The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God

by Douglas Harding

  WITNESS: I hear what you say, Master, but I don’t really get what you are talking about. Perhaps one day I shall.

  MYSELF, to Witness: You leave me speechless, Sister Marie-Louise... God bless you! I have no more questions. Your devotion to me is quite the nicest and neatest way of guarding against all I stand for. Please leave the box. [She goes, not a bit crestfallen. The more I tick her off, the more she loves it!]

  Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, observe the fix I’m in. It’s not that the lady and her friends mount me on a pedestal so high they can’t hear a word I say. It’s much worse than that. It’s that the pedestal is just low enough for them to hear parts of what I say, so that somehow the message turns out to be the opposite of what I mean. What sort of disciples are these who, when I say ‘Look in’, look out; and when I say ‘Look down’, look up; and when I say ‘Just look’, piously close their eyes? I hate to say this, but the truth is that I have dear friends, friends, enemies, bitter enemies - and disciples. Mercifully, very few.

  You’ll gather that I’m not one of those spiritual teachers who give their pupils the option: ‘Either see Who you are, or else surrender to me. If you aren’t ready to find the true Guru in yourself; at least find Him provisionally in me, as a first step. The second step, from me as your authority to yourself as your real Authority, may then follow.’ Those teachers include some great souls, and I’m not saying they are wrong. It’s not that this roundabout road to enlightenment via devotion to a guru is closed, but that it’s a long and difficult diversion, and few they are that emerge from it on to the main highway. I still have to meet a devotee who has come through and will tell you so. Accordingly my message, day in and day out, to anyone who has half an ear, is: What, for heaven’s sake, is wrong with the direct road to Yourself? It couldn’t be better paved and easier going and safer - and shorter. In fact, all you have to do is face the right direction, and - like a shot - you’ve arrived at the Place you never left! That 180° turn-about of attention is enough to see you right Home, instantly. But you are responsible for making it. Your attention isn’t something I can get hold of like a wrong-pointing signpost, and twist round to point the right way. It’s you who have to do that.

  COUNSEL: Whatever effect your gospel has on people, whether they take it the right way or the wrong way, the responsibility for what happens to them is yours.

  MYSELF: This sounds reasonable, but is really another of your choice ones. Blame me for the way the Witness - bless her silly heart! - inverts what I’m telling her, and you’ll have to blame Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for the millions of Russians Stalin liquidated. And Madame Curie for Hiroshima. And Jesus Christ for such flowerings of Christianity as the Children’s Crusade, countless pogroms against the Jews, the Thirty Years’ War and all the grisly work of the Holy Inquisition. Not to mention the Apocalyptic Church.

  COUNSEL: You can’t dodge the fact that you are marketing two sorts of divinity, one inadvertently and the other by design. You are causing a few feeble-minded folk to deify you, and many evil-minded folk to deify themselves. Also a lot of bloody-minded folk to deify violence. What remains to convict you of blasphemy under the Act?

  MYSELF: What, indeed? Given some adjustments of language, I guess you’re about right, for once.

  COUNSEL, all excitement: Jury, do you hear that? [To the judge, triumphantly] Your Honour, this outright admission of guilt by the Accused - not the first, but for sure the clearest - raises a vital issue about the conduct of this Trial from now on. May I ask for a brief recess in which to put to Your Honour some questions of procedure?

  JUDGE: Very well. The court is adjourned for half an hour.

  Recess

  The Judge in Camera with Counsel and Accused

  COUNSEL: I submit, Your Honour, that the Accused’s clear admission of guilt, which we have just heard, must change the course of the Trial. I see no reason to call the remaining witnesses. Just two or three of them, at most, will do.

  JUDGE: I take your point. Mr Nokes, what have you to say?

  MYSELF: I did not admit guilt. May I remind Your Honour that Counsel’s view of what constitutes blasphemy and my view are poles apart? My plea is that I’m the one in court (not the only one now, I hope) who isn’t blaspheming. I see God seated at the Centre of everyone’s universe, regardless. Along with animals and little children and sages, I’m content to leave Him sitting comfortably there. Most adult humans are hell-bent on unseating Him and taking His place. As if they could! Now that really is blasphemy!

