and pursuing worth-while goals.' 'Isn't it expensive? You say you don't have many visitors.' 'Oh, you are wrong. On the Festival of Hsi Wang Mu, pilgrims come in their hundreds. It is true their donations are small, but then most of us have private incomes. At first I did some clerical work for the Abbot in return for my board and lodging, but presently my father died and I inherited a portion of his property with which I bought a permanent place in the community that leaves me free of such duties.' 'Can you summarize the beliefs, the philosophy of this community ? I mean, what is the theoretical basis of your yogic practice ?' 'Naturally we revere the teachings of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, ordering our lives accordingly. As you know, Lao-tzu’s Tao Ti Ching is the foundation of all. It teaches us to submit ourselves to nature's promptings, once we have learnt to distinguish them instinctively from self-will. And from Chuang-tzu I have learnt how to deal with needs as they arise and leave all else alone, quietly according with the Tao, whose spotless, undifferentiated unity suffuses all. The key to inner serenity lies in three words: x"Make no distinctions."' Pien Tao-shih tried his best to instruct me in the essentials of the higher Taoist philosophy, hoping to make it clear that the Tao, besides being the matrix, the plenum of the myriad phenomena, is also the Way in the sense of a path. Whether because my knowledge of Chinese was inadequate or my powers of perception too poor, I could scarcely follow him. While dealing with such subjects, he struck me as an unusually erudite scholar; yet when the conversation turned to his conception of immortality he seemed to descend to an altogether different plane. There were moments when I could barely hold back from affronting him with laughter ! 'Immortality', he announced forthrightly, ‘has nothing in common with Buddhist notions of reincarnation, although many Taoists do confuse them. It means exactly what it says - no death, at least not for many aeons. I myself fully intend to transmogrify my flesh into a shining adamantine substance, weightless yet hard as jade. That is the only sure way; for, suppose we were - like so many recluses - to aim at creating a spirit-body to inhabit after death, imagine the frantic scurryings of the ghosts of those who died in the mistaken belief of having completed that difficult task in time ! How they would rush about, seeking in vain some vehicle to save their hun and p'o (higher and lower souls) from gradual dissolution into nothingness ! How pitiful ! Whereas, by" transmogrifying my present body, I shall leave no room for error.’ Literal belief in transmogrification? In the twentieth century? I could scarcely credit my ears. To doubt the loftiness of Pien Tao-shih's intelligence was no more possible than to impugn his sincerity and dedication; but surely a ten-year-old school-boy would have sense enough to ridicule the notion of transmuting flesh and blood into a physical substance able to exist for aeons ! Was it possible that poor Pien had such unswerving faith in some tattered old books and deluded teachers as to accept at its face- value this incredible interpretation of whatever the sages had really meant by immortality ? At any rate he continued : 'Our Abbot, the Immortal of the Onyx Cleft, and most of the recluses here seek spiritual immortality. They practise the inner alchemy in order to fashion spirit-bodies that will be perfected before they die; whereas my own dear teacher, the Dawn Cloud Immortal, is instructing two or three of us in the secret of secrets.' Eyes shining, voice betraying reverential awe, he bent forward and whispered: 'Within another three years or so, the transmutation of our flesh will be complete !' Hastily I dropped my eyes; yet, though sensing my scorn, he met it not with anger but with pity. 'Oh, why can you not believe, you and the rest of them ? Why, why ? On what grounds ? We have sacred texts that set forth clearly the alchemy of fleshly transmutation, and everyone knows that Lu Tung-pin, the patron of this hermitage, achieved it. Then why not me - or you ?' Fortunately Pien, like all true Taoists, was incapable of being disgruntled. Gazing at me fondly, he hurried on: 'Dear friend, stay longer on this mountain and free yourself from those worldly obscurations that have, if I may say so, dulled your mind. Mount Nan Yeo is a strange and holy place. The air is impregnated with the effulgence of legions of accomplished sages who have lived among its peaks and grottoes since time began. There are times when you can sense a palpable effulgence emanating from them. By rare good fortune, you may even meet one, for they occasionally appear to travellers in the guise of mortals. Surely you have noticed something of the mountain's atmosphere ? No streams in the world are so limpid as ours, no rocks so evocative of mystery. Standing alone of an evening on these sacred pathways, you can feel the pulsing of the Tao. From our teacher, we learn secrets once known to every living being, until man by his rude busying and bustling disturbed the natural harmony. Stay here and clear your perceptions of the ugly nonsense taught in schools and cities ! Learn to see things in perspective . You will admit that a tiny seed you can barely see when held in the palm of your hand has the potentiality of becoming a great tree; is transmutation of the flesh a greater marvel ? Free your mind of useless calculated thought and I shall petition our patron, the Immortal Lu Tung-pin, to instruct you in a dream.' 'Pien Tao-shih,' I answered gravely, 'I doubt if the Immortal will bother with a barbarian from the West, but if he does deign to visit me in a dream I shall of course be highly honoured.' At this point, a serving-boy came in to call us to the midday meal. Afterwards, as we were strolling across the courtyard, I remarked: 'This morning, while speaking of many things, you mentioned alchemy. Do Taoist sages really practise the transmutation of base metal into gold ? Some say the true alchemy is something more subtle.' His smile broadened. 'So even you strangers from the West know the gold-cinnabar pill is not a drug. Wonderful !' Full of enthusiasm, he hurried me back to his cell, where he produced from among some piles of books kept in ivory-hasped boxes a ragged volume finely printed on flimsy paper. It bore the title Ts'an T'ung Ch'i, which I took to mean something like The Ts'an Agreement or perhaps The Agreement of Three. Below it, was printed the subscription True Original Text of the Taoist Immortal Wei Po-yang of the Han Dynasty, from which I calculated that the text had been in existence for close on two thousand years. Leafing through its pages, I found I could not make head or tail of its contents. 'What is it ?' I asked. 'It is written in a cryptic language. Call it a book of philosophy or of ideal polity and you will not be wrong. Call it a detailed manual of alchemy and you will not be wrong; everything is there for the mixing of the elements that produce the gold and cinnabar pill. But look at it another way and you will see that it is a case of White Tiger and Green Dragon.' My blank look seemed to disappoint him, for he said: 'Perhaps I should not tell you. After all, you know less than I thought.' Falling silent for a while, he presently announced repentantly: 'White Tiger is lead, but also semen. Green Dragon is cinnabar, but also the woman's sexual fluid.' My comical astonishment restored his good humour. Metaphorically my hair was standing on end. Nothing I had read or heard so far had prepared me for such a disclosure. In Buddhist monasteries, though none of the monks would be likely to share the attitude of those Christian clergy who see sexual joy as positively sinful and allow it only grudgingly, even to married couples, it was always taken for granted that chastity is essential for those dedicated to rapid spiritual progress. 'The lead and the cinnabar', Pien continued, 'must be properly blended. Their product is not literally a pill, as you seem to know, but a kind of tiny foetus that grows within the male (or female) recluse's body. Rightly compounded, it has miraculous properties. How old would you say I am ?' 'Rising thirty ?' 'I am forty-five, and no one knows the age of my teacher whom you have seen and probably took for a man still in his early sixties.' Pien Tao-shih did not seem capable of lying; so I was impressed. 'You see ? I have been on the Way a mere twenty years, and already -- ! The gold-cinnabar pill is the great preserver and rejuvenator of youth. Doubling man's life-span is the least of its properties. One who can find devout ladies to help him, especially if he embarks upon the task while young, can quite easily achieve transmogrification. You must know the old legend of the Royal Western Mother, how she attained the stature of a goddess at the cost of a thousand young men's lives ? Unwittingly she deprived them of their entire stock of vital energy. That, if true, was monstrous. But male recluses need not be deterred by compassion for their female partners, since a woman's supply of vital essence is inexhaustible.' All I could gather from Pien's explanation was that the sexual yoga involved conducting sexual intercourse as often as possible within the limits of special times and seasons of the year, using a technique based on carefully numbered thrusting movements and rigid abstinence from orgasms. Without permitting his own yang-fluid to leave his body, the adept must cause orgasm after orgasm in his partner, so as to absorb her yin-fluid and, by uniting the yin and yang, create a sort of cell or embryo within himself ; and there was something which had to be drawn up to the top of the head. It would have been wrong to think of Pien Tao-shih as a laughable character. He had mistaken the nature of the final goal, confusing mystical union or spiritual immortality with literal transmogrification; but I did not suppose his devout practice would necessarily prove fruitless. Of those Taoist recluses who, at a very advanced age, possessed extraordinary strength and vigour, there was no means of knowing what proportion of them, if any, had achieved this result by sexual alchemy rather than by other means. Nor can Pien Tao-shih be reasonably accused of licentiousness. Nothing, I am certain, could have been further from his mind than mere physical satisfaction. He was joyful because he believed he had found a yoga that would surely lead to the transmogrification for which he longed. Before leaving the hermitage, I plucked up courage to ask on which part of the mountain the recluses housed their female partners. Pien's eyes shone with laughter. 'No, no, there's nothing like that. The local peasants would think us devils and have the authorities imprison us all, don't you think ? I am married, you see. The Abbot sends me back into the world during certain months every year to enable me to practise night and day. My wife co-operates to the best of her ability, realizing that pious girls, happy to devote their lives to donating energy to recluses, are rare these days. I did not really understand much of this, nor did I pursue the matter until some years later. Towards the end of my visit, there occurred what seemed to me a mildly extraordinary incident. The Immortal Lu Tung-pin appeared to me in a dream as Pien Tao-shih had promised. Unfortunately, though the dream was both vivid and long, by the time I saw Pien, I could recall no more than one brief fragment. This was of a handsome lightly bearded youth, easily recognizable from the statue in the shrine- hall, greeting me with a burst of laughter. His gaiety had proved infectious. I, too, had burst out laughing. Though unable to recall what language we conversed in, I was left with a clear recollection of a few seemingly inconsequential words. 'You have come,' he said. 'Yes, yes, but how did I get here ?' 'It doesn't matter, does it? Especially as you ought not to be here at all.' Again our laughter exploded and then he added: ‘It’s simple, isn’t it ? Everything seen from here is simple ! My advice is to take the longer route.’ Before breakfast I ran to Pien Tao-shih in great excitement and asked for his interpretation, only to discover how little I remembered of the dream. Reproachfully, he strove to think out what the Immortal's advice had referred to, but in vain. The most sensational moments of my visit resulted directly from that dream. Early in the morning on the day before I left, Pien, looking at once secretive and gay, suggested a walk. The rain and mist of the last few days had cleared and a watery sunshine pierced the white clouds surrounding the peak; but his choice of route quickly dispelled any lingering supposition that the weather had anything to do with our expedition. Instead of making for one of the interesting hermitages, shrines and temples on the other faces of the mountain, he kept to a steep path overgrown by weeds and nettles, that led straight upwards. Presently we emerged on a broad ledge sheltered by rocks which really did resemble what he described as living beings emerging from the uncreate, though personally I should have called those beings monsters. With some imagination, one could see the rocks slowly writhing in strange contortions from which the heads and limbs of these monsters were imperceptibly emerging. Turning a corner, we came upon a small hollow where stood a solitary pavilion, dilapidated yet seemingly inhabited, for smoke swirled from a lean-to adjoining the main structure. 'Dear friend,' announced Pien portentously, 'you are about to behold a youth already regarded as an Immortal – Hsuan-men Hsien-jen (Fairy of the Mysterious Portal).' Among Taoists, the title rendered Fairy or Immortal may generally be taken to imply a degree of wishful thinking, and so I was quite unprepared to meet a truly extraordinary being. An elderly servant, running from the lean-to kitchen, ushered us into the pavilion which, though it comprised but one room, surprisingly contained no bed - just a heavy square table, a few chairs and many shelves of books. Facing the door was a shrine enthroning a benign deity whom I could not identify. As we entered, a youth rose gracefully from a meditation cushion before the shrine to bid us welcome with the antique courtesy to which I was growing accustomed. By the time I had finished returning his elaborate bows, half-ashamed of my untutored awkwardness. I was, as it were, caught up in a dream. The youth, whom I judged to be about eighteen, was perhaps the most beautiful human being I had ever encountered. To see him was to love him. I doubt if there was anything sensual in this strange attraction; I had no inclination to touch or embrace him, just a tangible joy in his presence and a longing to win his approbation. It was a feeling not far removed from worship. Smiling charmingly, he waved to us to be seated and, while the servant was preparing and serving a pot of very delicate green tea, we exchanged the inevitable Chinese preliminary courtesies - name, age, place of birth, profession, etc.; whereupon Pien Tao-shih, fearing that our host would be too modest to talk of his own achievements, intervened with a recital of some of the young man's austerities, which included never touching flesh or wine, never lying down but passing the nights seated upon his meditation cushion - during which he slept not more than two or three hours in an upright position - and undergoing rigorous physical yogas. Gradually the conversation drifted elsewhere, leaving me to enjoy the role of fascinated listener, and so I was able to study the youth at my leisure. His face was exceptionally pale and there were deep shadows under his eyes, but these marks of his austerities added to rather than detracted from his beauty. The more I gazed, the more I came under his spell and was dismayed by the prospect of having to part from him. Being in his company was more than a pleasure; it was a source of warmth and joy. Presently Pien observed : 'Here in the presence of the Fairy of the Mysterious Portal, does the goal of immortality seem so utterly unattainable ?' The question was embarrassing because I did not grasp the connection and, in any case, had by no means changed my mind about the folly of seeking transmogrification. The youth sat regarding me with lively interest as though eager to hear my views. Though Pien had given him no explanation, I felt sure that this strange young man fully understood my state of mind. 'Frankly, yes, Pien Tao-shih. You cannot mean that the - the Fairy of the Mysterious Portal is very ancient or has already achieved fleshly transmutation !' Pien looked disappointed, but the youth laughed delightedly. ‘No, no, dear friend from beyond the seas. I am exactly what I seem. Born in the Year of the Ox, I have still to reach my twentieth birthday. But I must not waste your time. You have come to consult the oracle.' Completely at a loss, I stared at him blankly until Pien put in quickly: 'I have not told our visitor about your powers, but it happens he has need of them.' Glancing across at me he added; 'The Fairy of the Mysterious Portal is an infallible oracle. Unlike other oracles, his attainments are so high that our patron, Lu Tung-pin, communes with him directly. Since you were so remiss as to forget your dream, I decided to bring you here, although as a rule we avoid troubling the Fairy by allowing strangers to approach him. Were his powers generally known, he would be importuned by crowds night and day.' 'Please, please do not trouble,' I said anxiously. 'I would much rather not impose myself.' The marvellously sweet smile expanded as the youth replied: 'You, a guest from a distant land, have been gracious in coming to this poor hut to afford me the pleasure of your company. Since I have no suitable gift to offer, I beg you to let me be of some service. What was the dream vouchsafed by the Immortal ?' It was as though he had read Pien's mind. The recluse now related the remembered fragment of my dream. The youth's smile faded. 