China and the West

Huxley, Aldous. Letters of Aldous Huxley [ID D31469].
Letter from Aldous Huxley to J.C. Squire ; Oxford, late Aug. 1918.
Here is a review of that Buddhist book. How much I disapprove of the Wisdom of the East !

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Mrs Naomi Mitchison ; Florence, 25 Febr. 1925.
But your discoveries will not in the least affect the value of the ethical and religious experiences of the individual. The theory of those individual experiences must be worked out separately. On this subject Lao Tsz[u] [Laozi] is most remarkable. His little book on the Tao is a sort of philosophical explanation of the ethics of Christianity. It gives the reasons why it is necessary to lose one's life in order to gain it : because it is impossible to have a real and absolute self, so long as the superficial self is allowed to control things. It is the sacrifice of one egoism for the sake of realizing another and much profounder egoism. It is the same idea as lies at the bottom of the Yogi system.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Robert Nichols ; Florence, 10 April, 1925.
Obviously, the only thing to be done is to go right through the process ; to realize individuality to the full, the real individuality,
Lao-Ts[u]'s individuality, the Yogis' individuality, and with it the oneness of everything.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Leonard Huxley ; Kashmir, 2 Nov., 1925.
It is too cold now to do it in comfort, otherwise the thing to have done would have been to go up into Ladakh – fifteen days march from Srinagar – where the inhabitants are Tibetans and Buddhists, and follow all the customs of their brothers in the secret land. One sees a lot of them here ; for they come down in the winter to work in the plains – strange yellow men, dressed in furs. We saw still queerer men, the other day, at the Central Asian Caravanserai, where all the traders coming down from Chinese Turkestan stop on their way through to India. We went with the Kashmiri head of the Customs – a very nice and intelligent man – and so had opportunities of seeing everything in the best possible circumstances – all the traders being anxious, naturally, to keep in the good graces of the great man. These traders come from Yarkhand and are mostly yellow Tartars. It takes them six weeks to walk to Srinagar and, I suppose, another month or so to get to Bombay, where most of them finally go. They bring furs, carpets, jade, Chinese silk, hand-woven and printed materials. And they take back with them cotton piece goods, velevets, spices and otter skins.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Robert Nichols ; The Athenaeum, Pall Mall [London,4 May, 1930].
I gather from your letters that you got Frieda a bit on the nerves. Well, I'm not surprised – I like her in a way ; but being with her makes me believe that Buddha was right when he numbered stupidity among the deadly sins.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to T.S. Eliot ; Sanary, 8 July, 1936.
And of course the teachers of meditation. Such as Patanjali, solemnly warn the postulant against using it in the wrong way. It is significant that Japanese naval caders were until recently and perhaps still are sent to a Zen Buddhist monastery to take a cours in meditation, to train them in impassibility, courage and patriotic devotion… There are also a number of distinct techniques among the Indians, Chinese and Tibetans. A great deal could be done, I believe, to make this immensely valuable spiritual training more easily available by someone who would systematically investigat with techniques were suitable to which individuals.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley ; Philadelphia, 6 Dec., 1937.
There is something, I think, very suggestive about the myth of the Bodhisattvas in Mahayana Buddhism – and how wholesome is the Mahayana inculation of infinite patience !

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Gordon Sewell ; Rhinebeck, N.Y., 31 Dec., 1937.
Thank you for your interesting letter and the cutting referring to Bailey's adventures in Tibet – which reads curiously like some of the adventures of the Chinese pilgrim, Hiuan Tsiang, in the 7th century. So far as I am aware, the exercise which consists of demonstrating to oneself the imaginary nature of the gods is common in Northern Buddhism. There are descriptions of these exercises in one of Evans Wentz's translations from the Tibetan (published by the Oxford University Press) – I think the second volume, on Yoga. (Can't remember title : but it's the volume that isn't either The Book of the Dead or Milarepa.) However, this exercise in demonstrating the imaginery nature of the gods is designed to clear the mind for an understanding of the reality of the 'Buddha nature' immanent in all beings. Or so at least I understand it.

Letter from Aldoux Huxley to Julian Huxley ; Los Angeles, 18 Nov., 1938.
In the intervals the theologians make the most remarkable psychological discoveries, record astonishing insights. One sees the immense good fortune of Buddhists in not being cursed with a sacred book or an impossible dogma. True, they invented a lot of dogmas and paid idolatrous respect to a number of texts as they went along ; but there was happily never such an orthodoxy as in Christianity and never a Bible.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to J.B. Rhine ; Llano, Calif., 30 Dec., 1942.
It will be necessary to revive some form of the Buddhist and Hindu doctrines in regard to a 'psychic' world of mental forces, either completely immaterial or else making use of forms of energy akin to those observable in the ordinary space-time world, but more subtle… Thus, in a Mahayana Buddhist scripture The Tibetan book of the dead (translated by Evans Wentz and published by the Oxford University Prss) are to be found the most categorical statements to the effect that the tutelary deities of the worshipper and even the High Buddhas themselves are objectifications projected by human minds and ultimately unreal. The finally independent is the Clear Light of the Void, the undifferentiated, timeless consciousness which is the self-subsistent principle of all things, and which the mystic discovers progressively in pure contemplation.

Letter from Aldoux Huxley to Julian Huxley ; Llano, Calif., 26 June, 1943.
Basic English is a miracle of ingenuity. Whether Chinese and blackamoors will make a universal language of it is another question.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Cass Canfield ; Llano, Calif., 9 April, 1944.
I hope to be able to get down to a project which I have had in mind for some time, which is an anthology with comments, along the lines of 'Texts and Pretexts', but devoted to what has been called the Perennial Philosophy – the Highest Common Factor underlying all the great religious and metaphysical systems of the world. It sould bring together, under a series of Headings, quotations from Western and Oriental sources of every period, set in a connecting matrix of commentary.

Letter from Aldous Huxlety to Mrs Flora Strousse ; Llano, Calif., 21 Jan., 1945.
I am near the end of what I think may be a useful and interesting book – an anthology of passages, drawn from the most various sources, Western and Oriental, illustrating the Perennial Philosophy, which is the highest common factor of all the higher religions, the whole arranged under different headings and embedded in an explanatory commentary of my own.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Victoria Ocampo ; Llano, Calif., 2 April, 1945.
I have just finished a book which I am calling The Perennial Philosophy – an anthology of what is the Highest Common Factor in the World religions, the extracfts drawn from a great variety of sources, western and eastern, and the whole embedded in an explanatory commentary of my own, amouting to about sixty or seventy per cent of the book.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Hermann Broch ; Llano, Calif., 14 May, 1945.
Virgil wanted to see God, but, to judge by his writings, didn't want it quite strongly enough. If he had, he would have subjected himself to the purificatory discipline of one of the mystery religions – the Greek versions of that not merely theoretical, but practical 'Philosophia Perennis', which is the central core of Christianity and the religions of the Orient.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley ; Llano, Calif., 27 May, 1945.
For it is remarkable how the empirical findings of these various therapists confirm the findings of those who, in the East and West, have been concerned with the achievement of personal integration, self-transcendence and immediate awareness of God, Suchness, Tao, Atman-Brahman or whatever else you choose to call the primordial, immanent-transcendent reality substantial to phenomena. Buddhist and Hindu Yoga insist continually on the necessity of becoming conscious of what one is doing. With that remorseless thoroughness which characterizes his discourses, the Buddha of the Pali scriptures demands that his followers hall be mindful of everything they do – including, at the end of a long list, the act of excretion. The correct posture, with special emphasis on the relation of head to spine, is much insisted upon by Hindu Yoga. In later, Mahayana Buddhism much is said about the dangers of fixed, strained, rigid concentration of the attention (such as was practiced by the Hinayanists, who thereby got themselves side-tracked into 'false samadhi') and the necessity of being passively alert and open and empty… The whole gamut of therapeutic and spiritual procedures can best be thought about, I find, in terms of the Chinese conception of Tao – the Way, the Norm, the immanent and transcendent Suchness with which man, being a self-conscious creature enjoying freedom of will, may co-operate or not, as he chooses. If he doesn't co-operate, if he regards himself as autonomous, if his primary concern is with his self-conscious ego, then everything goes wrong on every plane from the physiological to the spiritual.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Henry Miller ; Llano, Calif. 5 July, 1945.
I hope soon to be able to thank you for them more adequately by sending you a copy of a book which is to appear some time this autumn, a book which I think will be of interest to you. I call it The Perennial Philosophy, and it consists of an anthology of passages drawn from Oriental and Western writers, illustrating that 'philosophia perennis' which lies at the core and constitutes the highest common factor of all the great world religions, the whole embedded in an illustrative commentary of my own. The book was very inte5resting to compile and write and wil, I think, be valuable as setting forth in the most unequivocal and explicit terms the doctrine taught by every master of the spiritual life for the last three thousand years…

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Philippe Dumaine ; Llano, Calif., 3 Sept., 1945.
As it happens, I have dealt rather fully with the subject that interests you in a book that is to appear towards the end of the present month. The title of this book is The Perennial Philosophy and it consists (to about one third of its length) of passages taken from oriental and western authors embedded in a commentary of my own, the whole arranged in a series of chapters, each dealing with one particular aspect of the doctrine and praxis which constitute the highest common factor present in the great world religions… Many of these passages are derived from Taoist and Zen Buddhist sources ; for it was especially in the Far East and under Mahayana Buddhism that salvation was primarily conceived as a reconciliation of time and eternity, a realization (which of course had to be earned) that Nirvana and Samsara (the world of becoming) are ultimately one… But it is among the Zen masters that this doctrine is most clearly and most poetically set forth. D.T. Suzuki's Manual of Zen Buddhism contains translations of the most interesting writings of these Chinese and Japanese mystics – mystics who made use of world-denying self-discipline for the purpose of being able and worthy to become world-accepting on that higher level where a man can say, with Augustine, 'Ama et fac quod vis'.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Victoria Ocampo ; Llano, Calif., 24 Nov. 1945.
I have been reading recently a book which I certainly ought to have read many years ago, but which for some reason I never did read – namely, Walt Whitman's prose Specimen Days in America. The little essays in the middle portion of the book, with their delicately precise descriptions of nature and their curiously Taoist philosophy, are really wonderful – preferable, in some ways, to much of Whitman's verse, which tends to be too eloquent and declamatory ; whereas these little notes and jottings make no pretensions to anything but a simple fidelity to experience and are, in consequence, much more moving than many of the pieces which he wrote with the intention of being moving.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Ossip K. Flechtheim ; Llano, Calif., 29 March, 1946.
 The statement of that purpose and hints on the way he achieved it are set forth in Traherne's Centuries of Meditation, which speak of the unitive knowledge of God in the soul and in the world and the purity of heart which is the condition of 'seeing God'. The same account of the end and the means has been given by all who are qualified to know, from Lao Tzu and Buddha onwards ; but in recent years the knowledge has been either dismissed as ignorance or, more often, politely ignored.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to John Middelton Murry ; Llano, Calif., 26 May, 1946.
The wonderful Chinese allegory, Monkey, which [Arthur] Waley translated a few years back, gives a very forceful account of that blessing and curse of cleverness, with which the Fairy Godmother, who is also the Wicked Fairy, endowed me, and with which, as a young man, I was in considerable measure identified.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to J.B. Rhine ; Llano, Calif., 26 Oct., 1946.
In yogic practices there is a form of intense concentration which includes 'false samadhi', or self-hypnosis. This is discussed in many Mahayana Buddhist texts, where it is pointed out that this way of the 'sravakas and pratyekabuddhas' is a blind alley and that, to the Budhisattva, the condition of annihilation produced by their methods seems, not bliss, but hell.

Letter from Aldous Hexley to Julian Huxley ; Llano, Calif., 27 Oct., 1946.
As for the Final End – that can, of course, be expressed in purely operational terms, as is done in many Buddhist texts, where the psychological (or should one say, 'autological' expression 'Nirvana' is used in plac of the ontological expressions 'experience of God', 'union with Atman-Brahman' and so forth. But the book was primarily an anthology, and most of the writers on the subject have preferred to use ontological expressions. And I woud say that, just as there seems to be justification for passing from purely operational descriptions of physical phenomena as observed in experiments to ontological descriptions in terms of atoms and the rest, so there seems to be justification for passing from operational expressions such as 'Nirvana' to ontological expressions such as 'Mind', 'Brahman' and so forth.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Victoria Ocampo ; Llano, Calif., 12 Dec., 1946.
Freshness, the free-working of the Tao, the something not ourselves that makes for beauty and significance – these are the things I find myself valuing more and more in style.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Fairfield Osborn ; Wrightwood, Calif., 16 Jan., 1948.
But for an ethical system that includes animate and inanimate Nature as well as man, one must go to Chinese Taoism, with its concept of an Order of Things, whose stae of wu-wei, or balance, must be preserved ; of an indwelling Lagos or Tao, which is immanent on every level of existence from the physical, through the physiological, up to the mental and the spiritual. In Manys passages, particularly of the Specimen Days in America, [Walt] Whitman comes very close to the Taoist position. And because of Whitman and Wordsworth and the other 'Nature mystics' of the West, I fell that it might not be too difficult for modern Europeans and Americans to accept some kind of Taoist philosophy of life, with an ethical system comprehensive enough to take in Nature as well as man.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Harold Raymond ; Wrightwood, Calif., 8 May, 1949.
PS. I have just had a letter from Dr. D.T. Suzuki, the well-known Japanese scholar who is the leading authority in the field of Mahayana Buddhism. He writes that he has a friend who wd like to translate The Perennial Philosophy and who is competent to do so adequately. He adds that he does not think it wd be possible to pay any rights on the translation. I have answered suggesting that the would-be translator shd get in touch with you, adding that I don't know what arrangements you may have made. If none have been made, I think Suzuki's friend might have the preference, if his competence is vouched for by such an authority.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Hubert Benoit ; Los Angeles, Calif., 5 Nov., 1949.
Pendant un certain temps j'ai suivi les methods un peu mécaniques qu'enseignent les Swamis de la Mission Ramakrishna ; mais je trouve maintenant plus fructueuses celles de Krishnamurti qui sont beaucoup plus proches aux méthodes Zen. Le vieux Suzuki m'a écrit récemment, annonçant sa prochaine visite aux Etats Univs. J'espère beaucoup le voir.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Hubert Benoit ; Los Angeles, Calif., 10 Dec., 1949.
Je n'ai jaimais eu l'occasion de discuter la technique du 'koan' avec un pratiquant du Zen moderne ; mais il m'a semblé (après la lecture de Suzuki) que cette technique vise à l'épuisement de l'ego par l'effort prolongé. L'étude du 'koan' l'éreinte, le pulverize, et la raison divine prend, à un certain moment, sa place. Mais le Zen a existé avant la technique du 'koan' ; et même dans les temps modernes certains maîtres du Zen ont rejeté la technique du 'koan'. Et une technique qui emploie la tension ininterrompue est intrinsiquement anti-naturelle.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Hubert Benoit ; Los Angeles, Calif., 3 Febr., 1950.
I have nust finished reading the latest volume by Dr. Suzuki to be translated into English - The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, published last year in London, by Ryder and Co. It is a commentary on the Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch and contains a great deal of interesting material from Chinese sources hitherto inaccessible to European readers. If you have not already read the book, I recommend it to you.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Hubert Benoit ; Los Angeles, Calif., 16 March, 1950.
But the average reader takes nothing of the kind for granted and is plunged not merely in Ignorance, in the sense of 'avidya', but also in a more specific ignorance of Vedanta and Mahayana thought.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Christopher Isherwood ; New York, 10 April, 1950.
Nothing very good in the way of a title has yet suggested itself. The only at all satisfactory one is the following, wich wd do if we stress the ens-and-means side of our political situation. It involves a quotation from the Tao-The-King : 'Heaven arms with pity thoas whom it wd. not see destroyed'.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Dr Roger Godel ; Los Angeles, Calif., 10 Dec., 1950.
This typewriter has no accents, so I will write in English to wish you both a merry Christmas and a new year as happy as Messrs McArthur, Mao [Zedong] and Stalin will permit anyone to have.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Mrs Elise Murrell ; Los Angeles, Calif., 4 Nov. 1951.
I am hoping to see Dr Suzuki one of these days. He is lecturing somewhere in this neighbourhood. He is a little old Japanese of more than eighty, with the tiniest hands I have ever seen on any human being, and with an extraordinary charm and gentleness. I saw him once a year ago, and was greatly taken by him, would like very much to talk with him again. There is a a very curious book by a man called R.H. Blyth, called Zen in English Literature. Blyth is a professor at some Japanese universitys and has lived in that country for many years. The book deals with the relgion between momvnet-by-moment experience of Things-as they-Are [and] Poetry. It is a bit perverse sometimes, but very illuminating at others.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Dr Roger Godel ; Los Angeles, Calif., 23 Dec., 1951.
May 1953 be as happy a year as Messrs Stalin, Truman, Mao [Zedong] et Cie, will permit it to be for any individual… Has your book come out yet ? All I have seen in this field is Dr. Benoit's new book on Zen. Good in its queer way – but written in the crabbed, abstract style which made his first book so hard to read. I saw dear old Dr. Suzuki the other day and had a very pleasant and instructive talk with him. I find the whole Zen approach, together with Chinese and Japanese Zen literature, peculiarly satisfying. There is a curious book by an Englishman now living in Japan (Blyth is his name) called Zen in English literature well worth reading, tho' sometimes a little exasperating.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to J.B. Rhine ; Los Angeles, Calif., 17 Jan., 1954.
What turns up under mescalin and in schizophrenia is divers ; but the diversity exhibits many common features, and these common features crop up in descriptions of Christian, Moslem and Buddhist paradises, and, with the experience has taken a negative turn, in descriptions of hell.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Matthew Huxley ; Los Angeles, Calif., 17 Febr., 1954.
If, as seems probable, the international tension eases (for the Russians obviously don't want war and, in spite of the China Lobby, a lot of American businessmen do want trade with Mao [Zedong]) and if the recession doesn't go so far that the world's rulers find it necessary to resort once more to rearmament on the biggest scale…

