Back to the Classics #3

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic Nonfiction. I taught English in Riga, Latvia from 1994 to 1998. I worked with local English teachers, mainly female, in their late 20s to late 30s. Having studied the enemy language of English from their teens, they had established their rebellious, defiant stances early on; as just a high school student, one had actively joined demonstrations for independence. They had things to say about Latvian intellectuals who had toed the line in order to secure nice apartments, travel opportunities, access to top-notch medical care, prestigious schools for their kids, and sweet jobs suddenly finding themselves scrambling when freedom-loving Latvians restored their independence in 1990.

The Captive Mind – Czeslaw Milosz

This excellent collection of essays analyzes the process of mental enslavement of society (especially writers) in a totalitarian state. Milosz extensively and aptly describes the mental contortions of ketman - the act of paying lip service to The System while concealing secret opposition. Ketman is dressed up in reasons national, artistic, professional, skeptical, metaphysical, and ethical. There’s even a ketman dolled up like revolutionary purity. It’s not simply hypocrisy – it works so well that the deceiver slides into a really weird mental space:

To say something is white when one thinks it black, to smile inwardly when one is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love, to know when one pretends not to know, and thus to play one’s adversary for a fool (even as he is playing you for one) – these actions lead one to prize one’s own cunning above all else. Success in the game becomes a source of satisfaction.

Milosz devotes chapters to four writers in an attempt to present their motivations for active compliance with the communist authorities in postwar Poland. Recall that Poland was the most devastated country to stagger out of WWII. Lots of people felt that the Polish people could not just pick up where the left off in the 1939. 

Besides, the subjects of the four case studies -- Jerzy “Alpha” Andrzejewski (Ashes and Diamonds), Tadeusz “Beta” Borowski (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen), Jerzy “Gamma” Putrament (poet, man of letters) and Konstanty Ildefons “Delta” Gałczyński (poet, humorist) -- stand as examples of the hundreds of surviving intellectuals who collaborated with Moscow to advance their careers and publish books. People were not presented with a lot of choices: get with the program or endure limited access to jobs, apartments, education, medical care, good prospects, etc.     

Miłosz mixes criticism and sympathy to show the gradual enslavement of minds by communist buzzing about History, Dialectical Materialism, Contradictions and all that lifeless gobbledygook about the new social and political reality and rosy future it’s supposed to usher. The alternative – exile, emigration, and a whole lot worse - was a sterile vacuum for creative writers  - especially poets - not able to stay in their own country, write in their own language, for their natural audiences.

This is a thought-provoking and still relevant book worth reading as a warning against totalitarian systems of thought. It can also be read as a work more about cognitive psychology than politics. People will believe in anything - anything! from Bigfoot to Nazis in Ukraine to mind-controlling chips in vaccines - and twisted are the mental hoops they'll jump through to establish and maintain a belief. 

It should be read by anyone who is or aspires to be an intellectual, even if they are an American, i.e., a person who would say out loud “I want to be an intellectual” only under the most excruciating torture.  Like fiction, the question that this non-fiction work makes us ask ourselves is, “What would we do in such situations ourselves?”

Japanese Literature Challenge #3

I read this book for The Japanese Literature Challenge 15

Personal note: In this novel the eccentric character Midori suggests eating lunch in the Takashimaya Department store in Nihonbashi, to which the hero of the novel expresses surprise and dismay. One imagines that in 1969 a cool-cat college student like Toru wouldn’t be caught dead in such a symbol of stodgy affluence. In fact, whenever my wife and I visited Tokyo from Okinawa (1986-92), we ate tonkatsu in the Takashimaya Department store in Nihonbashi. We liked its air of resolute unhipness.

ノルウェイの森 Noruwei no Mori 1987

Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami

This novel is a first-person narrative of Toru Watanabe who in his late 30s is looking back to the late Sixties when he was a 19-year-old college student in Tokyo. The themes of the novel are coming of age, love, sexuality, mortality, mental illness, and the guilt and grief of those left behind after inexplicable deaths by suicide.