'Dear friend, we cannot presume to inform the Immortal that his message has been forgotten ! Such a thing could not happen once in a thousand years. It would be best for me to say you have come to express your gratitude for his condescension. It is possible his reply will enlighten us.' So it was arranged. We took our leave immediately, promising to return after evening rice. At the appointed time, Pien and I, donning thick robes, slipped out into the cold darkness, A gibbous moon riding high among the clouds gave but little light as we clambered up the rocky pathway; thorns tore at my legs and several times I slipped, sending a shower of earth and pebbles clattering down the slope. Coming to the place of monsters, I felt glad of Pien's company; in that faint light, the rocks seemed more than ever like fearsome creatures struggling to emerge from a cold grey mass. Instead of going to the pavilion, we climbed to the rim of a kind of rock-bowl situated some distance above it. In the centre lay a broad, flat stone surmounted by what I took to be an image of a deity depicted in an attitude of meditation; but it proved to be the Fairy of the Mysterious Portal himself, sitting motionless as the rock beneath him. Suddenly spots of fire appeared and something moved in the darkness beside me. Startled, I grasped Pien's arm, but it was only the old servant. Silently he pointed to a heavy bronze tripod placed in front of his master. Clearly we were expected to pay our respects. Respects to whom ? The Fairy of the Mysterious Portal ? Or the invisible being with whom he sought communion ? It was an eerie thought. Following my friend up to the tripod, I watched him plant the incense-sticks in a mound of ash and bow to the earth three times; then he stood aside, motioning me to do the same. Thanks to my long robe, I imagined I would look reasonably dignified as I performed this ancient rite, but its skirts almost caused me to fall ignominiously on my face. Somehow I managed to do what was expected, struggling not to appear ridiculous. Afterwards, as I stood gazing at the motionless figure, a lovely serenity overwhelmed me. Not knowing what to expect, yet feeling it might well be moving, I did not regret having quitted the warmth and comparative comfort of the hermitage. When Pien took my hand and led me off behind some rocks, I felt bitterly disappointed and begged him to allow me watch whatever was going to happen; but, for some reason, my pleading inspired him to drag me still further away. Even so, we were still within earshot of the high, pure notes of a voice intoning an ancient hymn of impressive beauty. Never had I heard a voice or melody so sweet. Even the Fairy's servant) who must have been long accustomed to such lovely rites, shared our rapture. Peace and serenity shed their balm like moonlight flooding the landscape from a clear autumn sky. I had closed my eyes, the better to allow those exquisite sounds to float into my mind when, all of a sudden, I felt a pang of dread. A moment later the song was cut off amidst harsh, discordant laughter. A prolonged silence followed, during which my companions stood as though petrified. Presently a dialogue began, the youth's sweet voice alternating with the deep threatening tones of some intruder who seemed to be whipping himself into a fury. The marvellous peace had been swallowed up in an atmosphere murky with evil, and my being was invaded by an animal-like perception of danger. 'What is it ?' I whispered, wondering why we had not tried to run to the youth's assistance. Instead, Pien and the servant, shouting to me to keep close to them, began running and leaping down the mountain, away from the rock-bowl and straight towards the young man's lonely dwelling. Soon I was breathless and stumbling at every step, whereas my Taoist companions seemed able to pick their way effortlessly past even the most difficult obstacles. For one sickening moment, I thought some dangerous pursuer was close upon us; but it proved to be the youth himself, running swiftly and smoothly, as though his feet were but skimming the ground. Somehow I sensed that, though an interruption as dreadful as it was unexpected had most certainly occurred and had perhaps endangered the young man's life, he alone was untouched by panic; that, far from fleeing whatever evil threatened, he had joined us to give the feeling of comfort and protection which his presence immediately conferred. On reaching his pavilion, I made to follow him inside, but Pien was still in a state of consternation and, scarcely, sparing time for some hurried farewells, he pulled me away. Once again, we were running and slithering downward as fast as he could make me go. It was not until we were safely through the hermitage gates that he regained reasonable composure and embarked on profuse apologies, begging me not to allow one dreadful incident to spoil the happy memories of my visit. 'You see, you - that is to say all of us - might have - but, forgive me, it is worse than imprudent to speak of such matters. Please, please put this evening out of mind before you leave tomorrow.' Burning with curiosity, I begged in vain for an explanation; the harder I pressed him, the more his distress increased. Had I been able to prolong my stay, perhaps I should have received an answer in course of time. As it was, to this day I have no idea what caused our headlong flight. It would be easy to attribute it to the sudden appearance of a ruffian who posed a physical threat, but a conviction of our having been threatened by a much more terrible and impalpable evil remains vividly in my mind, though whole decades have passed since then. Besides, it is impossible to believe that fear of mere physical violence could have affected Pien as it did, to say nothing of the servant. Undoubtedly they would have rushed to aid the strange youth who inspired such love even in the hearts of newcomers. To my mind, the explanation is so fantastic as to invite ridicule; therefore I prefer to maintain a Taoistic silence. The following morning, Pien Tao-shih kept a promise made on the day of my arrival. Taking me into his cell, he pointed to the blank wall-scroll and described in great detail the painting with which he had now mentally endowed it. My white elephant had its back to him, but its head was turned as though watching him out of the corner of its eye. Its tail hung down disconsolately. I, its rider, was enveloped in a purple robe that descended to my ankles. Only the back of my head was visible beneath the wide black hat he had decided I should wear. An open fan fluttered in my hand and on its leaves were inscribed the words: ‘Thousand-league distance, friendship illimitable.' Pien Tao-shih looked sadly forlorn as, standing deferentially behind the senior recluses, he joined them in bidding me farewell. The rocky path leading down from the hermitage was now slippery and deeply puddled. Thinking fondly of the elephant, I wished it had been real. *

