Awareness

[Guest guest]

Hi Lewis,

Wei Wu Wei is an interesting

character. Here's a note on him

publicising a new biography.

 

Short description/annotation: Only By

Failure is a biography of Terence Gray.

((By Paul Cornwell))He was an Irish

aristocrat who in the Twenties became an

Egyptologist and historian, writing books

of short plays based on Ancient Egypt and

the early history of Ireland. He co-

founded the Cambridge Festival Theatre in

1926 and followed the inspiration of

Gordon Craig. Actors there included

Maurice Evans, Robert Donat, Flora Robson

and Jessica Tandy. Ninette de Valois

(Gray’s cousin) began her career there. In

1933 Gray’s interest in the theatre ended

and he moved to France, to become Wei Wu

Wei and he wrote eight books in his own

style of Zen Buddhism.

 

 

Main description: Only by creativity and

the risk of failure can one succeed. This

book is the first attempt to trace the

life of Terence Gray, a man who always

wanted to hide behind masks and

pseudonyms, whose death, in 1987 at the

age of 93, was (therefore) not noted

despite a life of great variety and

achievement. He is only known today by

brief references in theatre books and

under his pseudonym of Wei Wu Wei. The son

of Irish aristocrats, Gray was born in

Suffolk and came to Wandlebury near

Cambridge before leaving for short spells

at Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge.

He was a Red Cross ambulance-driver in

France and Italy and an air-mechanic for

the Royal Flying Corps during the First

World War. He became an Egyptologist,

historian and author of plays during the

Twenties before opening the Festival

Theatre in Cambridge in 1926 with a

sensational production of the Oresteia in

Egyptian-style on a redesigned open stage

and with the new electric lighting from

Germany and with choreography by Ninette

de Valois. The Royal Ballet of today has

its roots in performances of the de Valois

school and her arrangement of movement for

plays at the Festival Theatre. Over seven

years Gray achieved an international

reputation, until eventually his little

empire crumbled, culminating with the

conflict between his own views and those

of the student critics of the Cambridge

Review. At just thirty-eight his creative

life seemed to come to an end and,

humiliated by a satirical revue put on by

the Cambridge Footlights, he departed for

the South of France to run the family

vineyard and the racehorses which were

kept in England and Ireland. His horse

Zarathrustra won the Ascot Gold Cup in

1956 and the following year he married a

Russian princess from Georgia. His new

life really began in 1958 when he looked

up at the stars and decided to become a

mystic. Under the name of Wei Wu Wei, Gray

published the first of eight books in his

own personal style of Zen Buddhism.

 

Michael:

This doesn't sound like failure to me

though may I say that the Tenth Man

adaptation had an element of twee

orientalism about it. It was a popular

sort of pastiche in the early

20th.century. I have before me " Kai Lung

unrolls his mat " by Ernest Brahm who

hailed from far flung Manchester. One

remembers the novelist who passed himself

off as the reincarnation of a Tibetan yogi

though it escapes me which style or title

he affected.

((http://www.serendipity.li/baba/rampa.htm

l ))

He was discovered to have been a plumber

so it is well that he did not fall in this

janma into the ranks of the Hindoo where

his varna would not have been auspicious.

 

Wei Wu Wei's Tenth Man:

You know the quaint story of the ten monks

traveling

together from one Master to another, in

search of the

enlightenment they had failed to obtain?

Crossing a

river in flood, they were separated by the

swift

current, and when they reached the other

shore, they

reassembled and one counted the others to

make sure

that all were safely across. Alas, he was

only able to

count nine brothers.

 

Each in turn counted the others, and each

could only

count nine. As they were weeping and

bewailing their

drowned brother, a passing traveler on his

way to the

nearest town, asked what their trouble was

and, having

counted them, assured them that all ten

were present.

But each counted again, and the traveler

being unable

to persuade them, left them and went on

this way.

 

Let us continue the story:

 

Then one monk went to the river-side in

order to wash

his tear-stained face. As he leant over a

rock above a

clear pool he started back and, rushing to

his nine

fellow-monks, he announced that he had

found their

poor drowned brother at the bottom of a

pool. So each

in turn went over to the rock in question

and, leaning

over, looked into the depths of the pool.

 

When all had seen their poor drowned

brother, whom,

owing to the depth of the pool, they could

not reach,

they celebrated a funeral service in his

memory.

 

The passing traveler, returning from the

town, asked

them what they were doing and, when he was

told,

pointed out to them, and assured them,

that since each

had celebrated his own decease, and since

all had

celebrated the decease of each, one and

all they were

well and truly dead. On learning this each

monk was

instantly awakened, and ten fully

enlightened monks

returned to their monastery to the intense

delight of

their grandmotherly old Master.

 

Note: The Tenth Man is the only man: there

is no

other.

 

" Absolute absence is also absolute

presence. But the

absence of presence-and-absence is the

inconceivable

truth. "

 

P.S. Note on the Nirguna/Saguna later.