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Humphry Osmond ; Los Angeles, Calif., 2 March, 1954.
One of them was like a supplementary chapter to Monkey – the wonderful Chinese allegory translated by Arthur Waley. It was a vision of Monkey trying to climb to heaven up his own tail – a really admirable comment on the pretensions of the discursive intellect.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Mme Allanah Statlender ; La Combe, 26 July, 1954.
'The Buddha never preached enlightenment' – for the simple reason that enlightenment is something for every individual to experience for himself… It may even, as the Buddha was never tired of reminding his listeners, be a hindrance to enlightenment, an obstacle in the way of liberation – inasmuch as paying too much attention to such questions as 'How did the universe come into existence? ' may be a distraction no less dangerous than the less solemn and more discreditable dissipations of the 'life of pleasure'.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Roger and Alice Godel ; Los Angeles, Calif, 10 Jan., 1955.
For five hours I was given a series of luminous illustrations of the Christian saying, 'Judge not that ye be not judged', and the Buddhist saying, 'To set up what you like against what you dislike, this is the disease of the mind'.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Dr Humphry Osmond ; Park N.Y., 18 June, 1955.
It is a matter of will plus what the Buddhists call (I think) 'upaya', appropriate means.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Dr Humphry Osmond ; Los Angeles, Calif., 24 Oct., 1955.
And the things which had entirely occupied my attention on that first occasion I now perceived to be temptations – temptation to escape from the central reality into false, or at least imperfect and partial Nirvanas of beauty and mere knowledge. I talked a good deal about these temptations ; commented on the light this realization threw on the legend of St Anthony, on the Zen statement that, for a Bodhisattva, the Samadhi of Emptiness, Nirvana apart from wht world, apart from love, compassion and sentient beings, is as terrible as the pains of hell.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Victoria Ocampo ; Los Angeles, Calif., 19 July, 1956.
The supreme art of life would be the art of passing at will from obscure knowledge to conceptualized, utilitarian knowledge, from the aesthetic to the mystical ; and all the time to be able, in the words of the Zen master, to grasp the non-particular that exists in particulars, to be aware of the not-thought which lies in thought – the absolute in relationships, the infinite in finite things, the eternal in time.

Letter from Aldoux Huxley to Dr Humphry Osmond ; Los Angeles, Calif., 1 June, 1957.
I also waw dear old Suzuki in New York. What a really wonderful old man ! Have your read his most recent book on 'Mysticism, Christian and Buddhist' ? It is very good. And even better is a little pamphlet published by the London Buddhist Society, called the Essence of Buddhism. This last is really admirable. It makes one realize how much subtler these Far Eastern Buddhists were, min matters of psychology, than anyone in the West.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley ; New York, 10 Sept., 1957.
The Buddha was never tired of telling his hearers that theology and metaphysics were obstacles to enlightenment as grave, very nearly, as malice and insensitiveness. And how refreshing it is to find in the Far Eastern literature thos delightful anecdotes about Zen monks who burn images of Buddha in order to keep warm in winter, or who say that anyone who talks too much about Buddha or Buddhism ought to have his mouth washed out – like a child who has used a dirty word.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley ; New York, 27 Sept. 1957.
It is in relation to this kind of personal religion that an excessive preoccupation with theology is deplored by the Buddha and the Zen masters.

Letter from Aldoux Huxley to Dr Humphry Osmond ; Los Angeles, Calif., 17 July, 1960.
I took some LSD 3 or 4 weeks ago and hat some interesting experiences of the way in which, as the Indians say, the thought and the thinker and the thing tought about are one – and then of the way in which this unowned experience becomes something belonging to me ; then no me any more and a kind of 'sat chit ananda', at one moment without 'karuna' or charity (how odd that the Vedantists say nothing about Love, whereas the Mahayana Buddhists insists that unless 'prajnaparamita' (the wisdom of the other shore) has 'karuna' as the reverse of the medal, 'nirvana' is, for the Budhisattva, no better than hell). And in this experience with LSD, I had an inkling of both kinds of 'nirvana' – the loveless being-counsciousness-bliss, and the one with love and, above all, a sense that one can nover love enough.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Mrs Lucille Kahn ; Torre del Mare, Savona, 8 Aug., 1961.
Then I'd like, if it isn't asking too much, some of the books on oriental philosophy and religion which I valued. Conze's 'Buddhism' and his anthology of Buddhist texts. Suzuki's Zen essays and Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, Evans-Wentz's 3 books published by Oxford U. Press, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Milarepa and Great Wisdom (I think that's the title)…

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Sir Julian and Lady Huxley ; Los Angeles, Calif., 7 Jan., 1962.
Nehru was being harshly criticized while we were ther for being so apathetic about the Chinese, and I was not too surprised by his Goan adventure. He had to prove that he could do something and win a victory, if not over China at least over Portugal.

Letter from Aldous Huxley to Ian Parsons ; Los Angeles, Calif., 19 Jan., 1962.
Or perhaps one cd find a good black-and-white drawing (if colour reproduction to too expensive ) – some Chinese or Japanese rendering of rocks in water, suggestive of an island.