The Tenth Man: The Great Joke PDF
Preview The Tenth Man: The Great Joke
THE TENTH MAN The Great Joke (WHICH MADE LAZARUS LAUGH) WEI WU WEI THE TENTH MAN The Tenth Man is the only Man. There is No Other. The Tenth Man THE GREAT JOKE (which made Lazarus laugh) Wei Wu Wei S SENTIENT PUBLICATIONS, LLC First Sentient Publications edition 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Hong Kong University Press. Reprinted in the United States by Sentient Publications, by arrangement with Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be repro duced in any form without permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Printed in the United States of America Cover design by Kim Johansen, Black Dog Design Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wei, Wu Wei. The tenth man the great joke (which made Lazarus laugh) / Wei Wu Wei.—1st Sentient Publications ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1-59181-007-8 1. Asia—Religion. 2. Philosophy, Asian. 3. Buddhism—Doctrines. 4. Taoism—Doctrines. I. Title. BL1023.W45 2003 291.2’2—cd21 2002042947 SENTIENT PUBLICATIONS A Limited Liability Company 1113 Spruce Street Boulder, CO 80302 www.sentientpublications.com Foreword to the Second Edition By profession, I am a licensed clinical psychologist. I was in private practice for thirty-seven years, and my work as a psychotherapist was fairly traditional. I was always drawn to Eastern religions and philosophies and most of my private studies were in this area. I viewed myself as a dedicated “seeker,” and enjoyed the fantasy that this put me into the center of everything exciting, critical, and sig nificant. There were answers, and I was going to find them in this lifetime. One day a friend handed me a book by Wei Wu Wei and asked me if I knew anything about it. He said he didn’t understand it and wondered if I would read it to see what it was all about. In retrospect, I now see that noth ing was accidental about this moment at all. I read the book that night from cover to cover. Two things stand out. First, I didn’t have a clue what the book was about and second, I knew in my bones that I had been handed a gift. Unconsciously I knew exactly what the book was about—it made the hair on my arms stand straight up and my heart raced for no apparent reason. At the conscious level, I was permitted, thanks to denial, to grasp every ninth word if I was lucky. The book’s style was very abstruse, even a bit pedantic and “Oxfordian,” but the hidden message set off a firestorm of inquiry that persists to this day. That was over twenty-five years ago. I have since read all of Wei Wu Wei’s books, and I love them all like children. Each is an exquisite gem. I II THE TENTH MAN have also read everything everyone else said or thought about him. It is clear now that he had a profound impact on many seekers, including the great and wonderful Balsekar. It is poetic justice that very little is known about Wei Wu Wei. This is certainly in keeping with his belief that there is no one to know anything about. What we do know is that he was born into a very affluent family in Ire land in the year 1895 and that he died at the age of ninety- one in 1986. Curiously, not unlike Siddartha, he left the fold to study, travel, and learn about life’s great mysteries. His chief mentor was Sri Ramana Maharshi at Sri Ramanashram in Tiruvannamalai, India. At the age of sixty-three he pub lished his first of eight books, which were released between 1958 and 1974. He also made contributions to a variety of periodicals, including The Mountain Path, as well as The Middle Way, and Etre Libre, a French periodical. Psychology is all about working with people and their problems. Wei Wu Wei’s interpretation of Buddhist philosophy shook the very foundation of all my beliefs, particularly those that apply to the dynamics of psycho therapy. Little did I know that I was going to engage in a long struggle between what we say is, and what might actually be. Little by little, materialism gave way to the truth that ev erything we refer to as reality isn’t what we insist it is. These new views forced me to alter the way I worked with people. As I began to see things differently, my prac tice shifted from the standard Western view of life to a much vaster view of existence as a dream in which every thing we do is content in the dream. The shift was from real people in trouble to spirits in trouble trying to be real people. Denial saw to it this shift came very slowly, but the pull in this direction was as arresting as the ideas FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION III in Wei Wu Wei’s books. There was no turning back. The whole process reminds me of waking up from a giant slum ber, a trance that locks fiction into fact and fact into fic tion. This metanoesis, as Wei Wu Wei refers to it, feels like a 180-degree shift in course, in which enlightenment hap pens to the dreamers in the dream and not to the dreamed figures who pretend to be real people. -Dr. Gregory Tucker
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