Sunday 25 January 2009

Vitality

Vitality

What place Pan? The mythical figure Pan is connected with nature and fertility. Accounts of Pan seem to soon lead to tales of seduction and his shall we say base element seems clear. But there is more to Pan than this; there seems to be an element of creativity. We generally hold creativity in positive regard and so it seems important to understand the relationships between enslaving desires and creativity. Does Pan represent in some way our understanding of the desire to be, to come out of voidness? I recall that in his book 'Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist' DT Suzuki writes about trisna (tanha) as:

...more deeply rooted than we imagine, as it grows straight out of the root of karuna.
Let me cite a Japanese Haiku poet of the eighteenth century, Basho. One of his seventeen syllable poems reads:

When closely inspected,
One notices a nazuna in bloom
Under the hedge.

The nazuna is a small flowering wild plant.'

I feel we need to acknowledge our creativity and enjoy it. Just where this sits with the Four Noble Truths is not so simple.

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