Nice analogy. It reminded me of a similar kind of idea that came to me several years ago when I found myself wondering how it is that , (and here I assume this is a common experience for all of us),.... that if there's some question that my mind keeps returning to, over and over, like a dog worrying a bone trying to find a way into the marrow at its centre,.... how is it that the answer one day will suddenly just pop out at me ? From a book I may happen to pick up, a fragment of overheard conversation, an advert on a billboard glimpsed as I drive past. It can come from anywhere. But it inevitably comes, and it's arrival is most often sudden and unexpected. One day an analogy arrived in my thoughts, that perhaps the process was very like what a potter experiences every time he makes a vessel on his wheel. As soon as he's finished the form of the pot,... he has simultaneously formed the space inside it. Perhaps similarly,.... if we spend a great deal of time and effort trying to formulate precisely some question that means a great deal to us,.... perhaps once we have formed the question perfectly, unknowingly we have also formed the answer, which is the space inside precisely filling the outer form that our question has made. Maybe then, we should focus our attention on understanding as perfectly as we can, the nature and form of the questions that plague us. Having done so, perhaps we can then relax. Because the answers will, soon enough, appear without effort.

* Nice thought. As always in life, there's us 'mini-thinkers' who, in our spare time find ourselves drawn to wonder about the nature of our existence. And then there's the A-Team members who know, live, and breath the answers to the questions we're still trying to formulate. So it goes. Could your well-expressed thoughts be put any more perfectly than this : * Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion. The Dalai Lama

Only you're NOT 'beating your heart.' Surely, your heart is 'beating you ?'

It's purely semantics whatever we choose to call the 'thing',... 'Life', the 'Tao', 'Buddha Mind', 'God', 'Universal Consciousness', etc. But if we are the type of person who is drawn to this kind of model in our attempts to make sense of this experience of "consciousness", or, of "living-our-life",.... then it seems to me that we are also inescapably and unwillingly drawn towards a logical position which our mind's nature always automatically rejects. That is,... if the Tao is EVERYTHING, (or, the Whole, as you chose to call it),.... then how would it ever be possible for us to do anything which is NOT ALSO simply part of the Tao ? And therefore 'right' ? The limited perceptions that you and I and every other living being has within our tiny corners of the Tao, (i.e. whether we like or dislike what's happening, accept or rebel against it, etc),.... are they not also simply part of this same Tao ? And therefore of no more, or no less, importance than the colour of shirt that we each happen to be wearing at this moment, or the type of car our next-door neighbour drives ? Isn't everything equally, the same unfolding of Tao ?

* My intuition tells me that you're confusing the tail with the dog here. I feel that life is 'doing us',... I don't think it's a question of 'us doing life', (though it certainly appears that way.) But as you know, appearances are very often deceptive. To every person in the world, it clearly appears that the sun rises in the east, travels across the sky, and sets in the west. That 'sensory perception' is universal. Perhaps, so too with this idea of me, or you, or Kurt, living our life 'rightly', or 'wrongly',... as you put it. *

* "Plato said that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?" Kurt Vonnegut *

* Luxury ! You try to tell that to the young people of today and they won't believe you. *

* An unlikely comment to come from an ex-soldier. If you'd voiced an opinion like that while you were still fighting for Uncle Sam,... methinks you never would have got promoted beyond potato peeling duties. *

* You simply CANNOT drop in a line like that, and then skedaddle ! It's clearly against the Marquis of Queensbury Rules. C'mon. Share with us a bit of the juicy details here. It's all in the past, you're among friends here, and moreover, completely anonymous,... what have you got to lose ? Think of it as just chucking one of the old skeletons out from a dusty closet somewhere in the corridors of your mind. This might even be the LAST OBSTACLE separating you from full and complete enlightenment !! *

* Two threads with the same enigmatic title, (in the way that all forms of insanity are enigmatic). Is this just a shot in the dark in your struggles to be 'different' ? *

* Two threads with the same enigmatic title, (in the way that all forms of insanity are enigmatic). Is this just a shot in the dark in your struggles to be 'different' ? *

. Wonderfully refreshing response. Thank you very much, Amoyaan. I'll definitely be checking this geezer out over the next few days ! .

* Amoyaan, Thank you for an exceptionally thorough and absolutely fascinating description of a spiritual path that is clearly bringing you a great deal of satisfaction. You've taken a great deal of time and care, and not got yourself personally 'worked up' about any of my sometimes, 'in-your-face' way of expressing myself. I guess my lack of consideration can be a bit hard to take for many people,... but to me, trying to find genuine connections in an internet chat room, (where everyone is invisible and living under a false name), calls for unusual tactics to try and gain some idea of where one's interlocutor is genuinely coming from. I know from much personal experience over years in various spiritual chat rooms,,.... that the protective cocoon of invisibility tends to bring out a bit of the puffed-up, soap-box orator in me. (But I feel safe in assuming that I am NOT alone in this Jekyll and Hyde split between chat room persona versus real-life 'me') Anyway, I find myself quite intrigued by your explanation and now surprisingly curious about Vedanta. I see from your profile that you live in Scotland. I am just below the border in Cumbria, so probably not that many miles separate us. You said your teacher, James Swartz, you find to be quite an exceptional example of the what sincere Vedanta practice can lead to. Does he teach in Scotland ? To the uninitiated ? Or does he just have a small group of dedicated practitioners ? Do you have any internet links to his teachings so that I can a bit of a shufty ? Once again, thanks for a most entertaining explanation *