  JUDGE: I understand your position perfectly. The immediate question is whether the remaining witnesses need be called. What do you say?

  MYSELF: I say they must be called. Their names and abstracts of their evidence were of course given to me before the Trial, and the completion of my Defence depends on their appearing in court. I have every expectation that their evidence will, here and there, under cross-examination, turn out to support my case. I can’t afford to forgo the probability of some more Prosecution witnesses turning out to be Defence witnesses. It’s a risk that Sir Gerald must take.

  COUNSEL: Surely, Your Honour, I can’t be required to play into Nokes’s hands? I must devise my own strategy, make my own decisions about a nolle prosequi.

  JUDGE: If the Accused can so shake the evidence of some of your witnesses that they become, in effect, his witnesses, then he has every right to continue to do so. In the light of events so far in this Trial, I appreciate your concern regarding the rest of it. You have your job to do; I have mine. It is to give John a-Nokes, whose life - unlike ours, remember - is at stake, every opportunity to save it. I rule that you call the remaining witnesses.

  COUNSEL: In Rex v. Simpson, 1921, Court of Criminal Appeal, the Judge excused the Prosecution from calling four witnesses it had said it would call, notwithstanding the vehement objections of the Defence.

  JUDGE, after briefly consulting his computer: That was a trial for rape, and the grounds for the withdrawal were very different from yours, Sir Gerald. No. My decision is final.

  COUNSEL: Your Honour forces me to consider whether I shouldn’t leave the rest of the Prosecution’s case to my junior here. And explain to the Jury that I’m doing so because the proceedings from now on can only be de minimis, an anticlimax and irrelevance not meriting my attention - Nokes having de facto changed his plea to Guilty. In short, that I’m functus officio.

  JUDGE: Of course it’s up to you... But - if you’ll allow me to put a few questions –

  Can you be so sure of the way the case will go? Do you consider that your withdrawal would be in the public interest, or would further the intentions of the Crown? Or would serve the cause of justice itself? Not to mention - how can I phrase this? - the effect on your own professional career... Not that Mr Atkinson would fail to do an excellent job...

  COUNSEL, sighing, and shaking his head so vigorously he nearly loses his wig: It’s a question of duty, Your Honour. Personal considerations don’t come into it...

  Well, Atkinson, it seems we’ve no option but to soldier on.

  JUNIOR COUNSEL, suddenly rather down in the mouth: I guess so, Sir Gerald.

  Prosecution Witness No. 19

  THE VENERABLE BHIKKHU

  Prompted by Counsel, the Witness introduces himself and describes his relationship with me.

  WITNESS: I’m a Westerner - a Welshman - who, as a direct result of meeting the Accused, am now a Buddhist monk: which leaves me eternally grateful to him. I first met John a-Nokes five years ago at one of his workshop-seminars, organized by a group of philosophy and psychology students at our university. His subject was Buddhism - his very individual version of it. I was already some sort of spiritual seeker, but had no idea where to look or how to look or what to look for, and as unhappy as I was confused. Jack changed all that. He turned my attention round 180° and showed me what I needed to see - the much-feared and overlooked obvious. He initiated me into the art of looking within at the Emptiness.

  This ins
ight was enough to change the direction of my life. It got me off the mark - gave me not so much a head start as a no-head start - on my own spiritual odyssey, which is still in the early stages. Not that I seek something back of or additional to the Emptiness here. My aim is to see it ever more clearly, realize it ever more deeply, live from it ever more consistently.

  COUNSEL: It was to traditional Buddhism, then, and not to the Accused’s version - or inversion or perversion - of it that you turned, for guidance on your spiritual quest?

  WITNESS: That’s right. After all (I argued) that tradition has been tested over two and a half millennia. It seemed to me the ideal means of arriving at the sustained clarity and freedom I sought. The more I studied Buddhism, the more businesslike this approach to full enlightenment turned out to be. A year after meeting John a-Nokes, I became a Samanera, or novice monk, at the Amarāvati Monastery, where I’m now an ordained monk.

  COUNSEL: Do you think the Accused has taken the wrong road?

  WITNESS: It’s rather that he’s held up on the right road. The reason he’s stuck is that he imagines he’s got to the end of it. He mistakes the valuable insight he and I share for the final truth and full Enlightenment, whereas I see it as an aspect of the truth and a preview of Enlightenment. He says he’s arrived. I say we’re both on the way. There’s more to Buddhahood or Nirvana than intermittent and distant views of it. The touch, the savour and the smell of it, so to say, are essential. There’s a world of difference, and quite a few hazards, between spotting the restaurant of your choice across the wide and busy street, with occasional whiffs of the cooking, and sitting inside there, tucking away.

  COUNSEL: Are you saying that the Accused is deluded, or that he’s some kind of fraud?

  WITNESS: About his sincerity I’ve not the slightest doubt. It’s just that I can’t agree that he’s come anywhere near the goal.

  COUNSEL: What goal? Please be more specific.

  WITNESS: A fully enlightened Arahant or Buddha has freed himself from all limitations and defilements, such as desire, ill will, ignorance and pride. He’s fearless. He’s full of energy and wisdom and inspiration, and all pure and noble qualities. His compassion excludes no one and knows no bounds. In short, he’s perfect. Which means he won’t be reborn into the world. The rest of us very imperfect ones, after this life is over, will again and again return in other bodies and go on living and dying and being reborn till we, too, at last become Buddhas.

  COUNSEL: This full Enlightenment - does it mean shedding your humanness and putting on (or revealing) your divineness? So that you emerge as some sort of a god, or the Buddhist equivalent of God?

  WITNESS: Buddhism recognizes no God. No, the Buddha is a perfect human.

  COUNSEL: Which of the Buddha’s merits does the Accused notably lack, in your experience of him?

  WITNESS: I get the impression, though I can’t prove it, that at times he’s worried, tired, cross, bored, petty, irritated, fed up to the gills. Certainly I know him well enough to assure the court that he’s a million miles short of Buddhahood. Nor is this surprising: the long haul to perfection doesn’t interest him. Several times I’ve heard him say he can’t be bothered with the rigours of what we Buddhists call the Eightfold Noble Path, which combines moral discipline with a variety of meditational practices. He maintains that these are, at best, optional extras, so many arbitrary hurdles set up for training purposes. Publicly and tirelessly, he says he’s arrived at Buddhism’s goal of perfection in no time at all and on his own; and to blazes with the endless foot-slogging, the numerous stages and the hard going between stages, that Buddhists have, over all these centuries, found unavoidable. Which is like supposing that, because you happen to be quite exceptionally handy with a penknife, you can not only operate on yourself for appendicitis, but get yourself elected to the Royal College of Surgeons; and moreover, talk a lot of other far less skilled penknifers into following your example.

  COUNSEL: How do regular Buddhists react to the news that they themselves are setting up formidable barriers and hazards, to lengthen out a fifteen-second sprint into an age-long obstacle race?

  WITNESS: Some admire and are puzzled. Some are indifferent. Some are shocked. A few are very angry. But most are confused, because at times John a-Nokes seems to be a species of Buddhist, at other times not a Buddhist at all, occasionally an anti-Buddhist; and, increasingly of late, some kind of Christian, one gathers.

  COUNSEL: Is it true that not a few Buddhists think he’s poking fun at what they hold sacred, and pouring contempt on the Blessed One? Committing what amounts to blasphemy?

  WITNESS: Well, yes. But I think -

  COUNSEL: I gather that aiming to become a Buddha - or is it the Buddha? - isn’t quite the same as aiming to become Almighty God? In which case, what’s the difference?

  WITNESS: There’s all the difference in the world, most experts would say. Buddhism can fairly be described as an atheistic religion. It denies the existence of an individual self, let alone a Universal Self. However, for the profoundest Christian mystics (such as Meister Eckhart), the Godhead is the absolutely impersonal and ineffable Source and Reality and Truth behind appearances; and as such isn’t all that different from what we Buddhists call our Buddha Nature. On the other hand, Theravada Buddhism, with its principle of karma and reaping what you sow, is poles apart from Christian dogmas about guilt, vicarious suffering, and salvation.

  COUNSEL: So, in conclusion, you regard the Accused’s claim that he stands on the topmost spiritual peak - call it Full Enlightenment, or Nirvana, or Buddhahood, or Godhood, or what you will - as a false claim? And moreover, one that scandalizes followers of a great and ancient but very alive religion?

  WITNESS: I have to agree. Though -

  COUNSEL: And you agree that to induce others - particularly the easily-led young - to follow him is to mislead them? Corrupt them, even?

  JUDGE, going red and pounding away: Even in this Trial there are limits to how far I will allow the leading and the gagging of witnesses. You’re putting your words into the Witness’s mouth and stopping his words coming out.

  COUNSEL, between his teeth, his voice reduced to a stage whisper: Your Honour pleases to instruct the Crown how to conduct itself?

  JUDGE: Precisely! [Counsel flings down his brief, pushes back his wig, and mops his brow...]

  WITNESS, in a marked manner, all Buddhist calm: I’m quite sure of three things, Your Honour. That John a-Nokes stands way above the pea-soup fog that most of us are groping about in. That, in so far as I’m clear of that mental and spiritual miasma, it’s because he showed me the way up. And that both of us have a lot more climbing to do before we get to the topmost peak where the mountain air is perfectly healthy and transparent. Let me add that, if he’s held up temporarily, that’s his own affair. Let’s say he’s having a rest and a nap, and pleasant dreams about what lies at the end of the climb.

  COUNSEL, a little more calmly: I turn to you, members of the jury. The Witness’s concluding tribute to his one-time friend (should I call it his last-minute attempt to make amends?) may be praiseworthy but is certainly irrelevant, and should be ignored.

  It doesn’t erase a syllable from his statement that the Accused is by no means the exalted Being he claims to be, that he misleads the young into making the same claim, and that he publicly outrages some Buddhists by perverting and putting down what they hold sacred.

  The relevance of this testimony to the charge against him will not be lost on you.

  As for the Witness’s high opinion of the Accused personally: it only lends weight to his evidence against the man, to the effect that he is indeed guilty as charged. Once more, the adverse testimony of a witness like this - one who’s prejudiced in favour of the Accused - is worth that of two neutral witnesses

  Defence: Paths to Perfection

  MYSELF, to Witness: Buddhism, I think you’ll agree, is a vast umbrella sheltering hugely different varieties of itself. For brevity let’s label them the popular or fol
k Buddhism of the East, evangelical Pure Land Buddhism, zany or baffling Zen, ultra-puritanical Theravada, ultra-relaxed Tantra, the miscellany of picturesque and fantastical cults comprising Tibetan Buddhism, and so on - to say nothing of their countless subdivisions. Instead of ‘varieties of itself’ I could almost have said ‘parodies and contradictions of itself.’

  WITNESS: You are about right. All the same, there are common factors.

  MYSELF: We shall be glancing at one or two of them. Meantime, surely, room can be found under that marquee-like umbrella for the odd new development?

  WITNESS: It had better be. Buddhism is a living religion.

  MYSELF: Well, then, in the course of my cross-examination I hope to persuade you that my own variety of Buddhism (I never did belong to the Aching-legs School) is by no means so far out that it couldn’t possibly nose its way under that umbrella. Moreover, I hope to prove - what’s very much to the point in court here - that it deserves to be included without exciting any more scandal and accusations of blasphemy than other varieties of Buddhism excite. Varieties whose age conveniently masks their quite amazing boldness and oddity - including calculated insults to the Buddha - and lends sanctity to what it can’t hide.

  WITNESS: Well, I’m open to persuasion.

  MYSELF: Let’s go straight to the heart of the matter - to the Void or Emptiness that you and I find to be nearer than near. Isn’t it also - I ask you - clearer than clear, perfect from the start? You implied that it gets more lucid with practice. Surely you didn’t mean that?

  WITNESS: I must admit that, looking within, I can never see a hazy or spotty Void, or a mere profile or feature of what the Zen people call my Original and faceless Face. No - it’s an all-or-nothing sight. Yet, mysteriously, there seems to be a steady brightening and clarification over the years. More likely it’s the associated feelings, the meaning, above all the steadiness and continuity of the seeing, which mature with practice. Not the vision itself.