Let’s continue by mentioning that Zen Monks have all sorts of activity they populate their monastic life with, in the real world (even their small corner of it).  They don’t just sit all day under a Bodhi tree.  They have a wide variety of this-worldly activities, engaging their bodies and senses, which embody the idea that there has to be something for enlightenment to transcend in the first place.  All of their satori experiences have a seed-shell made of “doing stuff” to actually blossom.

Where am I going with this?

It annoys me (not a terribly enlightened emotion, I know) when notions of spirituality drift further and further from the daily requirements of living, by those who have the privilege of looking from that sort of distance; from a professional philosopher’s and/or professional author’s tower-view.

Warriors are not only capable of spiritual profundity, but they can be exemplars of it.  That is literally, exactly literally, why the Bhagavad Gita takes its metaphorical language, location, and cast of characters on the field of battle, by an ace archer who is tasked with brutal and terrible war against his own clan and beloved elders (and even his martial arts guru).  

I’ll grant that Cleary goes on to mention how the actual samurais that Zen monks had to sort of “look after” didn’t exactly sound like exemplars of good behavior.  The examples Cleary mentions are clear enough; absentee fathers/husbands leaving wrecked home lives in their wake, often domestically violent as well; siring illegitimate children while they were at it.  But a description of a number of bad apples doesn’t characterize the whole bunch as rotten.  Additionally, that does not exclude the possibility that they had authentically transcendent sensibilities and experiences, even if/when they behaved badly — for those that indeed behaved badly.

The razor’s edge of a professional warrior’s life, in a legendarily volatile milieu rife with constant memento mori moments, is a rich breeding ground for moments of profound insight and spiritually saturated experience.  

And its beyond the scope of this quick journal entry of mine to belabor the point too much more than I have here, but that is one of the things I’m eventually driving at with this whole umbrella of “Dharma Knights” content.  So, please stay tuned as I continue developing these thoughts; not so that I can “prove it” but so that some of the ideas can linger in more minds than my own, on the subject.

And its beyond the scope of this quick journal entry of mine to belabor the point too much more than I have here, but that is one of the things I’m eventually driving at with this whole umbrella of “Dharma Knights” content.  So, please stay tuned as I continue developing these thoughts; not so that I can “prove it” but so that some of the ideas can linger in more minds than my own, on the subject.

How do you handle it?  How do you handle wounds accumulated in fights?  Do you behave as if you’ve never had a hand severed in a war, if you have?  or do you learn to live in adaptations accounting for that missing hand?  At what point is a gesture toward spiritual strength (and a reaching towards bliss) a means of insisting the hand that is not is the hand that was never severed?  

Only the gods are immortal; or God, if you prefer; or even: language that surpasses our bodies, and the entire world we’ve constructed out of the language that is both from our bodies and weaved in and out of our bodies.  Our kind cast an enchantment of words and ideas on the world, and it, in turn, enchanted us.  So what enchantment of false immortality have you cast upon yourself (or accept as an enchantment of others) that would lead you to believe there would be no days you’d despair?  What led you to believe you could exile your shadow so thoroughly?  Or even that such an exile would be good?

Your hard days, your despairs, they are your strength in masquerade.  Your spirit grows in harsh soils.  That is why the wasteland’s fertilization is a miracle, but one that is internally experienced more readily and often than it is seen literally.  When the barren soils of your souls have been shown and told to seed the hardiest of growing things, and then these hardy growing things slowly transform the soil itself to be capable of growing more.  And yet, we’d never hope to totally reverse every corner of waste, for those are the places of the faithful.  If all faith was easily rewarded, its value would be easily forgotten.  

Your hard days are your grains of sand, in the hourglass, from the desert, counting down until you have the strength to overturn it’s glass lens, up to down, down to up, and to reverse the illusion of artificial dooms in favor of authentic (but acceptable) dooms.

Your mortality is your beauty, your dharma need not be at loggerheads with that.

Just a thought.

And yet, a mindful reading makes it clear that this story does not feature Ram treating Ravana as his enemy, so much as an opponent who must be overcome in order to restore the world from a state of adharma to a state of dharma.  Ram even seeks out the Brahmanic wealth of multiple expertises at the feet of his dying adversary, honoring both the societal imperative to preserve knowledge and also to acknowledge the sacredness of the soul he was forced to wrench from Ravana’s body in combat.  Ram even does penance for the crime of killing a Brahmin (priest), which Ravana was, despite his own corruption and abuses by entering into the political realm as a conquerer and self-made king.  

What’s the difference?  How is any of this abbreviated story above an example of the difference in enmity and adversarial conflict?  

Ram never invested anger or hatred against Ravana.  He never set his heart on revenge, or even justice, so much as rescuing his wife Sita and restoring the honor of his royal clan.  He didn’t even judge Ravana morally, even while resolving that he must be slain for order to be restored. 

In other words, Ram never made it personal; despite Ravana’s motivations for his many crimes and corruptions being completely and totally personal.

We tend to use “enemy” rather loosely when referring to one-on-one conflicts, without giving much thought to how it may change our attitudes and worldview about our conflicts.  An impersonal, unrecognized member of an opposing army can be formally called “the enemy” if not as often “my enemy”.  But how often is one of those random, unrecognized individuals ever actually YOUR enemy?  They stand on the other line of an aggregate boundary, but rarely your boundary specifically, in a personal way.  

There are times when, like Ram, we would be better served to treat our opposite within a struggle as merely an adversary or opponent, to be sure our own feelings (and thus, our discernment and objectivity) do not tempt us to act wrongly; to miss the mark in simply achieving a need we have which may be in conflict to the need of another.  We do not dehumanize our opponent.  We do not ascribe to them all the qualities of bad, evil, shadow-reflections of our own perceived goodness.  We simply act to achieve victory where we must.

Ram, in his story, managed to humanize an enemy we as the readers have every reason to regard as an inhuman beast even as he is a vastly intelligent adversary in the narrative.  He and his people live within a fabulous city gained by conquest, but within the city, act more according to the law of the jungle than the laws of humane civilization.  

And yet, even in dispatching his adversary, Ram imbues Ravana with sacredness and recognition rather than merely a slain enemy.  In doing so, even the act of killing Ravana has transcendent substance, as the dying Ravana has his consciousness expanded in the process; he finally sees his former adversary (and thus, the universe) in ways he was not capable of seeing before, when the whole world for Ravana was formerly split into “me” and “not me”, or “mine” and “not mine”.  

It is inevitable that we will gain adversaries, in a world where needs come into conflict, and some dimension of competition to satisfy those needs is required.  It is not inevitable, nor perhaps even desirable, that we gain enemies in the proces; for the sake of our own soul-substances and clarity, and even perhaps that of our adversaries.  Choose your adversaries carefully, when it is indeed your choice to make; and choose your feelings about the adversarial pairing even more carefully.

Defeat has layers; there are scrimmages for defeat that can prepare you for actual defeats, and there are gaps between the significance of different actual defeats. Some consequences of defeat are far steeper on the balance sheet than others. In any case, a fighter has to be able to accept defeat with equanimity, or they are lost. The mental tools that accompany unfavorable outcomes multiply usefulness and diminish inertia. Yet, few make the decision to consciously develop tools, though many successful students of defeat organically learn tools that they may not know how to articulate to others; it’s just a lived experience.

The least successfully adjusted fighters are those who can’t even incorporate the training-room losses with mindsets of uncomfortable but necessary success habits. How can one ever hope to handle a real and impactful defeat if one could not even process defeats in training as lessons that are supposed to happen; that are expected? How can someone who did not push themselves to the point of failure on purpose, in the environment designed for that push, hope to succeed when it really matters? Let alone, how can they accept to let a true defeat pass through them, when they failed to invest in defeat in failure when the stakes were not too real? This is the very idea of investing in non-crucial defeats, so vulnerabilities are immunized.

