Avalokiteshvara, el Bodhisattva de la Compasión, meditando profundamente sobre el Entendimiento Perfecto, descubrió que los cinco aspectos de la existencia humana estaban vacíos*, liberándose de este modo del sufrimiento. En respuesta al monje Sariputra, dijo lo siguiente:

El cuerpo es tan solo vacío,
el vacío no es más que el cuerpo.
El cuerpo está vacío,
y el vacío es el cuerpo.

Los otros cuatro aspectos de la existencia humana:
Sentidos, pensamientos, voluntad y conciencia,
también están vacíos,
y el vacío los contiene.

Todas las cosas están vacías:
Nada nace, nada muere,
nada es puro o impuro,
nada aumenta o disminuye.

Así pues, en el vacío, no existe el cuerpo,
ni las sensaciones, ni los pensamientos,
ni la voluntad, ni la conciencia.
No hay ojos, ni oídos,
ni nariz, ni lengua,
ni cuerpo, ni mente.
No hay sentido de la vista, ni del oído,
ni del olfato, ni del gusto,
ni del tacto, ni de la imaginación.
Nada puede verse o escucharse,
olerse o gustarse,
tocarse o imaginarse.

No existe la ignorancia,
ni el fin de la ignorancia.
No existen la vejez y la muerte,
ni el fin de la vejez y la muerte.
No existe el sufrimiento, ni la causa del sufrimiento,
ni el fin del sufrimiento, ni un camino a seguir.
No existe el logro de la sabiduría,
ni ninguna sabiduría que lograr.

Los Bodhisattvas confían en el Entendimiento Perfecto,
y, libres de todo engaño,
no sienten ningún miedo,
disfrutando del Nirvana aquí y ahora.

Todos los Budas,
pasados, presentes y futuros,
confían en el Entendimiento Perfecto,
y viven en la iluminación total.

El Entendimiento Perfecto es el mejor mantra.
El más lúcido,
el más elevado,
el mantra que elimina todo sufrimiento.

Ésta es una verdad fuera de toda duda. Dilo así:
Gaté,
gaté,
paragaté,
parasamgaté.
¡Bodhi!
¡Svaha!

Que significa…
Partir,
partir,
partir a lo alto,
partir a lo más alto.
¡Iluminados!
¡Que así sea!

* Vacío es la traducción habitual para el término Budista Sunyata (o Shunyata). Hace referencia al hecho de que ninguna cosa, incluida la existencia humana, posee una sustancia verdadera, lo que implica que nada es permanente y que nada es independiente por completo del resto de las cosas. En otras palabras, todo lo que existe en el mundo está interconectado y en un fluir constante. Por tanto, una correcta apreciación de esta idea nos libera del sufrimiento causado por nuestro ego, nuestro apego y nuestra resistencia al cambio y a la pérdida.

Nota: “Entendimiento Perfecto” es la traducción de Prajnaparamita. El nombre completo de este sutra es El Corazón de Prajnaparamita.

Question: what is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. 

Doubt.

The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God’s will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills à la god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, end of protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they’ll play your harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of behind-their-own-eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind close peepers… angels, they don’t have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent.

I know; devil talk. Shaitan interrupting Gibreel.

Me?

A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator’s role, according to one way of seeing things; he’s unnatural, a blasphemer, an abomination of abominations. From another angle, you could see pathos in him, heroism in his struggle, in his willingness to risk: not all mutants survive. Or, consider him sociopolitically: most migrants learn, and can become disguises. Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods invented about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret selves.

A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him, to prove he’s managed it. Playing God again, you could say. Or you could come down a few notches, and think of Tinkerbell; fairies don’t exist if children don’t clap their hands. Or you might simply say: it’s just like being a man.

Not only the need to be believed in, but to believe in another. You’ve got it: Love.

Saladin Chamcha met Pamela Lovelace five and a half days before the end of the 1960s, when women still wore bandannas in their hair. She stood at the centre of a room full of Trotskyist actresses and fixed him with eyes so bright, so bright. He monopolized her all evening and she never stopped smiling and she left with another man. He went home to dream of her eyes and smile, the slenderness of her, her skin. He pursued her for two years. England yields her treasures with reluctance. He was astonished by his own perseverance, and understood that she had become the custodian of his destiny, that if she did not relent then his entire attempt at metamorphosis would fail. ‘Let me,’ he begged her, wrestling politely on her white rug that left him, at his midnight bus stops, covered in guilty fluff. ‘Believe me. I’m the one.’

One night, out of the blue , she let him, she said she believed. He married her before she could change her mind, but never learned to read her thoughts. When she was unhappy she would lock herself in the bedroom until she felt better. ‘It’s none of your business,’ she told him. ‘I don’t want anybody to see me when I’m like that.’ He used to call her a clam. ‘Open up,’ he hammered on all the locked doors of their lives together, basement first, then maisonette, then mansion. ‘I love you, let me in.’ He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn’t manage to beam. Only when it was too late did she tell him that her parents had committed suicide together when she had just begun to menstruate, over their heads in gambling debts, leaving her with the aristocratic bellow of a voice that marked her out as a golden girl, a woman to envy, whereas in fact she was abandoned, lost, her parents couldn’t even be bothered to wait and watch her grow up, that’s how much she was loved, so of course she had no confidence at all, and every moment she spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut.

They never managed to have children; she blamed herself. After ten years Saladin discovered that there was something the matter with some of his own chromosomes, two sticks too long, or too short, he couldn’t remember. His genetic inheritance; apparently he was lucky to exist, lucky not to be some sort of deformed freak. Was it his mother or his father from whom? The doctors couldn’t say; he blamed, it’s easy to guess which one, after all, it wouldn’t do to think badly of the dead.

They hadn’t been getting along lately.

He told himself that afterwards, but not during.

Afterwards, he told himself, we were on the rocks, maybe it was the missing babies, maybe we just grew away from each other, maybe this, maybe that.

During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant counterfeit of joy. 

He tried to invent a happy future for them, to make it come true by making it up and then believing in it. On his way to India he was thinking how lucky he was to have her, I’m lucky yes I am don’t argue I’m the luckiest bastard in the world. And: how wonderful it was to have before him the stretching, shady avenue of years, the prospect of growing old in the presence of her gentleness.

He had worked so hard and come so close to convincing himself of the truth of these paltry fictions that when he went to bed with Zeeny Vakil within forty-eight hours of arriving in Bombay, the first thing he did, even before they made love, was to faint, to pass out cold, because the messages reaching his brain were in such serious disagreement with one another, as if his right eye saw the world moving to the left while his left eye saw it sliding to the right.

‘You’re fired,’ Mhatre emphasized, beaming. ‘Cashiered, had your chips. Dis-miss .’

‘But, uncle,’

‘Shut your face.’

Then the Babasaheb gave the orphan the greatest present of his life, informing him that a meeting had been arranged for him at the studios of the legendary film magnate Mr. D. W. Rama; an audition. ‘It is for appearance only,’ the Babasaheb said. ‘Rama is my good friend and we have discussed. A small part to begin, then it is up to you. Now get out of my sight and stop pulling such humble faces, it does not suit.’

‘But, uncle,’

‘Boy like you is too damn goodlooking to carry tiffins on his head all his life. Get gone now, go, be a homosexual movie actor. I fired you five minutes back.’

‘But, uncle,’

‘I have spoken. Thank your lucky stars.’

***

He became Gibreel Farishta, but for four years he did not become a star, serving his apprenticeship in a succession of minor knockabout comic parts. He remained calm, unhurried, as though he could see the future, and his apparent lack of ambition made him something of an outsider in that most self-seeking of industries. He was thought to be stupid or arrogant or both. And throughout the four wilderness years he failed to kiss a single woman on the mouth.

On-screen, he played the fall guy, the idiot who loves the beauty and can’t see that she wouldn’t go for him in a thousand years, the funny uncle, the poor relation, the village idiot, the servant, the incompetent crook, none of them the type of part that ever rates a love scene. Women kicked him, slapped him, teased him, laughed at him, but never, on celluloid, looked at him or sang to him or danced around him with cinematic love in their eyes. Off-screen, he lived alone in two empty rooms near the studios and tried to imagine what women looked like without clothes on. To get his mind off the subject of love and desire, he studied, becoming an omnivorous autodidact, devouring the metamorphic myths of Greece and Rome, the avatars of Jupiter, the boy who became a flower, the spider-woman, Circe, everything; and the theosophy of Annie Besant, and unified field theory, and the incident of the Satanic verses in the early career of the Prophet, and the politics of Muhammad’s harem after his return to Mecca in triumph; and the surrealism of the newspapers, in which butterflies could fly into young girls’ mouths, asking to be consumed, and children were born with no faces, and young boys dreamed in impossible detail of earlier incarnations, for instance in a golden fortress filled with precious stones. He filled himself up with God knows what, but he could not deny, in the small hours of his insomniac nights, that he was full of something that had never been used, that he did not know how to begin to use, that is, love. In his dreams he was tormented by women of unbearable sweetness and beauty, so he preferred to stay awake and force himself to rehearse some part of his general knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of being endowed with a larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single person on earth to offer it to.

