SHANJIAN: A PATH TO AWAKENING OF THE TRUTH

HOMAGE to Shanjian Dashi (Arthur Easton)

His life delivered a lesson for a fresh favorable rebirth for those chained to unfavorable circumstances in their present life within Samsara. 

In this gradual and, perhaps for the tempted reader, tedious history many lessons are presented which were attained upon the Dharma Path from birth through adolescence of Shanjian Dashi (Arthur Easton). Clues are generated by examining this favorable birth which can help those not so favoured who now face a path of difficult Dharma advances.

We can perhaps declare that Truth lies beyond what is not True and what appears to be True but is not is Illusion. If then Truth lies beyond all Illusion then perhaps the closest that we can get is to experience "all to be Illusion" beyond the cognitive consciousness that "all is Illusion".

Human folly then can be defined as the mistaken belief that illusions are real and this we can call the "DELUSION OF TRUTH" and the destruction of that "DELUSION"  we can term "AWAKENING" and, as Gotama the Buddha declared, one receives nothing that has any utility.

Here is presented "a" path to Awakening not "the" path to Awakening and it is a particular path of delusion, illusion and awakening that cannot ever be duplicated. That is because each man or woman's path must by definition be different.

This is the path of the Illusion given form and the name. The photo presented above is clearly not the Truth, for a photo can at best only duplicate the illusory form of a given moment. From moment to moment the biological base is changing as is the illusory Identity and the Truth that may be hidden. But history leaves indelible marks, not upon the written page, but upon one's memory and it is there that the record of the path to freedom lies.

Why present such a mass of illusions over time for one form and name? It is presented in the hope that present reflections upon that past may bring more substance to the teachings that I have given before the photo was taken and over more than fifteen years since that photo was taken.

While I am writing this mind/body is approaching the magic figure of 80. Why is eighty a magic figure? It is because this mind never imagined for a moment that it would come close to that number. Why one man lives and another dies is in itself a mystery, but it is a marvelous mystery, for he who does not see life and death as one beautiful thing has never lived at all. He who does not see that there is no individual existence and therefore no individual death will be forever dancing in Delusion with the true Illusion that is life always just out of reach.

So let us begin this story in the year 1932, perhaps in the summer of that year.

In 1932 the world's economy continued to deteriorate and unemployment in the United States in that year was 24.1% with 13 million Americans without work. Yet today in 2010 in America with unemployment at 10% we say we are in crisis.

Many ordinary people were living in the streets or in old derelict buildings.

But progress continued and the BBC Television in England made its first regular TV broadcast. It was just seventy nine years ago. 

The British jailed the Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi , and in Britain the first-ever splitting of the atom occurred, while in Russia there was mass starvation and estimated death tolls of over five million due to the faulty agricultural policy.

Meanwhile in England  the Hunger Marchers Army marched to London to protest lack of food. World War I vets march to Washington DC demanding early payments of cash bonuses to help survive the Great Depression.

Working hours were cut and wages slashed by 30%. Yet at the same time the Summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles and the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid New York. Not many of the ordinary people cared any more than they did in learning that Al Capone was convicted for Income Tax Evasion and Charles Lindbergh's son was kidnapped.

Who cared that a young Plymouth fisherman of 25 called Arthur Frederick and his wife Freda Lillian managed to get together and generate the life that summer and on April 11, 1933, which was was the worst year of the depression, when Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany and opened the first concentration camp at Dachau, their first child was born.

Typhus epidemic strikes thousands in Moscow. The Yellow River breaches its banks in China creating mass starvation due to following crop failure. On a lighter vein, the original King Kong movie was shown, the Loch Ness Monster was sighted and the Board Game Monopoly was invented

It was an inauspicious time, but what Buddha called a favorable birth.