THE POISON PATH II


With the very poison, a little of which would kill any other being, a man who understands poison would dispel another poison.
— Hevajra Tantra
The Sanskrit for "poison" is visam. In Buddhism, three poisons form the hub of
the Wheel of Life: kama-raga, "desire," or "greed," depicted as a red cock;
a grasping quality: reaching out, to attain: meristematic shoots after light,fungal hyphae seeking nourishment;
or hanging on, grasping backwards, clinging.
dvesa, "hatred" or "aversion," a green snake; and moha, "ignorance," "folly," "delusion," represented as a black hog. They chase each other and bite each others tails. Each poison is dependent on the others, and the whole cycle of birth and death is dependent upon them.
the snake's tongue flicking, smell is tasting the air, repellents
as important as attractants: amines of corruption, pheromones of disease,
bitterness in leaves
In rain-forest canopies the trees avoid each other: branches of each tree filling in just up to the others, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but a little space between, just
enough to foil crawling insects.
Some say the black hog is the mother of the other two; others disagree, saying that greed and hatred are equally fundamental.
Some say that all sentient beings can obtain buddhahood; others are less charitable,
as much as charity has anything to do with the veracity of spiritual laws.

What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon Poet
-John Keats, letter to Woodhouse, 1818 (in Dun 1970)


The Poison Path is the narrow way, the twisting path, or no path at all. You could make it, O Nobly Born, you just might survive, yes, but who could follow you? Better to send them down the big road, well trodden and paved; this Poison Path is no shortcut. The Poison Path is best suited to tricksters and magicians who, if
the stories are to be believed, come back to life after getting killed.
A special transmission outside the scriptures.
Poisonous dharma, poisonous datura, why be surprised that they grow together? A poison-filled cobra, what's he hiding? Medicines and powers, oak tree in the yard, a turtle-nosed snake.
Even today, right here, people are losing their lives, bitten by this snake.
— Hekigan Roku, The Blue Cliff Record

The poison becomes pervasive, and poisons the path itself.

Socrates compares the written texts Phaedrus has brought along to a PHARMAKON: a "drug"or"medicine," a filter which acts as both remedy and poison. . . . This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination can be alternately or simultaneously — beneficent or maleficent. . . . Operating through seduction, the
P H A R M A K O N makes one stray from one's general, natural, habitual paths and laws.
-Jacques Derrida, Plato's Pharmacy

The primary poison is the Word — the Pharmakos — the one who stands-in-for. All other poisons function through this one, the signifying poison. Signifying monkey. Jesus should have been stoned, not crucified.

Pharmakos also meant "poisoner," and "sorcerer," and "magician." Plato banned the pharmakeus, the shaman, from his Republic in 480 B C . The Chinese kicked the shaman out of the government in the first century, along with her whole family.
Standing-in-for, the Logos. Morphine wearing the mask of endorphin, tetra- hydrocannabinol dressed up like anandamide. Molecules standing in for stimuli: sensation symbolized on the cortex, rhodopsin a metaphor of light. Intellect is mediated and mediator, a mapping of pattern to patterns of ions, ratio, concentration of amines, layers of neurotransmitters themselves in flux, charged and shaped by emotion and memory. Mind acts it out, moves moun- tains, changes its own environment, altering the very reactions that led to the alteration.
and that's a good trick
Patterns, likeness of pattern, and some analogous likeness of likeness: the swelling of sound in adagio and its neuronal reflection. The great bead game, poetry is poison — echoes of phonemes, ghosts standing in for ghosts.
Poson as defilement: klesa, the ten deffilements, the seven deadly sins, the speck of dust that spoils the immaculate mirror, Alaya, the "Store-Consciousness." The fly in the ointment is Beelzebub.
In the Lankavatara Sutra the klesa is an uninvited guest, the one who doesn't fit in or belong, Dionysus, perhaps, or a furry critter with pointy ears, Coyote, or maybe two gods, wandering together among mortals, disguised.
If the Tathagata-garbha or Alaya-vignana were not a mysterious mixture of purity and defilement, good and evil, this abrupt transformation (paravritti) of an entire personality would be an impossibility. That is to say, if the Garbha or the Alaya while absolutely neutral and colourless in itself did not yet harbour in itself a certain irrationality, no sentient beings would ever be a
Buddha, no enlightenment would be experienced by any human beings.
- D.T. Suzuki, The Lankavatara Sutra
The Alaya is the Ally.

The defilements are graffiti on the white wall of the Great Warehouse. Or maybe the storehouse walls are transparent, and the apparent graffiti our discrimination, itself the coloring — pigments, makeup — Empedocles' cunning artist mixing and applying his polychromatic pharmaka to votive offerings, creating men and women and trees. The Creator made the World from poisons.
Krankheit ist wohl der letzte Grund Des ganzen Schopferdrangs gewesen; Erschaffend konnte ich genesen, Erschaffend wurde ich gesund.
Disease at bottom brought about Creative urgence for, creating I soon could feel the pain abating, Creating, I could work it out.
— Heinrich Heine (in Freud, "On Narcissism")
There is no point to calling that defined as impure as being pure, or is there? "All the intrinsically pure defilements." All co-created, co-dependent impurities of thought and brain, flying at us like angels, or emerging from their own arising: a leaf, a horn, a dream, a voice that passed and dropped a word.
We are not trying to say that they are nice, these poisons, but "nice" is a relative, not a god.
Poison eyes, poison ears, poison songs: dreams within a dream.

We hope we have not poisoned the world in vain.

The intent of our teaching is like a poison-smeared drum. Once it is
beaten, those who hear it, near and far, all perish. That those who hear it perish is surely true. But what about the deaf?
- Zen Master Shiqi Xinyue, "Stone River" (in Cleary 1990)


DALE PENDELL


excerpt from "Pharmako Poeia- Plant Powers, Poisons and Herbcraft"