His big break arrived with the coming of the theological movies. Once the formula of making films based on the puranas, and adding the usual mixture of songs, dances, funny uncles etc., had paid off, every god in the pantheon got his or her chance to be a star. When D. W. Rama scheduled a production based on the story of Ganesh, none of the leading box-office names of the time were willing to spend an entire movie concealed inside an elephant’s head. Gibreel jumped at the chance. That was his first hit, Ganpati Baba , and suddenly he was a superstar, but only with the trunk and ears on. After six movies playing the elephant-headed god he was permitted to remove the thick, pendulous, grey mask and put on, instead, a long, hairy tail, in order to play Hanuman the monkey king in a sequence of adventure movies that owed more to a certain cheap television series emanating from Hong Kong than it did to the Ramayana. This series proved so popular that monkey-tails became de rigueur for the city’s young bucks at the kind of parties frequented by convent girls known as ‘firecrackers’ because of their readiness to go off with a bang.

After Hanuman there was no stopping Gibreel, and his phenomenal success deepened his belief in a guardian angel. But it also led to a more regrettable development. 

(I see that I must, after all, spill poor Rekha’s beans.)

Even before he replaced false head with fake tail he had become irresistibly attractive to women. The seductions of his fame had grown so great that several of these young ladies asked him if he would keep the Ganesh-mask on while they made love, but he refused out of respect for the dignity of the god. Owing to the innocence of his upbringing he could not at that time differentiate between quantity and quality and accordingly felt the need to make up for lost time. He had so many sexual partners that it was not uncommon for him to forget their names even before they had left his room. Not only did he become a philanderer of the worst type, but he also learned the arts of dissimulation, because a man who plays gods must be above reproach. So skilfully did he conceal his life of scandal and debauch that his old patron, Babasaheb Mhatre, lying on his deathbed a decade after he sent a young dabbawalla out into the world of illusion, black-money and lust, begged him to get married to prove he was a man. ‘God-sake, mister,’ the Babasaheb pleaded, ‘when I told you back then to go and be a homo I never thought you would take me seriously, there is a limit to respecting one’s elders, after all.’ Gibreel threw up his hands and swore that he was no such disgraceful thing, and that when the right girl came along he would of course undergo nuptials with a will. ‘What you waiting? Some goddess from heaven? Greta Garbo, Gracekali, who?’ cried the old man, coughing blood, but Gibreel left him with the enigma of a smile that allowed him to die without having his mind set entirely at rest.

The avalanche of sex in which Gibreel Farishta was trapped managed to bury his greatest talent so deep that it might easily have been lost forever, his talent, that is, for loving genuinely, deeply and without holding back, the rare and delicate gift which he had never been able to employ. By the time of his illness he had all but forgotten the anguish he used to experience owing to his longing for love, which had twisted and turned in him like a sorcerer’s knife. Now, at the end of each gymnastic night, he slept easily and long, as if he had never been plagued by dream-women, as if he had never hoped to lose his heart.

‘Your trouble,’ Rekha Merchant told him when she materialized out of the clouds, ‘is everybody always forgave you, God knows why, you always got let off, you got away with murder. Nobody ever held you responsible for what you did.’ He couldn’t argue. ‘God’s gift,’ she screamed at him, ‘God knows where you thought you were from, jumped-up type from the gutter, God knows what diseases you brought.’

But that was what women did, he thought in those days, they were the vessels into which he could pour himself, and when he moved on, they would understand that it was his nature, and forgive. And it was true that nobody blamed him for leaving, for his thousand and one pieces of thoughtlessness, how many abortions, Rekha demanded in the cloud-hole, how many broken hearts. In all those years he was the beneficiary of the infinite generosity of women, but he was its victim, too, because their forgiveness made possible the deepest and sweetest corruption of all, namely the idea that he was doing nothing wrong.