Watanabe is an ordinary guy and sees himself as an ordinary guy. But in fact he is not ordinary in the sense that he sees through bushwah and flapdoodle. For example, when he looks at student activism, whether right or left, he sees little more than empty words, half-digested theory, inflexible ways of thinking, and unbecoming intolerance for anybody that doesn’t get with their program.

Sensitive and thoughtful, Watanabe listens to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and reads serious things like The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Beneath the Wheel (everybody read Hesse in the Sixties), and The Centaur by John Updike (forgotten now, it did win the National Book Award in 1964, beating Pynchon’s V). He holds himself apart from others, "hard to get" is his default setting but he listens closely and kindheartedly. His introspection  and shyness make him attractive to a certain kind of female. 

Why so aloof? Watanabe, at only 19 years of age, does not have the experience to come to grips with the suicide of his best friend Kizuki two years before.

Translated into words, it’s a cliché, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust… It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took Kizuki, death took me as well.

Kizuki’s GF Naoko has taken the suicide badly. With symptoms of depression and anxiety, she has ended up in a sanatorium north of Kyoto. Murakami’s narrative of Watanabe's trip to visit her there is masterful. Naoko’s roommate Reiko is a fully realized character, with a horrendous story about loss of reputation.

Watanabe’s search for values in a money-mad culture rests on his determination to be responsible for Naoko and bring her back to the world of the living. Naoko is the broken angel that many readers will sympathize with, but I thought the more vivid character was the working-class Midori with her plain-spoken ways and impatience with baloney. Midori, whose father told her she should have died instead of her mother, on love:

Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortbread. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortbread out to me. And I say I don’t want it any more and throw it out of the window. That’s what I’m looking for.

Midori was smart to test Watanabe by springing on him a task: helping her take care of a sick family member in a hospital. Murakami’s narratives of Watanabe's stint in the hospital and the scene of the fire near Midori’s house were both incredible. Expressive and willing to make an impression, volatile Midori is a challenging GF. She comes on strong, lacks tact, talks unlady-like and likes porn movies, all things that challenge Toru to put the book down, stop brooding about mortality, and live a little.

Nagasawa is Toru’s crony in the dorm. He is a brilliant and has ambitions to work in the Foreign Ministry, not an easy goal by any means. His problem, like more than few spectacularly brilliant people, is that he uses his smarts and charm to use people, especially women, despite hanging with a GF with a lot of heart, Hatsumi, insightful enough to tell Watanabe that he’s not like other guys. Nagasawa identifies Watanabe’s bullshit detector to be as acute as his own, but mistakenly believes Watanabe is as selfish as he himself is.

Watanabe’s practically the same as me. He may be a nice guy, but deep down in his heart he’s incapable of loving anybody. There’s always some part of him somewhere that’s wide awake and detached. He just has that hunger that won’t go away.

Nagasawa makes the error of thinking that everybody always looks out for #1 and worldly success is going to make him happy, that he’ll reach a point where he can say, “I have arrived.” Nagasawa is as deluded about our ever-changing world as any other self-styled “alpha male.”

It’s a sad novel, filled with characters that can find no way past the realization of the sadness of life. The realization that marks adulthood, Reiko claims, is “Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt. Life is like that.” Death puts a period on everything but it’s a part of life that gives life meaning. 

Murakami, to my mind, is a Japanese writer because we always know what season it is and what the weather is doing. He even works in cherry blossoms and the pathos of things (mono no aware 物の哀れ)!

After I read it, I stayed on the porch and let my eyes wander out to the garden, full now with the freshness of spring. An old cherry tree stood there, its blossoms nearing the height of their glory. A soft breeze blew, and the light of day lent its strangely blurred, smoky colors to everything.

Plus, novels starring miserable college students haunted by suicide go back to Natsume Sōseki. So does the Meiji era theme of “what are we Japanese, where are we Japanese going, how did we get here.” Like poet Matsuo Bashō and many other writers, the protagonist goes on a hitori-tabi (ひとり旅 solo wandering) after a tragedy. So, I think critics that say Murakami isn’t “Japanese enough” are missing elements that clearly appear in this novel.

