Like the Flowing River

Many centuries ago, in the days of the Samurai, a book was written in Japan about the spiritual art of the sword: Impassive Understanding, also known as The Treatise of Tahlan, which was the name of its author (who was both a fencing master and a Zen monk). I have adapted a few sections below:

Keeping calm. Anyone who understands the meaning of life knows that things have neither a beginning nor an end, and that there is, therefore, no point in worrying. Fight for what you believe in without trying to prove anything to anyone; maintain the same silent calm of someone who has had the courage to choose his own destiny.

This applies to both love and war.

Allowing your heart to be present. Anyone who trusts in his powers of seduction, in his ability to say the right thing at the right time, in the correct use of the body, becomes deaf to the 'voice of the heart'. This can only be heard when we are in complete harmony with the world around us, and never when we judge ourselves to be the centre of the universe.

This applies to both love and war.

Learning to be the other person. We are so focused on what we judge to be the best attitude that we forget something very important: in order to attain our objectives, we need other people. It is necessary, therefore, not only to observe the world, but to imagine ourselves into the skins of other people, and to learn how to follow their thoughts.

This applies to both love and war.

Finding the right master. Our path will always cross that of other people who, out of love or pride, want to teach us something. How can we distinguish the friend from the manipulator? The answer is simple: the true teacher is not the one who teaches us the ideal path, but the one who shows us the many ways of reaching the road we need to travel if we are to find our destiny. Once we have found that road, the teacher cannot help us anymore, because its challenges are unique.

This applies to neither love nor war, but unless we understand it, we will never get anywhere.

Escaping from threats. We often think that the ideal attitude is that of giving up one's life for a dream. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to achieve a dream, we need to preserve our life, and we must, therefore, know how to avoid those things that threaten us. The more we plan our steps, the more chance there is that we will go wrong, because we are failing to take into consideration four things: other people, life's teachings, passion, and calm. The more we feel we are in control of things, the farther off we are from controlling anything. A threat does not issue any warning, and a swift reaction cannot be planned like a Sunday afternoon walk.

Therefore, if you want to be in harmony with your love or with your fight, learn to react rapidly. Through educated observation, do not allow your supposed experience of life to transform you into a machine. Use that experience to listen always to 'the voice of the heart'. Even if you do not agree with what that voice is saying, respect it and follow its advice: it knows when to act and when to avoid action.

This applies to both love and war.

In the Blue Mountains

The day after my arrival in Australia, my publisher takes me to a natural park close to Sydney. There, in the midst of the forest that covers an area known as the Blue Mountains, are three rock formations in the form of obelisks.

'They're the Three Sisters,' my publisher says, and then tells me the following legend.

A shaman was out walking with his three sisters when the most famous warrior of the time approached them and said: 'I want to marry one of these lovely girls.'

'If one of them marries, the other two will think they're ugly. I'm looking for a tribe where warriors are allowed to have three wives,' replied the shaman, moving off.

For years, the shaman travelled the Australian continent, but never found that tribe.

'At least one of us could have been happy,' said one of the sisters, when they were old and tired of all that walking.

'I was wrong,' said the shaman, 'but now it's too late.'

And he transformed the three sisters into blocks of stone, so that anyone who passed by there would understand that the happiness of one does not mean the unhappiness of the others.

The Taste of Success

A rash Hejazi, my Iranian publisher, tells a story about a man who, in his search for spiritual enlightenment, decided to climb a high mountain dressed only in his normal clothes and to spend the rest of his life there meditating.

He realized at once that one change of clothing wouldn't be enough because his clothes soon became dirty. He came down the mountain, went to the nearest village and begged them to give him some more clothes. Since they all knew he was a man in search of enlightenment, they gave him a new pair of trousers and a new shirt.

The man thanked them and went back up to the hermitage he was building on top of the mountain. He spent his nights building the walls and his days in meditation. He ate the fruit from the trees, and drank the water from a nearby spring.

A month later, he discovered that a mouse was nibbling away at his spare set of clothes, which he had left out to dry. Since he wanted to concentrate exclusively on his spiritual duties, he went down to the village again and asked them to get him a cat. The villagers, who respected his search for spiritual enlightenment, found him a cat.

Seven days later, the cat was close to starvation because it could not live on fruit alone and there were no more mice around. The man went back to the village in search of milk. The villagers knew that the milk was not for him and that he was surviving without eating anything apart from what Nature provided, and so, once again, they helped him.

The cat soon finished the milk, and the man asked the villagers to lend him a cow. Since the cow gave more milk than the cat could drink, the man started drinking it too, so as not to waste it. Soon, by dint of breathing good mountain air, eating fruit, meditating, drinking milk, and doing exercise, he was transformed into a very handsome specimen indeed. A young woman, who had gone up the mountain in search of a sheep, fell in love with him and persuaded him that he needed a wife to take care of the household duties, leaving him free to meditate in peace.

Three years later, the man was married with two children, three cows, and an orchard and was running a meditation centre, with a long waiting list of people wanting to visit the 'Temple of Eternal Youth'.

When someone asked him how it had all started, he said: