Thursday, September 27, 2007

The Gold Thread : Confucian or Sufic Way

Through The Wheat Fields of China and Fez –(Robert Luongo, New York 1995)

(Note: Subtle warning. This essay is a long reflection, abstruse, true and misleading.

It is real plus fictional encounters from multi-sources.At the end, the reader had to make a choice. Be free or perplexed. A seeker with six masks. Ask Wu Ming, Shabistari, Hafiz or Chuang Tzi. Attar is too fragrant. )


This morning after Dawn Fajar prayer at 5.38 am Nov.2006, as the seeker goes down to his Library room and his eyes fall unto a little grey Book. In the centre, two Strange Chinese characters in Red appear in a Green background. Bingo…Nothing is Coincidence as my forward oriented Friend from Jakarta named his avatar.

Published by Stranger Press c/o Portobello Books, 328 Portobello Road, London W10 5RM.
Library of Congress Catalog No.95-0722311.

ISBN 0-9631722-4-7 Remember this book. Will quoted later as ..GT.RL.SQ. Not written for the over fed. Guide To Kulchur, printed in 1938. Ezra Pound- Cantos/Confucian Way


One two-one two flowing football run with Cesc Fabregas and Theo Walcott will kick your nuts to arrived at Jakarta sufi teahut. Nothing is true Today. We all lived in a world of Netscape..controlled by a tiny usurocracy elite. Their best joke is..the Bankers are laughing all the way to Hollywood. Throw away your worthless US dollars. Buy and use Gold dinars instead.

All Money is False. Replace first number with first alphabet. 1221 and ends with Special letter no.19. Guess it, then you can read those blogs.

( Are you confused. Enter the wrong page. Where reality start and fiction ends. Jean Rufin Globalia revisited by Abu Bakr Rieger).

BismiLlahir- Rahmanir- Rahim, a sufi pointed out it consist of 19 Letters and cover 24 Hours if counted in romanized scripts. Try it. No Coincidence. We had met before and we will encounter you soon.


Our best Grammy award this 2009 Year of the Phoenix goes to Satria Neo. The rejunevated Matrix filasufer. Much older now at age eighty eight minus two. Why, Sidi Oracle had annihilated his alter ego and cold storaged from 2003-2005 to the Nusantara Archipelago Orchid Farms at remote Bandung mountains. While the Trilogy Ring hobbits conjured up the Desert Storm operation at faraway which costs millions of innocent Iraqis women and children lives. Two years ..is a long time in Politics. Now it is Time ripe for Bliar and Blush to go fishing at Cape Bloom. Lots of salmon and bears at the Mckenzie River. Enron USD30 billion collapse hardly noticed. Where all the iraqi men gone ? Bombing and killing each others. Civilians are only collateral casualties. Lebanon suddenly wrecked by 200,000 tonnes of missiles and bombs and need USD50.0 billion from IMF,World Bank and UE funds to rebuild.

Ask the I Ching hexagram number 86: May be IMF Rule No.74. In mandarin means, Quick Death. Refer to Joel Yap weekly Feng Shui column in STAR:

1. Rebels must be dealt harshly.

2. Sage kings or Amirs cannot be disobeyed.

3. The Empire shall be attacked by quitoxic hackers..

4. Yunus Emre can sing and travels freely in Anatolia and Riau

5. China hold USD300.0 billion US Treasury Bonds. Poorer every day.

6. (Oxford Dictionary on azzuri : tied up, not free, slavery, spies)

7. USA National Debt stands at US100.0 Trillions, just a guess.

8. Let us remake Wagner Trilogy of the Rings.


Now this is my Acknowledgment to the old company of Fez fuqara :

Credit is to Dr. Abdal Alim Palmer for his assistant with the etymology of the Chinese characters.

( Who can get me a copy of his book-

The Pattern of Man, maybe published in New York in 1980)


I would like to thank Abdassamad Clarke of Norwich, England and Nick Feher of Northern California, two talented and exceedingly patient proof readers and editors, for their help in preparing the manuscript for print.


Appropriately left to Last, as the single most important influence and aid in my own life’s Journey, is my Sufic Master Shaykh Dr.Abdal Qadir as-Sufi , whom I thank for his pre-eminent contribution toward my accomplishing this study of Ezra Pound. His first novel The Book of Strangers-1972, Luzac, London planted the seeds of this literary adventure almost like Szuma Chien- Record of The Historians.

Miftah al-Wird: Key to the Source. Now we are going to unravel the 2 Chinese characters at

The ideogram depicts the sun’s silk descending as tensile rays:


Making Clear (bayan), Discriminating (furqan),

Revealing ( kasyfu), Manifesting ( izhar ):

descending light held taut between the Celestial

and the Terrestial ( samawi /ardhi ), intersecting

with Leaves or layers of shale, as horizontals:

descending warp threads as they cross the woof.


An elite is distinguished by those who, while seeking that ‘blinding light’, recognized that they are charged in this world with stabling ‘order’ and ‘brotherly deference’. Hence, no Taozers mooching about, begging for alms to build gold palaces for the ‘Bhud’. And since young Sidhartha rejected all that and set out to travel, what makes them think he would want that place. ‘No Monkery’, said the Prophet. Confucius, too were not no taozer, while he was on the Tao(Path) of the Ancients. Unlike the passive interpretation that led to a spiritual decadence, Master Kung Fu Tze and rulers who followed him in his mobilized understanding were concerned with ‘order-tao’ and ‘brotherly deference’.


At the end of his life, Pound believed he didn’t know much. He was freed of a great illusion.

Do not Move ( oh seeker )

Let the Wind speak ( put forward by the One )

That is Paradise (of Gnosis- Gatheredness without Frontier)

: Notes and Fragments ( p.112)

Post Face (page 113)


There was a great man of the 18th century by the name of Mawlay al-Arabi ad-Darqawi who said an extraordinary thing. This man who is called Shaykh of Instruction, said about the path (the Way) of Knowledge that lies through the Wheat Field. He meant by this that the way (tao or tariqa) is Service : serving people. In this we can hear the words of the ancient Chinese sages who, while occupied with the rectification and purification of their hearts, simultaneously were engaged in establishing justice, maintaining the granaries (food supply), facilitating irrigation and cultivation of the land and proctecting the channels of distribution and commerce.


They were the preservers of the forms of courtesy (adab) and noble character (khulq) through the remembrance of the still more ancient odes and rituals. It is precisely by turning away (tajrid) from the self and its arena of worldly ambition (zuhd) together with turning towards the needs of the others (pillar of zakat) and accepting ( and taking) authority (amirship) that real leadership (khalifate-sultaniyya) comes about.


Living today there is a teacher who is the inheritor of this knowledge and is the heir of Shaykh ad-Darqawi. Having benefit and privilege of sitting in his company I will relate what he explained as a further clarification of the line by the Master ad-Darqawi:

‘the Way leads through the Wheat Fields’

Paraphrasing from memory, the understanding gathered was this:


‘Those people who seek that knowledge which leads

on to perfection of Absolute Being in which all existence

other than the Existent (Real)

is annihilated are like growing field of wheat.


These people, bowing and bending in the wind, rising up

and standing golden brown in the summer’s sun are the shafts

that will make the autumn’s harvest.


Now this wheat must be cut, threshed and the chaff separated, then ground under the weight of enormous stones to be turned into flour. This flour must be salted and yeasted, allowed to rise, then punched down to rise again. The dough is then molded and shaped and put into ovens and baked under s great heat. What come out is bread that now must be sliced and given to people to eat.

The kernel of this metaphor is that those people of Knowledge are the leaders : they establish governance based on justice; they clean up and purify the trading markets, I mean by prohibiting usury, fraud and any form of monopoly.

Such a people, no longer driven by ambition and pride, no longer imagining that they are creators of their actions, are set Free.

This is the condition of those that rule and are caretakers of traditions and the preservers of language’.

Ezra Pound recognized the existence of this quality of being in the great Chinese sages and to, a somewhat more limited degree, in other of his heroes who appear in the Cantos.

It cannot be said however that Pound possessed the Science how to make men and women who are able to change both themselves and the world around them. That is another matter. The fact that he was able to see some of the triumphant possibilities that belong to man, expressing their deepest nature, raises him up as signpost on the road side. Herein lies the epitaph of the poet.

The analogy of the wheat field is drawn from a source that affirms a knowing of how to guide and instruct, through the steps of transformation, those people who desire it. This is the highest knowledge. My teacher Shaykh Abdal Qadir as-sufi who

encouraged me to write this book (in mind of the need of future

Eastern disciples), is such a rare model teacher.

The knowledge that is gained, as I understand it, changes one’s inwardness as well as how one lives. How are we in our homes, how we transact in the world, the money we use, must all be different.


The gold thread in the pattern goes on and on. We must realize our Need and it must be Great. Unable to accept being a slave to tyranny, man needs courage to change.


The terra firma of our very existence is under siege. How we transact in our lives, what in Arabic called Deen, must be freed from the impediments of ignorance and tyranny.

I keep hearing the lines from the Cantos LXXXI ’. The man saw it all ! exclaimed my campanero’ as we sat in the Cypriot café across from Kensington Garden. London, England. Hold your breath. Whisper :

‘Andiamo’. Fa ayna tazhabun. Antumul fuqara.

The ideogram ‘hsien’ a pierching light, is enormously important to the understanding of Pound. It is the light that descend upon man, Dante’s Divine Intellect. ..the pre-Socratic philosophers and Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina and al-Kindi come into it. The Neo-Confucian sages, also, of course, are present. These are the men of great intellect within the discourse of The Cantos IV.


From the well planned gardens of the Confucian China,

through the date groves of Madinah and on into Andalucia

(Averroes was born in Cordoba), a well Trodden Path can be Found.


At the age of sixteen, this seeker set off for the University of Pennsylvania. Hilda said: ‘ He was immensely sophiscated, immensely superior, rough and ready..One would dance with him for what he might say !’. He publish his first volume of poems- A Lume Spento. He also met T.S.Elliot, who also endured trials of brotherhood and intimate collaboration that spanned more than 50 years. He nailed a notice of the Wall Street:


A NATION

THAT WILL NOT GET ITSELF

INTO DEBT

DRIVES THE USURERS

TO FURY

‘I o venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto’


This corrupting the ‘word’, abuse of ‘real money’ in its deepest Confucian sense, give rise to usury. Aristotle said;

‘ Money is not energy nor it is procreative.

You cannot inseminate (sexualize) with it or plant it.

Money is not a commodity and therefore not to be rented


(what do we say today about Loan, Credit, Treasury Bills, Future-Junks Bond, Stocks and Shares that fluctuate its values every seconds on

the Dow Jones, Nikkei, LSE, NasdaQ… currencies cyber robotic numbers moving across the world to suck up men women children bloods, sweats and tears. More Mr. Smiths replicate and enter into your friends bodies and troubling us unknowingly. Kill the self. Wipe out the Nafs. Get unwired from blue rated Mirrors to your desires.

In Malaysia, one advert proudly said : Get your Islamic Platinum Mastercard. No compounding interest monthly, Unsurpassable spending power to Muslims world wide..”. Islamic bond markets worth RM1.5 trillions are ripe for takings.


PART TWO – THE GOLD THREAD – ROBERT LUONGO

Nine Sages taught us : ‘ Keep to silent, when in unknown spiritual states. But only One Sage whispering to us : Speak little, swim in your own ocean, before emerging to flash your Dragon-like wisdom Fire’.

Canto XCVIII :

The Praiseworthy in sympathy : ‘is part of Religion’

It’s passion would be ‘ seeking knowledge even unto China.

The strength of men Kuan Nine decrees, 8th essay.

Is in grain Tzu Canto CVI.


The ideogram Kuan = To Govern.

Second ideogram Tzu = the Master

( Very close the the meaning of Khalifa in Arabic. Ba’aya is to obey/give authority-power to a ruler, demanded by Shariat/Sunna).

When joined give us the acronym name for the Neo Confucian

Kuan Chung, minister (Wazir) of one Province. ( Is he both a Ruler and

A Sagely man who wrote the 9th Decrees (Fatwa)


The Prophet said in sixth century C.D. ;


‘ Leadership is a responsibility Binding on good men’.

‘ His wanting it disqualified him from having it’.

Making a Scene Shift, a literary device or trick as Ezra called them

To show two correlatives in history (two ends of one tally stick).


Consequently we will ask:

Why are Scottish and Irish people are not allowed

To have free lands ? Why, with both Spain and

France being great leaders of democracies, are

The neighboring people of the Basque nation

Not allowed to exist as such ? Not free to Govern my own people.


Mencius , the Confucian who lived 100 years after the Master, said :

‘ None of our Sages ever wanted or sought public office. They took it as obligation binding upon them. When out of office, they returned to their original work of rectifying (purification-illumination) their hearts ‘

Motto : It is a bank privilege to earn interest

On money which it create out of nothing.

Ask the International Hedge Fund Managers – reported by NST 12 September 2006 and praised by Sekuntrate Fizance Minstor’ , Qarazya welcome the USD300 billions hot money , foreign ventures capital to invest in our local financial Markets.

When the Master was asked about how to rule, Confucius warned ;

“First act of the Government-Rulers is to call things by their Right Names, Ming Qing ’. What is the World Money now ? Can we use any currency we like when we travel ? No. Just a Plastic Card will Do !. Give me your Golden Secret PIN Account Number !.

Gentle Man, your are just a Number and Computer Code. The Matrix has invaded your Consciousness, no way out. May trekking into the Desert of Tafilalet south Maghribi or Rajastan desert , Ajmer Sharif where the great Chistiyya masters used to roam and do da’wah among the poors..

Now in order to Survive, crafty Old Chuang Tzu give us several pathways as follow :


Hold on to the Unwobbling Pivot ( Chung Yung )

Sit with teachers who Instruct from the Great Learning (Ta Hsio)

Few will understand from The Analect (Lun Yun)

Then refer to Ernest Fenollosa, Gaudier Brzeska.

The Century of Usurocracy brought about the final

Destruction of all Europe’s ruling monarchies as well

As the Islamic Caliphate.

Sought the Four Axis (Awtad) who will often have

To speak the Language of the Time, the

Dialect of the Place

( p. 8 first line, no fiction here, check GT.RLSQ)


More Quotation From The Gold Thread

Robert Luongo’s study of Ezra Pound’s reveals a fundamental awareness; that whenever men are truly free they will chose leaders from amongst themselves who have placed self discipline and the preservation of values as their guiding principles. Natural order emerges whereby leadership becomes an ‘ obligation binding on good men’

Returning to an example from Pound’s translation of the Ta Hsio of Confucius, a definitive clarification of the ageless wisdom follows:

‘ The men of old (ancient sages), wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that light which comes from looking into the heart and when then acting , first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first establish order in their own families; wanting order in home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their hearts and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their thoughts (tones given off by the heart), wishing to attain precise definition (of words/language), they set out to extend their knowledge to utmost. This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things (reality) into organic categories (of meanings/usage).’

The sickness of our age can be traced to the perversion of ‘money, culminating in deaths of countless numbers, the devastation taking place in Brazil, Mexico, Somalia, along with the destruction of the very lungs of our planets (forests)…this all due to humanly and mathematically impossible national debts.

DILIGITE IUSTITIAM QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM.

..that will exist between men of knowledge, regardless of the varying times and places in which they lived, is true, it is imperative

to seek new Terrain.

The highest role for man is to point towards those of knowledge.

“ There came a man running from the furthest part of the city calling: follow the Messengers’ is a verse from the Koran that points to a person who will speak up.

Mencius said : Is there any difference between killing him

With a sword and with a system of government ?”

The Cantos are as much a great telling of history, seen from the perspicacious prow of the poet’s craft , as they are one man’s passionate response to the Divine. His search for knowledge was never divorce from action.

Oh you who believe, fear God

And give up what remains of your demand

For usury, if you are indeed believers.

If you do not, take notice

Of War from God and His Messenger -Quran: 2:275-279

P.104. Without the love of learning, good men become bad ones.

You have heard the Six Words and the Six Becloudings ?

There is love of being benevolent

Without the love of learning, the

Beclouding here leads to foolish simplicity.

The love of knowing without the love

Of learning, whereof the beclouding brings

Dissipation of mind.

Of being sincere without the love of learning

Here beclouding causes disregard of the consequence.

Of straight forwardness without the

Love of learning whereof beclouding leads to rudeness.

Of boldness, without the love of learning, whereof

The beclouding bring insubordination.

The love of firmness with the love of learning,

Whereof the beclouding conduces to extravagant conduct.


Until this lines, reader should realize that Robert Luongo from New York is a daring sophisicated muslim and far more significant he had sat at the circle of the Master as an American faqir.

Meanwhile we heard that Master Izi, Dr.Zuigan and Prof. Anqaravi last year had successfully renovated their Dailin Nur Institute in the hilly Miyazaki Prefecture, Kyoto, Japan. New students intake will begin in summer June 2007. Are you interested or your friends.


1 comment:

Unknown said...

Greetings from the Cape of Good Hope.