Sí, para Marino era difícil la asimilación del cero. Padecía la fobia por esa cifra y quizá el horror mismo de la existencia. El cero le hacía sentirse ante la presencia de la nada y el vacío. ¿A quién le gusta el vacío? Cuando se le mencionaba el problema de Brouwer de los muchos ceros posibles o imposibles en una cifra irracional, Marino afirmaba no tener preocupación. ¡Bah! —decía—, necesitaríamos todas sus cifras para investigarlo y eso no puede hacerse, son infinitas, ¿lo olvidan? Marino se confiaba con este razonamiento acerca del infinito, le tomaba a la ligera. Pero el hecho de que no podamos predecir si hay o no una cantidad monstruosa de ceros seguidos en un número, en el que aparentemente no tienen razón de ser, no significa que no podamos encontrárnoslos de manera fortuita en cifra alguna. Los ceros nos pueden incluso engañar respecto a esa cifra, haciéndonosla creer racional, sobre todo si no tenemos el cuidado de contemplarla con atención. 

La gente que habitaba la Calle de la Buena Muerte era silenciosa y hosca. Quienes caminaban por la avenida se encontraban con los rostros ausentes de los que ahí vivían. Era la calle de los devenires por donde la gente atravesaba apresurada en busca de los curas de la Plaza de San Pablo que confesaban a sus moribundos. Las miradas de los moradores ignoraban al transeúnte; perdidas en la monotonía, sin signo alguno de vida, parecían contemplar hacia el interior de esos seres vacíos en el que no existían las noches con sueños, sólo oscuridad y cavidades en las que antes se guardara el conocimiento del dolor, y ahora nada. Eran los espejos empañados de caras que mimetizaban toda emoción. Rostros de nadie. 

Amante soy, pese a quien lo niegue; 
el amante de mi tiempo, que en amor a nadie teme.

El amor me ha dejado pálido y delgado:
mira y verás cómo mi color tornóse;
ahora podrías ya llamarme moreno,
y en mi ropa no hay ya cuerpo;
no me verás, si no fuera porque gimo.

Soy, pardiez, hombre enamorado,
y mi estado atestigua que digo verdad;
pero en este zéjel me recobro,
pues raja mi mente un cabello desenvainada,
y nunca detuviese cota a la espada de mi lengua.

Déjame de la fe de Jamïl y ‘Urwa,
que modelo tiene la gente en al-Hasan.
Di a quienes no lo creen en Africa:
«Tú, que prefieres otro a Hatim,
¿qué vale un putero, del que todo el país se mofa? 

Suéltate el pelo amando a mozos,
y si ves que el amado es melindroso,
escánciale como sea una y otra vez,
y si bebe la copa grande y aún resiste,
dale otra y caerá, aunque sea un león.

Cuando hubo mi amado bebido su vaso,
y lo derribó la embriaguez entre contertulios,
le recité, sosteniéndole la cabeza: .
«Bebió mi amante, bebió hasta prosternarse,
y no garantizo a quien, ebrio, se me acuesta.»

En una vida como la mía da tiempo a demasiadas cosas. Bueno, no da tiempo a nada y a la vez sí da: a demasiadas cosas. Mi memoria está tan llena que a veces no lo soporto. Quisiera perderla más, quisiera vaciarla un poco. O no, eso no es cierto, prefiero que aún no me falle. Lo que quisiera es que no se me hubiera llenado tanto. De joven, ya sabes, uno tiene prisa y teme no vivir lo suficiente, no disfrutar de experiencias lo bastante variadas y ricas, uno se impacienta y acelera los acontecimientos, si puede, y se carga de ellos, hace acopio, la urgencia del joven por sumar cicatrices y forjarse un pasado, esa urgencia es bien extraña. Nadie debería tener ese miedo, los viejos deberíamos enseñárselo a la gente, aunque no sé cómo, hoy no los escucha nadie. Porque al final de cualquier vida más o menos larga, por monótona que haya sido, y anodina, y gris, y sin vuelcos, habrá siempre demasiados recuerdos y demasiadas contradicciones, demasiadas renuncias y omisiones y cambios, mucha marcha atrás, mucho arriar banderas, y también demasiadas deslealtades, eso es seguro. Y no es fácil ordenar todo eso, ni siquiera para contárselo a uno mismo. Demasiada acumulación. Demasiado material brumoso y amontonado y a la vez muy disperso, demasiado para un relato, aun para uno solamente pensado. Y no hablemos de las infinitas cosas que caen bajo el punto ciego del ojo, cada vida está llena de episodios literalmente invisibles, uno ignora lo que pasó porque simplemente no lo vio, no hubo posibilidad de verlo, buena parte de lo que nos afecta y nos determina está tapado, cómo decir, no se ofreció a la visión, se sustrajo, no hubo ángulo. La vida no es contable, y resulta extraordinario que los hombres lleven todos los siglos de que tenemos conocimiento dedicados a ello, empeñados en contar lo que no se puede, sea en forma de mito, de poema épico, de crónica, anales, actas, leyenda o cantar de gesta, romances o corridos, de evangelio, santoral, historia, biografía, novela o elogio fúnebre, de película, de confesiones, memorias, de reportaje, da lo mismo. Es una empresa condenada, fallida, y que quizá nos haga menos favor que daño. A veces pienso que más valdría abandonar la costumbre y dejar que las cosas sólo pasen. Y luego ya se estén quietas.

