The Rider

 I'm not sure where I discovered Tim Krabbé's wonderful little window into the world of high level amateur cycle racing.   I do remember it was suggested as a classic example of short fiction, and I can see why.  Krabbé, a journalist and former chess player in addition to a serious cyclist, narrates his ride in the Tour de Mount Aigoual.  It's a fairly short but incredibly hilly road race in Southern France that has occasionally featured in the Tour de France.  

This may not sound like a great setup for a story.  Just a bunch of fucking amateurs moving their feet in circles for hours.  But Krabbé manages to make it exciting and entertaining the whole way.  Of course it's a sports broadcast of sorts.  Who broke away from who and what the racer's strategies were.  This part alone is surprisingly entertaining, to the point where it almost makes you want to watch cycling on TV while eating a baguette and shouting allez!  But Krabbé's narration is also constantly interrupted with stories drawn from his own past and the history of professional cycling.  In other words, precisely the knowledgeable commentary you **wish** sports broadcasters provided.  

The really amazing thing, however, is the way the writing style captures the type of thoughts one has on a long ride.  I haven't raced a bicycle since I had one with streamers and the prize was bragging rights about who got to the end of the driveway.  But I have done some long riding and noticed how thoughts get incredibly short and repetitive when you're working hard, but then can sometimes take crazy flight into delirious daydream when the pace lets up a bit.  It's a real *tour de force* that you can read faster than he rode it.

The Gambler

This short novel was packaged alongside The Double in Pevear and Volokhonsky's new translation. Unlike The Double, this one was written smack in the middle of Dostoevsky's most creative period, which included classics like Notes from Underground, The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment. Unfortuantely, The Gambler is nowhere near as interesting as any of those.  It tells us the story of young Russian employed as a tutor by a wealthy family passing time in "Roulettenburg".  Alexi Ivanovich is tormented by his doomed love for one of the young ladies in this cortege, and, in an attempt to help her out of some monetary difficulties, takes to gambling.  Unfortunately, he wins.  This gets him a lot of money at first -- although not the girl he wants --and a lot less money later, as his beginner's luck inevitably turns on him.  In the end, it is a novel about addiction, though for the bulk of it that addiction is to unrequited love, and not specifically to gambling.  Apparently, Dostoevsky saw them as equally corrosive.

The Ministry of Time

A friend recommended this new sci-fi novel from an author I'd never heard of.  Its a breezy, entertaining, forgettable, and not really science fiction even.  In fact, it's more of a romance novel with some light time travel grafted onto it.  While the writer is perfectly competent at making the pages turn (no mean feat), there didn't seem to be much intellectual substance to the novel beyond some vague implications that the British Empire might not have been wholly a good and glorious thing.  

The plot centers around the way that 'expats' can fall in love with another one simply because they feel out of place in their new society.  The narrator is a really quite helpless and annoying first generation British woman whose mother is a Cambodian refugee.  She falls in love with a mid-19th-century British explorer who was plucked from arctic starvation by the titular Ministry's new time machine.  The past, it seems, is a foreign country.  But a sexy one!

The Magic Mountain

Sometimes, the great books just aren't. I found Thomas Mann's classic pretty underwhelming.  It's long.  It's kinda boring plot wise -- the narrator at one point evens calls it an attempt to tell the story of time passing.  It features too many epic philosophical debates between a humanist and a Jesuit that end up sounding like just so much sophomore dorm room bullshit.  And it's filled with interminable descriptions of the way the snow glistened and her eyes looks and the exact dimensions of the latest stereo system.  

Perhaps, in its defense, we can imagine the way it may have spoken to its moment when it was published in 1924.  The novel is set almost entirely in a Swiss sanatorium before the outbreak of WW1.  It describes an idyllic world of 'illness' completely removed from the 'healthy' goal driven "flatlands" of Germany, where our hero Hans Catorp spend years on end recovering from even a hint of tuberculosis and other maladies of the age.  In other words, it depicts a seemingly endless and meaningless pause in the 'real' life of the world below, a sort of aristocratic nihilism where the values of discipline, productivity, and efficacy no longer have the same import.  When the madness of war gradually intervenes in its final pages, the question of what is 'sick' and what 'healthy' takes on a new poignancy.  I can only imagine that in Weimar Germany this may have struck a chord we can no longer hear.

The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti

This translation of "A Mahayana Scripture" by Uma Thurman's more famous dad fits into the recent penchant I've had for exploring related spiritual traditions via things sitting on the shelf at the cat bookstore.  I believe it caught my eye because at one point I started the Michael Taft & M.C. Owens lecture series (before finding M.C. Owens intial overview a bit long-winded).  It's the first Mahayana scripture I've read other than the Heart Sutra.  And I guess it confirms me as 'Theravadan', at least for the moment, because I didn't find it particularly approachable or revelatory.

In fact, it leads me to reiterate the same question I asked in the case of Tantra Illuminated -- if the philosophy is so simple, why is its exposition so ... gaudy.  The basic idea is so profound and straightforward that it is almost totally summed up in the five short pages of Chapter 9, "The Dharma-Door of Nonduality".  ALL PHENOMENA ARE EMPTY.  Thank you for you attention to this matter.  And yet this scripture has an elaborate literary structure that spans multiple universes and involves uncountably large contingents of boddhisattvas doing various magic tricks.  On top of that, it rather condescendingly uses all the Buddha's 'Hinayana' disciples as whipping boys to illustrate the superiority of the Mahayana path.  I get that all this is supposed to expand our mind in trans-rational ways, and there is doubtless a profound teaching in that.  But I simply don't have the background to find this stuff helpful.  I think I better stick with the Early Buddhism I'm familiar with and that makes sense to me.

Tantra Illuminated

A couple of years ago I read Christoph Wallis' translation of and commentary on the Recognition Sutras.  It was an interesting glimpse to Kashmiri Shaivism, a nondual branch of what we now call hinduism.  So when I saw his earlier introduction to the broader scope of tantric teachings, of which Shaivism is a particular lineage, floating about my used bookstore, I figured I should expand my mind a little.  I found this book less well written and less interesting than the Recognition Sutras, but it was still worth getting a little fuller picture of this tradition.

The book's subtitle, "The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition" also turns out to be its organizational principle.  The first part contains a long discussion of nondual philosophy, including a set of lists to rival even the Buddhist list obsession -- 36 tattvas, 5 acts of God, 4 levels of the world, 5 states of Awareness, etc ...  This was all interesting enough, but ultimately feels to me like just another arbitrary metaphysical construct. Certainly, part of this response is simply because, right now, I find myself more interested in the marked contrast between this philosophical apparatus and the Buddha's refusal to even engage these metaphysical speculations.  But there's also a coherent intellectual objection here that I first formulated in the context of people talking about Dzogchen (a system which Wallis suggests is extremely similar to Kashmiri Shaivism).  If everything, including ourselves, is really just an emanation of a single divine energy, why are there so many different gods and practices and lists involved?  Compared to Theravadan practices and philosophy, the Tantric world is incredibly complex.  I understand that it's more of a lay tradition, not aimed mainly at monastics.  And I understand that this naturally means it is a less renunciate path, more open to the beauty and complexity of everyday life.  But one would naively think that the practices which fit with what Wallis calls a "nondual monism" would be more like shikantaza, and less like multi-part meditations with elaborate visualization of deities and channels.  To be clear, I think this objection is simply the beginning of conversation, not some sort of invalidation of these traditions.  I still find the contrast between core belief and philosophical articulation notable.

The second, more interesting, part of the book explains the history of Tantra.  Wallis is not merely a spiritual practitioner, but also an academic, so he does a great job of situating this tradition with the context of medieval India, distinguishing it's various flavors, and tracing some of its later influences.  For example, it's remarkable to learn that we can trace the origins of hatha-yoga back to a much corrupted version of tantric practices.  It was also kinda interesting to get such a succinct overview of the way various branches of the tradition can be organized into a left-right spectrum defined by how seriously they take the concept of nonduality.  I personally might have wished for more detail concerning the way that Buddhism clearly influenced these branches of Vedanta, as well as more insight into how their influence in turn percolated back into Vajrayana, and especially Tibetan, Buddhism.  But this was probably beyond what could be put into one volume. 

The final part contains a quick overview of tantric practices.  There's not really enough detail to start doing these practices on one's own, though this is clearly by design.  Wallis feels like anyone interested enough in this way of seeing the world should pursue a relationship with a qualified teacher.  So we really just get a flavor for some of the pranayama and visualization practices that were central to almost all the tantric lineages.  There's even a section regarding what you might call "insight" meditation -- looking at the world in ways that loosen our self-centered concepts and thus bring us into contact with some larger field, interpreted here as divine.  

On The Way To The Far Shore

I've found all of Leigh Brasington's books so straightforward and useful that at this point I'd probably read anything he wrote.  But I was actually particularly keen to go thorough his new commentary on the Pārāyanavagga because it is the other collection of suttas (alongside the Aṭṭhakavagga) that people think are the earliest writings in the Pali Cannon.  Since I just recently read Gil Fronsdal's commentary on the latter, along with a few Upanishads to set the context, it seemed like a good moment to continue in the same vein.

Like the "Book of Eights", the "Way to the Far Shore" also pears down the Buddha's teaching to its core message.  Be mindful and investigate the way that craving causes suffering, and the way that letting go of craving leads to the end of suffering.  Here, these observations are not ariticulated as a list of "Noble Truths", but the teaching is the same.  This core message is very simple. and repeated many times in these verses.  We have to investigate for ourselves how holding on prevents us from living peacefully.  Brasington of course has more expansive commentary, and some very interesting reflections on the translation of certain terms, but his short book is mostly aimed at helping us to see how simple and direct the pre-Theravadan path can be.