Marakami isn’t so Japanese, I guess, when he makes constant references to pop jazz and classical music. He also injects utterly unexpected unsettling scenes. e.g. the description of the well by the lost character of pale Naoko; e.g. the episodes of casual and meaningless sex that Toru subjects himself and various women to; e.g. Midori presenting herself wearing not a stitch before her father’s memorial portrait on the family altar. 

It’s as an existentialist cosmopolitan Murakami seems to be saying to avoid being depressed, anxious, suicidal, and in an asylum, don’t be tools and victims of terrible events, jobs, companies, causes, mass media, mass education, mass advertising, the entire shithole of online shit. 

Other Books about Japan

Fiction: click the title to go the review

Nonfiction: click the title to read review

Kappa – Akutagawa Ryunosuke I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki, Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene Modern Japanese Stories – edited by Ivan Morris A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories  - Nagai Kafu Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata The Shooting Gallery - Yuko Tsushima The Devil’s Disciple – Hamao Shiro The Gate - Natsume Soseki

The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveler to Lifer at Mitusbishi - Niall Murtagh Nightless City: Geisha and Courtesan Life in Old Tokyo - J.E. de Becker Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrine of Nikko – Isabella Bird Kokoro – Lafcadio Hearn Adventures in Japan: A Literary Journey in the Footsteps of a Victorian Lady - Evelyn Kaye The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures  – George Sansom Angry White Pyjamas: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police – Robert Twigger

 

Intercultural Interaction & Poems

The Translator – John Crowley

This novel is about the intense relationship between a Russian poet exiled from the USSR and a young American student at a large Midwestern state university on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.

As a high school student, Kit Malone meets JFK in the White House because she won a poetry prize. In the receiving line, he mentions that the federal government has gotten dissident poet Innokenti Falin out of the Soviet Union. 

A short time later, enrolling in what sounds like Indiana University, she takes a poetry course from Falin. Through no fault of their own, they've been through more than their fair share of troubles in life. Lonely Kit has trouble connecting with people. She's been through a teenage pregnancy and home for unwed mothers. She grieves the loss of her brother in an accident in the Army. 

In the 1930s, Falin miraculously survived his experience as besprizornost', a homeless child who either lost or was separated from their parents and who therefore lacked any adult care and support at all. They are drawn to each other and translate his poems from Russian to English.

This literary and chaste passion between hurting people can’t last, however. For obscure reasons, US secret agents want to keep an eye on him. A stumblebum fiend and her dean at school instruct Kit to report what she hears and sees after she visits Falin. Kit also feels that her circle of left-wing friends has been infiltrated by a federal government made nervous over Russian-Cuban cooperation. The Sixties atmosphere of 'paranoia strikes deep/into your life it will creep' is persuasively evoked but not harped on. Crowley's sense of restraint, his light touch in a novel of such wide scope made me shake my head in wonder. It's magic, what he does with mere words.

I’d not read any Crowley since the middle 1980s. I found engaging writing, with some mystical overtones but not much in the way of magical realism. As in Beasts, Crowley still has low expectations of government’s ability to act justly, wisely, or temperately. And Crowley treats love and its stabs, well, in a lovely fashion, as in Little, Big. 

He lets the weather play the chorus in many scenes. Though from Michigan I’m not from the prairie Midwest, but I'll testify he’s got the winter snow and summer thunder storms down. His rendering of everyday details is stunning; really took me back, the scene of registering for classes at a midwestern state university, in huge intermural buildings, going from gym to gym clutching big computer cards sporting rectangular punches with the corner cut off (do not fold, spindle or mutilate). Hey, it's late winter, when else are we most vulnerable to the warmth of nostalgia?

Japanese Literature Challenge #2

I read this book for The Japanese Literature Challenge 15

村上の小澤征爾さんと、音楽について話をする (2014)

Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa - Haruki Murakami

A discussion about music and writing, in six informal conversations that took place between the conductor Ozawa and the writer Murakami, between 2010 and 2011, a period in which Ozawa, due to an operation for esophageal cancer, was not particularly well.

Murakami and Ozawa discuss topics from Bernstein to Karajan, from Beethoven to Bach, from Strauss to Tchaikovsky, from Brahms to Bartók, to Mahler and Bruckner, up to the strange enigmatic figure of Glenn Gould. The obvious warmth between interviewer and the interviewee animates these dialogues. They listen to and examine the recordings of some of their favorite performances. For the sake of the self-described ‘complete layman’ Murakami, Ozawa does not focus on the purely technical aspects of conducting, but rather on the conductor's job: using their own sensibility to identify the essence of the music and then untangling it from both the composer’s intentions in the score and how the orchestra’s musicians want and are able to perform it.

An orchestra conductor has to be receptive to the musicians who make up the orchestra he directs so that every single sound, with his interpretation too, becomes part of the whole, in as perfect a harmony as they can achieve. Ozawa says "We conductors have to get sounds out of a group of musicians, that's the starting point. We read a score and imagine a sound in our mind, then, together with the members of the orchestra, we transform it into real sound. And from there many things are born. Interpersonal relationships, the importance given to certain aspects of music ... everything has to be taken into account. "

Similar is the writer of a story, who brings together characters, listens to their individual voices, and gives a rhythm to the writing, so that the reader can immerse himself in the flow of the narrative, as does a listener of a piece of classical music. Flow is key. Murakami says, “No one ever taught me to write, and I’ve never made a study of writing techniques. So how did I learn to write? From listening to music. And what’s the most important thing in writing? Its rhythm. No one’s going to read what you write unless it’s got rhythm. It has to have an inner rhythmic feel that propels the reader forward.”

I listen to both jazz and classical music, but I don’t know much about those genres in a technical sense. These interviews are, I think, serious musicological conversations. While there are no excerpts from scores, the talk would be better appreciated by people who know well the compositions they are talking about. Also, Murakami plays the part of the respectful layman and makes statements like “I don’t get any story from the first movement in Mahler’s first symphony” that elicit from Ozawa curt statements like  "Now that I think about it, I’ve never thought about music in such a way.” Musicians and music lovers, I sometimes think, are not always on the same wavelength.

The Ides of Perry Mason 33

On the 15th of  every month, we publish a review of a mystery - or something - starring our favorite lawyer. For the hell of it.

Good Riddance: Victims that Needed Killing

The final season (1966) of the Perry Mason TV series was marked by numerous clinkers. But three of the episodes are noteworthy for exceptional portrayals of stinkers who had it coming.

In The Case of the Unwelcome Well, the murder is caused by a mistake on the part of our favorite lawyer. Without the knowledge, consent, or signature of the husband, Perry gets the wife to enter into a contract with an oil exploration company. They strike oil and the husband goes on a spree spending money he doesn’t really have. When the oil company decides to cap the well for 10 years, the husband is enraged at the company president Jerome Klee, played by Wendell Corey. The big oil man says, “If I were in the habit of explaining my actions, most of the time I'd use one word... MONEY!” But the viewer senses that he just likes getting his boot on the necks of other people. In a creepy scene in an industrial park where the victim is creating a weird echo by shouting for attention, the blow across the back of his head by a huge monkey wrench is one of the very few on-screen snuffings in the series. Like Brian Donlevy in The Case of the Positive Negative, Wendell Corey looks like the drinking is taking its toll though the bleary dazed look doesn’t detract too much from the relentless awfulness of the character.

Dennis Patrick, with a typical snide look on a belligerent face, often played louses and rats but puts in the bravura performance of the final season as pro golfer Chick Farley in The Case of the Golfer’s Gambit. Chick is a booze-hound, brawler, embezzler, blackmailer, and golf cheat. He browbeats his long-suffering wife who got him started in his golf career. Chick is forcing himself on the beautiful Dina Brandt (Nancy Kovak – hubba hubba), whose sad sack husband Erwin (Harry Townes) he tosses into a fountain in the most memorable fight scene of the whole nine-year series. When Erwin stands up in the pool, he’s got a lily pad on top of his head and the viewer, though a sympathetic person at heart, has to laugh at such a clownish sight. When somebody bashes Chick’s skull in with a driver – a poetically just choice of a murder weapon, n'est-ce pas - the viewer wants to give the culprit a medal.

The final episode of the series was The Case of the Final Fade-out. Its theme summed up the negative attitude the show’s producers and writers had of dog-eat-dog Tinsel Town. James Stacy plays snotty action star Barry Conrad – one wonders if this is a slap at cocky combative egomaniacal James Conrad, star of Hawaiian Eye and Wild Wild West. Just because it’s fun to do so, Barry likes to cause problems, create delays, sow confusion and consternation, undermine careers and reputations, and blow smoke rings in no-smoking areas. He’s a liar and hypocrite, even betraying an old lady down on her luck who did him a good turn in the past. It’s a loose, funny episode with some overacting and what must be inside jokes but Denver Pyle and Jackie Coogan put in excellent turns. Estelle Winwood (born 1883, on stage by 1888) camps it up in her cell interview with Perry, putting her hands to head and saying, “It's hopeless - hopeless! They'll send me to the chair.”

Back to the Classics #2

I read this book for Back to the Classics ReadingChallenge 2022.

A Classic Short Story Collection. I hope this collection of wonder stories counts for the category - the stories range from about a page and half to 25 pages so these are longer than the tales in Bulfinch's Age of Fables, which was the other choice on my TBR shelf. Also, many of the stories are original stories based on traditional tales. 

Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov – tr. by Robert Chandler et al

Reading fairy tales can prepare us for the world of work. Guy at work, I love him not like a brother but as a guy at work, though I’m one of the few people so patient that he doesn’t drive a little nuts. But this guy, he often complains that people can’t follow simple directions.

And I think to myself, if he read fairy tales he would know that one of the hardest things to do in life is follow simple directions.  The wonder stories in this collection often feature characters that break straightforward taboos or can’t follow the plainest directions to the letter. They are told clearly, “Don’t look in the barn,” and what’s the first thing they do when the boogie-man goes to the market? 

They look in the damn barn.

Thus overly curious characters fall into trouble deep with hurtful witches, cranky bears, and wicked stepmothers. They might be plucky heroines and stalwart heroes. They might be assisted by helpful birch trees and obliging snakes. But they are still pretty damn incapable of following simple directions. 

Just like people at work.

So on the surface the main take-away in fairy tales is a conservative one: Do as you’re told. But another reading shows that the tellers of the stories are wise and tolerant enough to assume that people are not going to do what they are told. That gives us hope that inch by inch we make progress to wisdom and kindness, often guided by wayward, fallible, incorrigible people not doing what they are told. Some of the lessons are a little more subtle, however. For example, the continuance of your life demands being economical with the truth sometimes so be careful doling out the whole truth and nothing but the truth and beware who hears the truth too.

Anyway, to review the actual book here, this is a large collection of Russian fairy tales that have been gathered from the plain folks in the last two centuries or so. They have been collected not only by ethnologists, philologists, and linguists but by famous writers such as Pushkin and Nadezhda Teffi (whose original tales here are wonderfully mordant). Also contributing great stories based on wonder tales is Andrei Platonov, an author who died in obscurity in 1951.  Translator Robert Chandler argues that Platonov may be the greatest Russian writer of the last century. I never heard of him either.

On the down side, it’s undeniable that post-modern sensibilities will be singed by harsh misogyny and gory violence that we can but expect in pre-modern cultures. The more traditional the culture, the tougher ordinary people are on women, children, old people, the afflicted and anybody who can’t help being different. However, making allowances for backward attitudes, the reader can understand better the difficulties of life – the risks and hazards that come with the territory of being alive on this planet - as perceived by slaves, peons, serfs and other powerless vulnerable people.

Sinking into an Unfamiliar Sofa

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall – Kazuo Ishiguro

Four of the five longish short stories are first-person narratives by musicians. The time settings are the early and middle 2000s.

In the first, a young guitarist is hired by an American crooner to serenade his wife. The guitarist is eager to play for the crooner because his mother enjoyed the crooner’s records back in what sounds like Poland or Czech Republic. The guitarist finds out that the crooner is using a dishonorable tactic to mount a comeback, sacrificing genuine emotion for commercial success. There’s also an interesting sub-theme of the casual disregard and derision Western Europeans feel for Eastern Europeans.

The third story stars another young and ambitious singer-songwriter-guitarist. Finding the London music scene stodgy and crassly commercial, he leaves London to return to Malvern Hills (Herefordshire) and spend the summer with his sister, who runs a café with her husband. The deal is live rent-free but work in the café at peak times. Things gets strained in the family business because he feels his art – making a great song, not a hit song - trumps making sandwiches. He meets a middle-aged couple who have been entertainers all over middle Europe. The woman warns him she never used get angry but nowadays everything upsets her. Mixing marriage with professional obligations is taking its toll. Art takes a lot out of people as they negotiate with other artists, impresarios, and kinfolk.

The fourth story also presents the choice of expediency versus virtue. A middle-aged sax man is pressured by his ex and his agent into getting cosmetic surgery to improve his career prospects. He convalesces with a female star whose celebrity he despises. She leads him into an embarrassing adventure (she has impulse control problems) and gets into his face about the trials of the less talented who have to exploit their looks and networks to hit and stay in the big time.

The fifth story tells of the meeting between a promising Hungarian male cellist and an American female who considers herself a virtuoso. The woman helps the man improve through listening and advice though in fact, she never plays and her behavior makes the young musician suspicious. A bittersweet tale, it is the only story that is not told from the point of view of the protagonist.

To my mind, the second story was the best story because it starred an expatriate English teacher, which I used to be until I was 42 years old. The protagonist in this one, however, is 47-years-old, which is a long long time to be away from one’s native culture, one’s family, one’s network, even if one is in Spain and home is the UK. Anyway, our hero is invited to London by a couple of college friends who got married. They consider our hero a loser because of his precarious career and single status, with no prospects for money, house, stuff, status, respect, etc. Our hero reassures them more than once by saying that he is fine but he suffers from restlessness (FOMO), which can't be a good symptom. The story is funny but the theme of consequences of choices made and worry about the judgements of others is another sharp exploration of worldly success and reputation versus doing what you want versus going with the flow versus inertia versus whatever it is that keeps expatriate teachers overseas way too long.

The motif of this particular anthology is the love for music and the tension between art and success but the author also underlines how fast life goes by. Trust me - blink and they’re sending you junk mail about Medicare Part B.

Anthology of Japanese Literature: Pre-Modern

I read this book for The Japanese Literature Challenge 15 

Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century – Donald Keene (editor)

This 1955 collection gathers the greatest hits of all the historical periods up to and including the Tokugawa era.

The poems from the Manyōshū impressed me much more deeply than they did when I first read them for a college course a long time ago. Reading the scripts of No plays made me want to see them performed, though I wonder where I will find a whole day to make that happen. Meeting old friends again in the Sarashina Diary and The Pillow Book. Sadly, the martial exploits left me cool in The Tale of the Heike from the Kamakura Period but The Account of My Hut had a melancholy totally in keeping with this wretched pandemic. Eye-opening was the literary criticism by Basho and Chikamatsu Monzaemon from the Tokugawa Era.

Reading gluttons can read collections like this through. But I read selections from this between other books I’ve reading since the New Year. Sure both the poetry and prose can seem as thin and wispy as a haiku, but for me, nothing beats Japanese literature when I have a yen for the sense of impermanence of The Tosa Diary or the knockabout fun of Saikaku or Hizakurige.

Other Books about Pre-Modern Japan: Click on the link to go to the review.

·         The Tale of Genji

·         The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan – Ivan Morris

·         History of Japan to 1334 – Sir George Sansom

·         A History of Japan: 1334-1615 - Sir George Sansom

·         A History of Japan: 1615-1867 - Sir George Sansom

·         This Scheming World – Ihara Saikaku

·         Zen and Zen Classics, Volume I General Introduction from the Upanishads to Huineng - R. H. Blyth