Hay prosas y poesías cuyo estilo es en sí mismo fascista, aunque hablen del sol y la luna y las firmen izquierdistas por autoproclamación, nuestra prensa y nuestras librerías están llenas de ellas. Pasa lo mismo que con los espíritus, o con el carácter: los hay en sí mismos fascistas, aunque los alberguen cuerpos con tendencia a levantar el puño y a sudar la gota gorda en manifestaciones y marchas con filas de fotógrafos abriendo paso e inmortalizándolos como es natural. Sólo falta que ahora se reivindiquen el espíritu y el estilo de quienes además de serlo se proclamaban fascistas, y tan ufanamente, por si no se les notaba bastante con la pluma en la mano, en cada página que dieron a imprenta y en cada denuncia entregada en comisaría. Ya han dejado suficiente estela sin necesidad de eso, entre los autores actuales, aunque la mayoría la silencien y se busquen antecesores con menos mancha, el pobre Quevedo en primera línea, y algunos no sean quizá conscientes de su herencia más cercana, en la sangre la llevan y además les hierve.

My writing life—having begun so unexpectedly—shall die newborn. Never to be reborn. As a writer I’m all thumbs, it’s true—I don’t have a way with words; it is they that have had their way with me, conscripting me as a weapon of revenge. Now that their will has been done, I may be discarded.

Yes, these half-dried sheets have taught me a great deal: words are spiteful and tenacious—anyone who tries to kill them will sooner be killed by them.

Well, that’s all, my pen has scraped bottom. Again I’m without words—forever. The ecstasies of these four nights have taken everything from me: I’m spent. And yet I did, if only briefly, for a few scant instants, break out of my orbit and step out of my “I”!

Here—I’m giving the words back; all except one: life.

Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you’ll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; no­body talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You’ll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Luna­tics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips. Only one thing I’ll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they’re not hurting anyone while they’re sitting in front of that Eye. But neither was Japhy. … I see him in future years stalking along with full rucksack, in suburban streets, passing the blue television win­dows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the Master Switch. As for me, maybe the answer was in my little Buddy poem that kept on: “‘Who played this cruel joke, on bloke after bloke, packing like a rat, across the desert flat?’ asked Montana Slim, gesturing to him, the buddy of the men, in this lion’s den. ‘Was it God got mad, like the Indian cad, who was only a giver, crooked like the river? Gave you a garden, let it all harden, then comes the flood, and the loss of your blood? Pray tell us, good buddy, and don’t make it muddy, who played this trick, on Harry and Dick, and why is so mean, this Eternal Scene, just what’s the point, of this whole joint?’” I thought maybe I could find out at last from these Dharma Bums. 

No seas cochino

I wanta read about Hakuin, who went to see this old man who lived in a cave, slept with deer and ate chestnuts and the old man told him to quit meditating and quit thinking about koans, as Ray says, and instead learn how to go to sleep and wake up, said, when you go to sleep you should put your legs together and take deep breaths and then concentrate your mind on a spot one and a half inches below your navel until you feel it get like a ball of power and then start breathing from your heels clear up and concentrate saying to your­self that that center just here is Amida’s Pure Land, the center of the mind, and when you wake up you should start by consciously breathing and stretching a little and thinking the same thoughts, see, the rest of the time.