I was speaking with a student recently who admitted (as many will not) that they continually had the internal mantra of “I must not lose” on repeat. What the brain actually thinks you’re saying here is “I lose”, cutting out several of the other words in the middle. Because the thing you’re visualizing — without acceptance — is the loss, again and again and again, even if you’re ostensibly visualizing it as an outcome to be avoided. The brain likes to output its visualizations to the body, and the programming it’s sending out here is instructions for losing. Be careful what you repeat, and know you might not be cycling quite what you imagine yourself to be repeating as an official or unofficial mantra.

A topic I’m sure I’ll return to often in my writings is the samurai practice of only visualizing the absolute worst of mortal defeats so as to be at peace with the possibility; but the reasoning here is the precise opposite of the anxious brain’s loop of outcomes to fear. The former is to consciously quell anxiety and fear, so as to act with clarity and no hindrance; the latter is precisely to feed into such anxiety, and is mostly done unconsciously.

Be at peace with defeats, small and large, and detach yourself from anxiety in either direction about the outcomes. Reach forward with clarity, with tranquility, and with focus; do so by not fearing defeat in the first place. Do so by accepting that you do not control fate, even as you do take responsibility for your own actions. You can only do your best, and you will never have one hundred percent control of all the chaotic forces of the world around you; you will likely never even have complete control over yourself. But making the conscious decision to embrace the possibility of defeat, and to invest in little skill-building scrimmages of defeat from time to time, makes all the difference.

For fighters and warriors, for those enmeshed in struggle, Bhakti can become even more crucial. Getting to the nitty gritty of necessary action can make one feel confused, can make even questions of morality and ethics weigh heavily and tax the heart. But actions taken in service to the higher truth, the higher dharma — and sometimes, even the higher divinity — removes oneself and self-serving motives from the confusion.

Knights, when they are anything more than glorified mercenaries, serve a higher duty than their own best interest. Ideally, they serve a higher duty than their worldly and political lords as well, though reality and all the authentic grime of actual history contains ample evidence of knights who cynically had no such higher law, principal, or even divinity to whom their ultimate allegiance was sworn. For every knight of the church, there were as many (or more) knights bound only to the office or throne keeping them fed and equipped.

When we dedicate ourselves to a fight, to a struggle, or even to our own spiritual struggles, we do well to have a higher truth to which we ultimately subordinate ourselves. Even in the secular versions of European Grail stories venerating authentic human compassion and love as the highest ideals, those ideals themselves were also a continuum of something crucial but lost in spiritual life at the time. Obscured but potent dimensions of transcendent spirituality and natural harmony had been washed out of the hollowed-out church-dominated landscape of that era, and the essence of The Grail was reconnecting with those obscured dimensions.

When you fight, do you do it for your own glory, like the Ancient greeks of The Iliad? Seeing nothing else on the horizon of this life? Do you combine a nihilism and ego-driven passion into what you do, thinking that there is nothing else real, nothing greater for which your efforts can serve? Are you making it about you? Are you so lost in your own struggle that you forget what it can feel like to struggle for something that may even outlive your own mortality?

Your Bhakti doesn’t have to be to God, but devotion something greater than yourself (and probably: something that even transcends the merely political) can take you further than motivations for glory. It can make you capable of more. It can make your spirit grow. It can make even efforts to improve yourself and your abilities more effective than motivations driven by your own ego; however powerful pure unadulterated ambition has proven in some aspects of our lives and of our collective histories. Ideas live longer. Fellowships of believers, committed to transcendent beliefs, live longer.

A whole world can become a greater context and set of bounding coordinates for your notion of your “self”; for example, “I am fighter [your name], knight of the World,” even if “knight of God” sits strangely on your lips and hearts. Because as large as your own spirit is (and it may indeed be colossal): it’s not all about you.

When you find your higher truth, to be a bhakta of this higher truth, imagine it saying: “whenever you fight, do it in service to me” and you may, like so many countless before you, literally experience the feelings of strength refilling your tired spirit, when you might otherwise falter.

For those who have decided that the monastic life, even, lacks this sort of inevitable conflict: I’ve had several friends who had stints as monks of one sort or another (Zen, Hindu, Catholic) disabuse me of this opinion.  A monastic order is a microcosm of society in some ways, no matter how they may try to steer it otherwise.  And in any setting wherein two humans’ needs might disagree, there will be conflict.

Again, we see: you will have to fight.

Is it right for me to invisibly substitute “fight” for “conflict” here?  Cannot conflict have peaceful and nonviolent dimensions?  Of course it can.  But even in the sense that you have to struggle to have your needs not canceled out by others, or even that you have to struggle to not act against your own spirit by some need to avoid conflict, there will be one or another fight, now or later.  A martial arts tournament might have less (or even: no violence) than a heart neglecting itself, or one heart doing quiet wrongs to another.  

Then there are those of us who do not have reservations about fighting, even in literal senses, when the correct circumstances trigger a need to do so.  We know we’ll need to be prepared to fight one day, maybe even at a time we don’t chose.  We train some sort of readiness for a fight like this; maybe martial arts classes, maybe speech and debate clubs for rhetorical struggles; maybe even shooting lessons for the potential of deadly encounters where people mean to take our very lives from us.  The world has darknesses weaved into it, and even compassion for those wounded souls who sometimes multiply the world’s darkness does not translate to a willingness to let them harm us.  So here again, we will fight.

Preparing your skills for conflict doesn’t also mean preparing your mind, per se; though some aspects of repetitive practice do yield some level of preparedness, for some aspects of the reality of a fight.  Other aspects must be prepared in other ways.  Some professional warriors (samurai, for example) had meditations wherein they would visualize battles and even their own death; and these same warriors also often had meditative preparations to clear their mind of anything and everything so that they could be accustomed to acting as a vessel empty of disturbances of the mind and perceptions.  There are many ways to prepare for the fight, and they are all valuable in one or another sense.

But, in sum: how are you preparing for whatever fight is inevitable in your life?  Or are you still under the delusion that there will be no fight, no struggle, and that a perfectly tranquil existence was somehow your right, or inheritance, when all of nature around you literally struggles for survival even in the most microscopic violences you’ll never even know to look for until you’re told how?  Where even the plants vie with one another for nutrients as often as they collaborate in a system?  

In this existence, perhaps it is best to be just as prepared for adversarial struggle of one kind or another as we are for cooperation and collaboration; may we have the courage to reach for the appropriate choice at the appropriate time, and the wisdom and discernment to identify that appropriate time.

Archery is mentioned as a metaphor for focus, and for spiritual discipline, because it requires silencing the rest of the world outside of our target; visually silencing, auditorily silencing, and even silencing any bodily/tactile sensation apart from the mechanics required to draw and shoot.  

Arjuna of the epic Mahabharata (and implicitly: of the Bhagavad Gita, which is framed as an expanded episode from that tale) is the best archer in his world, with the possible exception of his unacknowledged brother and rival Karna.  It’s no coincidence that Krishna (supreme lord of creation, in this tale) chooses Arjuna as his friend and devotee; he’s got the ability to focus unrelentingly on a goal, and also the ability to listen to wisdom to aid in his discernment, after spending most of his childhood-time around forest mystics and spiritual teachers.  But it all starts with his ability to focus; which takes him a long way past situations (with Krishna’s help and guidance) that his other shortcomings would ordinarily prevent him from surpassing.

When he is still young, but old enough to begin learning the secrets of archery, he is asked a sort of “test” question by his martial guru, along with his brothers (who all fail the test).  When Arjuna is asked to report on what he sees, when drawing and aiming at his target, he reports that he can’t describe all he sees; he can only see the eye of the stuffed bird which is his practice target.  He can only see the eye; not the rest of the bird, not the sky, not the ground, not anything else surrounding the very center of his target.  His guru tells him to fire, and Arjuna strikes the eye; whereas his brothers and cousins were told to put down their bows.

When we as beings with spiritual intent set ourselves to one or another kind of meditation, in the East, the metaphor is often that we are “stringing our bow”; particularly when we take a seated posture with an upright spine for said meditation.  But the world will take every opportunity to keep you from sitting still and drawing your bow.  It will relentlessly provide you with distractions, and even multiply your duties, to discourage you from your determined path.

To be honest, in this life where we must have at least some share of obligations and exchange, such distractions are inevitable.  And yet, your determination to seize opportunities to focus must be equally inevitable; whether you are carving out ten minutes or an hour, you must be married to your archery (meditation, perhaps) practice.  You must improve your skill, and sharpen your dedication, every day.  Whatever other obligations pile up, you must have a sacred boundary line that says “no further than this”.  And if you need a rationale surpassing your own goals to justify it, here is one: to be of best service to others, you must build your capacity as a servant.  The more your focused disciplines are maintained, the scope of service you can provide will grow as well.

So, pick up your bow, aim, and practice shooting again, and again, and again, until you are little more than a repetition of ever-improving bullseyes.  Until it is time to fulfill one or another inevitable obligation… which is only a rest interval between yet another practice session.

Practice only seeing the bird’s eye.

Having spent half to two-thirds of his (fictionalized) life in forest-exile with his brothers, he learned as many spiritual lessons among the wisest sages as he did military lessons under his peerless martial arts guru. He also went on his own idiomatic quest for the weapons of heaven, following his own path, to prepare for the coming war he knew he and his brothers would have to fight.

He was also a devotee; a bhakta; of his friend Krishna, who he also knew (at times) to be the supreme power in the universe, behind all other powers, manifest in the world.

Fast forward to Medieval Europe.

The Arthurian tales spread far and wide in a spiritually corrupt place, where the priestly class has a monopoly on nominal salvation; no matter what the character or fidelity of the particular priest serving as intermediary. And the language of scripture, spoken at Mass (etc) was not even shared in the common tongue, but in the mostly by-then alien tongue of Latin.

This “sacred language” and “vulgar language” disconnect was much like that of India. The Sanskrit language of the Vedas, in India, was spoken by the priestly class of the Brahmins; like Latin, it was also somewhat guarded like a trade secret from the common people.

Knightly tales of questing — often, for the Grail; or else authentic romantic love — exploded in popularity. In the best of these tales, the essence of Christianity’s understated feminine compassions blended with the barely re-branded Celtic nature mysteries, and enchantment dramas. The search for submerged spiritual truth not mediated by hollow sacraments and professionalization of religion took on heroic tones.

There was a deeply resonant chord struck by the archetype of “the quest” as an individual’s own deliberately “off the beaten path” process of reaching toward enlightenment and internal expansion; and even true love, in a landscape where the church’s legal machinery often made authentic love literally punishable by death.

The knights in these stories were not just defenders of the weak and downtrodden (though they were that as well), they were proxies for their own inaccessible authenticities. As many scholars would point out, there was a direct inheritance of many of the Eastern motifs in these Grail Quest stories, whose kernels were one of the many treasures brought back after the Crusades. Many of the concerns were the same; where one can find enlightenment in the background of the orthodoxy’s foreground; where one can find sincere compassion for their fellow humans, in truly Christlike ways inexplicably rendered unavailable by Church doctrine, where one could find romantic love and true friendship, where one could reconnect with the natural wilds deemed “fallen” or otherwise exiled by civilization-building.

Fast forward again to stories of the knightly class of samurai in Japan, in similarly rigid land of fatally enforced codes of conduct, this time with a largely buddhist orthodoxy with subtextual flavor variations rooted in Shintoism. The specifically Zen-Buddhist ideas find root in a class of warriors who ride a razor-thin layer between life and death; whether their own, or the life and death they may be adjudicating on the spot; of their opponents, or even the lower orders over whom they helped govern and defend. The simple poetry of tea ceremonies and samurai poetry can be astonishingly valuable in its brevity and its near-silent ache. They found beauty in so volatile a life, in an environment whose political (and even natural) volatility was a constant.

Every once in a while — between service to different masters, for example — these Samurai knights would go through a period of “being ronin”, or masterless. This was considered a time of some amount of shame, to some surface-level estimations of the time; as it meant a samurai knight did not commit ritual suicide either for percieved failures of some kind, or to join their master in death.

Though my own suspicion is that many more samurai went ronin at one time or another than not, and to no fault of their own. Some of the texts from the time support this view. And its also my own suspicion that samurai who went in an out of a state of being “ronin” had a wisdom and spiritual rounding-out that others always kept at the table of one master may have missed out on; assuming their time of “ronin” didn’t include going for a spell of banditry.

As yet another personally interesting fast-forward: when Westerners met Jigoro Kano (the founder of Judo; a martial art whose technical ancestor is the samurai way of war). When they encountered Kano’s top-ranking students, they didn’t call them his athletes; they called them his knights. I don’t think I can call most of my martial arts peers “knights”. Kano was committed to Judo as a tool for spiritual enhancement, more than a sport. Something is getting lost in the sauce today, there.

I hardly need to mention that in our own time, all our children seem to go through a phase of fascination with the big screen’s “Jedi Knights”, and probably continue internalizing these ideas of a knightly class of protectors whose core identity is a spiritualized duty.

This is all a preamble. I’m trying to gesture at something we may be missing today. I’m not sure that police-men and military thumping the Bible or the Koran are inheritors of this way of life; and I’m not saying that to denigrate the Bible or The Koran. I’m equally not sure that Hindu Nationalists thumping the Ramayana or the Gita meet this role either. This is bigger than nation-states, and religions.

I’m talking about the individual knight who had a journey of ups and downs along the way. I’m talking about knights who had to wander in the wilderness for a while, either seeking out enlightenment or encountering it more or less naively, by accident. I’m talking about those knights whose honor-code of defending the weak was tested in the extreme; especially while they were in their own “weakness” of one kind or another. I’m talking about those knights who quested, either by being assigned a quest or formulating one of their own.

Terrance McKenna coined the term “archaic revival” as an impulse we should nurture to find a missing piece of our species’ potential, long in exile. And the missing piece he is gesturing at would serve a role of “yoga” (union, of the kind Krishna talks about in the Gita) without using that language. It would serve the role of authentic compassion, which somehow gets ritualized and lost in modern orthodoxies. It would serve to reconnect us with the Nature we’ve alienated ourselves from, in the way shamans attempt to reconnect us. It would serve the role of fulfilling our potential by reconnecting with inappropriately abandoned facets of our past. It requires us dislodging ourselves from the belly of whatever great machine has played Jonah’s whale for us, so that we may do good in the world.

And whatever archaic ideals come out of this would have to avert all the mistakes in backward-looking Nazism and other fascisms fall into, where they romance lost times that never were, and neurotically (and murderously) try to impose that false nostalgia on a complicated world, in an attempt to make it simpler.

I’m interested in that archaic revival, for the sake of good. I’m embracing whatever knighthood I’ve received along the way (and there have been one or two) and seeking out others. I’m interested in seeking out a fellowship of other similarly questing knights. I’m intent on reclaiming the insult “white knight” and ripping out all the codependent and chauvinistic guts out of it, for a more nuanced and less naive mode of helping others (and the larger world) to heal. I’m interested in the union of Krishna and Arjuna’s yoga, the compassionate grail of the Arthurians, and the time-frozen beauty of a haiku at a tea ceremony the night before a terrible battle — whatever terrible battle is inevitable for me, for you, for all of us.

To achieve this, I’ll need the poetry of all these traditions, and the meditative focus of the archer at his target. I’ll need the spiritualism to treat all these things as metaphors, and the literalism to bring them back as valuable and tangible boons for the rest of the world.

I’ll need my sword to be sharp, and my soul to grow.