The Knight’s Move Across the Pacific

(click image to enlarge)

The right-handed Buddhist swastikas here are actually ideographs meaning “ten thousand,” and therefore by extension “everything,” They also mean the Buddha, and the Buddha’s infinite knowledge. I’m using them here because of their many corners, as a mnemonic for the crooked move of the knight in chess, and to the unstraightness of Buddhist expedience in general. And hey, this kind of encodement – form to meaning, ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom – is basic to ideographic thought, and is a time-honored practice in the Chinese cultural sphere of influence.

Significant motion in the Pacific Basin is always necessarily not straight. It can’t be. The thing is home to the biggest and most powerful etheric vortex on earth. You NEVER aim where you are actually headed for in the Pacific Basin. Not if you’ve been here long enough to understand how anything can only work. You ALWAYS factor in everything that is going to throw your bearing off, and otherwise screw you up, before you set a course. On a previous blog, I tried to write about this in terms of astrology, feng shui, and five-element theory, and only lost my audience. So now I really want to write about it again, so I’m using something that I hope will be less threatening; a simple little chess piece (that only threatens the Queen – hehehe!).

It’s probably the Japanese who really understand this best. Did you ever watch a couple of Samurai square off to fight? Do they ever head where they’re actually going? Does the Pope wear a yarmulka? What fun would it be to tell your opponent how to kill you? If you want to arrive one place, you head in another. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s only what works in the real world.

It probably would also behoove me to write, since I’ve eschewed the whole scary subject of Astrology and stuff, that the strongest planet in my birthchart is Mars, and it sits Swakshetra in a Nakshatra in sidereal Aries called Ashwini, which is about, among other things, the healing power of horses.

It’s been clear to me since Ven. Xing Yun of Fo Guang Shan retreated to Taiwan after blessing ground zero after 9-11, that he would not transmit to the American mainstream. The nun-run Fo Guang Shan centers in America and Canada, and Hsi Lai University in So. Cal. don’t change that. Transmission is not a matter of either money, manpower, organizational expertize, or good intentions. It’s a matter of heroic will, and a refusal to accept five bazillion “No!’s”, most of them coming from your own birth culture and your own lineage. So far the only Asian who has actually done it was Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and then his lineage even tried to undo and/or deny it after his death, and then that one successful transmission was followed by the most hideously defunct, decrepit, and corrupt series of deliberately designed failures that could be invented by irreversibly devious and mud-bugged human minds, if three billion people sat around for thirty years, and did nothing but attempt that. (Which, of course, never happened, because every East Asian is automatically a Buddhist Saint just by being alive. Ask her; she’ll tell you).

But please do not think, dear reader, that I am angry about this. It has gone beyond anger. I am simply dealing in a perfectly straightforward and humorous manner with something so disgusting that the automatic tendency of a healthy human mind is simply to block it completely. Also do not think that I am blaming the head of my lineage for his own failure to transmit to the American mainstream. It was simply beyond his capacity from the beginning, and by the nature of his birth, and that’s a fact. Ven. Xing Yun was born on the Chinese mainland, and then went to Taiwan to spread Buddhism, by agreement with his Sangha on the mainland. His primary responsibility therefore, is to deal with problems between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, and he has discharged that responsibility with an unimaginable degree of integrity and success. It was for this purpose that he retreated from America after 9-11, and I knew it in my bones at the time.

And that’s the sideways component of the knight’s move, i.e., Taiwan to the Chinese mainland. The other component, moving in for the kill, can only come, and will certainly come in time, directly from the Chinese mainland to America.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping