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URTHONA Buddhist arts magazine

Explore art & culture from a Buddhist perspective

Welcome to Urthona magazine. Inspired by William Blake’s zoa of the creative imagination, Urthona blends a Romantic concern with inner and outer spiritual freedom with the insights of the Buddhist East. Urthona appears once a year in 72 page full colour A4. We explore world art, literature, culture and imagination from a contemporary Buddhist perspective.

Click ESSAYS & ART FEATURES above for online essays on literature, art…

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Current Issue 37, the Dharma of Fantasy

Pure Forms in Buddhism and Platonism

What is ‘pure form’?

Since time immemorial human beings have been prone to extraordinary experiences where they feel that they have ascended to a world of purity & wonder far beyond everyday concerns. However, the ways in which such experiences of pure, luminous forms have been understood has differed widely from culture to culture. A particularly interesting contrast is found between how such experiences of pure beauty were understood in the Buddhist east, and how they were understood in Greco-Roman culture – especially Platonism, which placed a high philosophical value on the knowledge of pure Forms of beauty and truth.

It is certainly true that both Buddhism and Platonism posit a level of reality characterized by ‘pure forms’, but it would be unwise to equate these exactly. For Platonism the Forms are marked by true reality. For Buddhism the loka or realm of pure form (rūpa-loka) is marked by subtle forms of illusion & subtle blissful sensations. Although useful to the meditator, the rūpa-loka doesn’t have the characteristic of being closer to the absolute truth than ordinary sense experience.

To investigate this further I will start with the Theravada Buddhism of Southeast Asia which is based on the suttas, the earliest strata of scriptures shared by all schools. So in classical Theravāda cosmology and in the Abhidharma (that is the scholastic tradition based on the suttas), the rūpa-loka (the realm of subtle form, is accessible via the lower jhānas or absorption states of meditation. It occupies a fascinating middle ground. Undeniably higher, refined, and freer from gross delusion than the kāma-loka (the realm of ordinary sense desire). Yet, strictly speaking, it is not “closer to ultimate truth” (paramattha sacca).

To understand why, it helps to look at how Buddhist thought contrasts with Platonism on what constitutes reality, and why the rūpa-Loka is higher than normal sense experience, yet still characterized by illusion.

In Platonism, moving up the divide from physical objects to the Forms is an ascent toward Truth. Physical things are mere copies or shadows (mimesis).

In Buddhism, moving from the kāma-loka to the rūpa-loka is an ascent in refinement, peace, and cognitive clarity, but not a move toward ultimate reality. The rūpa-loka remains conditioned (Saṅkhata). It is created through the cultivation of deep meditative absorption. But because it has a cause, it is subject to impermanence (anicca) and lacks inherent existence (anattā). The eternal quality of pure Platonic forms does not apply here; even a deity born in the highest brahma realm will eventually exhaust their karma and fall back.

This is because subtle delusion (Moha) Persists. While the gross defilements of sensual desire (kāmachanda) and ill will (vyāpāda) are suppressed in the rūpa-loka, subtle ignorance remains fully intact. In fact, Buddhist texts warn that the rūpa-loka is particularly dangerous precisely because its refined bliss and luminous stability mimic Liberation (Nibbāna), leading meditators to mistake a high state of concentration for Enlightenment.

In Buddhism, there is only one unconditioned timeless truth (asaṅkhata dhamma): Nibbāna. Everything else—whether a coarse pebble in the sense realm or a luminous, ethereal structure in the highest jhāna—belongs to the realm of conditioned phenomena. In terms of ultimate truth, a golden cage and an iron cage are both cages.

However, while the rūpa-loka is not itself “The Truth,” it provides the epistemic environment necessary to see the truth.

In the Sutta tradition, pure form states act as a supreme lens. Ordinary sense experience (kāma) is like turbulent, muddy water where light refracts unpredictably. The rūpa states still the water and clear the sediment. When a meditator cultivates these states regularly, the mind is said possesses qualities vital for insight:

The mental factors present in the rūpa-loka (such as single-pointedness, joy, and equanimity) allow for powerful stable observation.

By observing that even these refined, radiant forms arise and pass away, the meditator sees that nothing in conditioned existence is worth clinging to – a realization far harder to achieve amidst noisy, coarse sense data.

In short: the rūpa-loka is not closer to the Truth in its nature, but it is closer to the Truth in its utility. It is like a high-magnification microscope – not the specimen you are trying to understand, but the instrument that lets you see reality as it actually is.

Indeed, the fact that rupa in Buddhism and eidos in Platonism are both often translated by the word ‘form’ may be misleading. The forms in Platonism are universal objects. Instead of apprehending amongst individual objects or beings that they are the same or different to each other, or beautiful, or large, or with some other virtue, one apprehends Beauty itself, or Sameness itself, or even Being and Unity themselves. Whereas in Buddhism the pure forms are apparently particular luminous forms apprehended by particular beings.

However, when we move up from the rūpa-loka, to the even more subtle levels of the ‘formless realms’ or arūpa-lokas, the situation is a bit different. These levels are characterised in a way that sounds more epistemological. There is the loka of infinite space, then infinite consciousness, then neither perception nor non-perception. These are not ‘eternal forms’ in the platonic sense, but they do sound more like basic building blocks of perception in a very refined form.

Also, we should not forget that whilst in Platonism the forms are given a high ontological status, in Neoplatonism, at any rate, they are not the ultimate reality – not the One beyond being. The philosopher in touch with the Forms must reach beyond them towards the final truth. Just as ‘Devas of the path’ wish to go beyond the rūpa-loka towards unconditioned realization.

In Neoplatonism – as systematized by the 3rd century Roman philosopher Plotinus – the Intellect (Nous) housing the Forms is only the second hypostasis of three descending levels of reality. The Forms represent multiplicity-in-unity; because they can be differentiated and intellected, they possess structure, and thus fall short of absolute simplicity. Ultimate reality belongs solely to The One (To Hen), which is strictly epekeina tes ousias – beyond being, beyond substance, completely ineffable, and the source of all being, all existence, which comes after it.

So, both traditions construct a ladder where the realm of pure form serves as a crucial transit station rather than the ultimate destination.

Plato’s Forms are a radiant intellectual order of eternal archetypes.

The rūpa-loka is characterized by luminous, refined mental states (jhānic bliss), in which the objects of perception seem to be luminous, pure and eternal.

Just as Plotinus insists that remaining at the level of Nous leaves on in the realm of Being rather than reaching the Source, Buddhist soteriology warns that rebirth as a long-lived Deva in the rūpa-loka is still bound to the wheel (saṃsāra). To dwell as a high god or Brahma in the even more subtle extension of the arūpa-loka, is ultimately no better. You may be able to stay there for an aeon or two but in the end the subtle bliss of ‘formless forms’ must be seen through. If you don’t see through it, the conditions that sustained it will eventually be exhausted and you will descend involuntarily to a lower state.

There are also parallels in the path of practice as regards moving from form to that which is beyond form. To reach the One, the Neoplatonist must undergo henosis – a detachment from intellection itself, as the Forms are still dualistic (subject knowing object). Similarly, to reach Nibbāna, the Buddhist must abandon attachment to rūpa-lokas & arūpa-lokas and ultimately step beyond all conditioned phenomena.

Because both destinations transcend structural forms, they can only be described apophatically. Plotinus speaks of The One in terms of what it is not (neither being, nor non being, nor essence), directly echoing the Udāna’s famous description of Nibbāna as unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned.

However, where these traditions part ways is in the metaphysical nature of the ultimate.

For Plotinus, The One is an overflowing, transcendent Plenitude – the hyper-real generator of all being from which reality emanates. For Buddhism, Nibbāna is not a generative source or a primal cause from which the world emanates, but the extinction of the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion – the complete cessation of dependently originated conditions of experience (paṭiccasamuppāda).

In both frameworks, the realm of pure form is, so to speak, a vital intermediate destination, but stopping there is a metaphysical cul de sac. For Platonism the Forms however, have considerable ontological weight. They are the source of all form and structure in everyday experience. For Buddhism experience of pure forms, or indeed of formless forms, is simply that, an experience that arises and ceases in dependence and conditions.

However, if we move from Theravāda Abhidharma to Tibetan traditions like Dzogchen, Mahāmudrā, or the Shentong (other-emptiness) philosophical school, the structural and phenomenological parallels to Neoplatonism become far stronger.

In these non-dual traditions, reality is understood through the lens of primordial awareness, or innate luminous non-dual consciousness. I will focus here on the Dzogchen tradition for which this state of awareness is known as rigpa, and is said to possess three indivisible dimensions.

1. Essence (Ngo bo): Primordially pure and empty (Ka dag).

2. Nature (Rang bzhin): Spontaneously luminous and clear (Lhun grub).

3. Compassionate Capacity (Thugs rje): Unimpeded, expressive, and all-pervading.

For Dzogchen the Base or Ground is primordially pure emptiness, non-conceptual, beyond existence and non-existence. All phenomena manifest as the dynamic ‘ornament’ or ‘play’ (Rölpa) of Rigpa without ever separating from it. Samsara and Nirvana are both the ‘luminous self-display’ (Rang-snang) of mind’s true nature.

To illustrate how Rigpa sustains everything without itself being involved in the network of conditions, the tradition uses three metaphors.

The Sky and Clouds: Clouds (conditioned phenomena) form, transform, and dissolve based on weather patterns (causes and conditions). The sky (Rigpa) allows all clouds to appear within it, yet the sky itself is never stained, reshaped, or conditioned by the storm.

The Mirror and Reflections: A mirror shows beautiful or terrifying images (samsara/nirvana). The images depend on external objects and light, but the mirror’s reflective surface is never altered, dirty, or improved by what appears in it.

The Ocean and Waves: Waves (individual thoughts and appearances) rise and fall due to the wind of karma. The underlying water (the nature of awareness) never leaves its fluid state regardless of how violent the surface waves become.

Unlike classical Sutta/Abhidharma Buddhism, which treats consciousness as dependently arisen alongside sense objects, Dzogchen positions primordial awareness as the fundamental ground of reality. All cosmic manifestations – pure ‘Divine’ mandalas or coarse, confused samsaric projections – are light-forms arising from this single, luminous source. This aligns well with Plotinus’s view of Nous and Psyche emanating from the One.

Furthermore, in Dzogchen practice (specifically Tögal or the ‘Direct Crossing’), the practitioner works directly with the luminous display of the Ground. Here, pure vision manifests as circles of light (thigle), deific forms, and mandalas. These are not created by the mind; they are the inherent, primordial architecture of awareness itself – strikingly similar to how Plotinian Forms reside eternally within Nous.

In Plotinian Neoplatonism, the Soul doesn’t create its divine nature; it simply awakens from its sleep/forgetfulness (amnesia). Likewise, Dzogchen is a ‘resultant vehicle’ (phala-yāna): enlightenment is not built brick-by-brick, but achieved by recognizing the naturally present, uncreated perfection (Lhun grub) that was never lost.

Nevertheless, there is no exact equivalence. Even in Dzogchen, two fundamental Buddhist tenets hold firm. Emptiness (Śūnyatā) and lack of an essential first cause.

Plotinus’s One is often conceived as a hyper-substantial source of ultimate Being. Plotinus is very careful about how he speaks about this. The One is not strictly speaking a cause, but in some ineffable way it overflows in its fullness. It thus gives rise to the pure intellect of Nous. This level, which contains the Forms, is involved in causation and produces the levels of inner Soul and of outer material forms below it. Thus, we have a descending chain of causation, or rather, to use more strictly platonic language, of participation, in which each level gains its essential being by participating in the level above it.

But in Dzogchen, Rigpa is explicitly empty of active causation. It is a luminance that has no substance – a mirror’s capacity to reflect, rather than a light source. Forms only appear to arise and dissolve within its luminescent emptiness.

Neoplatonism leans toward a cosmic teleology or emanation chain extending from the highest levels of existence to the dark, unformed potentiality of matter. Existence is not so much like a mirror in which forms appear, but more like a descending fountain, or a spreading and diffusing stream of light, arising from a central source.

Dzogchen avoids calling the Ground a ‘creator’ or ‘primal cause’ to avoid falling into eternalism (Śāśvatavāda). The display is described as interdependent, unceasing appearance rather than a descending series of hypostases.

Nevertheless, if you are looking for a bridge between Western classical idealism and Eastern contemplative metaphysics, the Dzogchen view of Rigpa as Luminous Empty Source is about as close as a Buddhist school gets to Plotinian Neoplatonism.

The Effect Vehicle: an interview with Robert Thurman by Louis Bourgeois

Urthona is very pleased to present a previously unpublished interview with the noted Buddhist scholar and translator Robert Thurman. This fascinating conversation was conducted not long before Thurman’s passing away in June 2026 by the New Orleans poet and translator, Louis Bourgeois.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Robert Thurman photographed in 2016 by Christopher Michel

For many years a major figure in Western Buddhism, Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman was the Je Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, before retiring in 2019. He died in June of this year (2026) at the age of 84. An internationally celebrated scholar, author and practitioner of Tibet Buddhism, Robert Thurman was one of the most respected and outspoken voices of Buddhism in America.

He was the Je Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia University until he retired in 2019. He was also the first American to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, by no less a figure than His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Time magazine named him one of the “25 most influential Americans” in 1997—just one of many honours he received in the USA and abroad. Though he disrobed in 1967 he and the Dalai Lama remained lifelong friends. Thurman was in fact deeply committed to the Tibetan people and their cause. At the Dalai Lama’s request, in 1987, Thurman, along with his wife Nena, actor Richard Gere, and composer Philip Glass, founded the nonprofit Tibet House US to support the preservation of Tibetan culture. He served as president of the board.

During his long career, Thurman published many distinguished translations of Buddhist texts as well as original works about Buddhism. He was considered to have been a pioneering, creative, and talented translator by many of his English-speaking peers. The prominent Buddhologist Jan Nattier has praised the style of Thurman’s translation of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, as among the very best of translations of that important Indian Buddhist scripture.

THE EFFECT VEHICLE

(A CONVERSATION WITH Dr ROBERT THURMAN)

LOUIS BOURGEOIS: In all the lectures I’ve seen of yours you never discuss Zen Buddhism. What’s your stance on Zen?

ROBERT THURMAN: I love Zen!

My view of Zen is that the core of its tradition is the DIALECTICTICIST CENTRISM ((Prāsaṇgikamādhyamika) – Unexcelled Yoga Tantra, the Mahamudra, or the Dzogchen of China and Japan! I wrote to this effect in my Buddhist Hermeneutics article decades ago, and repeated that in the introduction to the Central Philosophy of Tibet.

Chinese culture was so nervous about women and their power, that the advanced Tantras never got very settled there until 20th century, and so the Ch’an lineage brought the radical “effect vehicle” teachings without the sexual imagery and subtle body yogas, though they knew them and used them themselves at the highest levels. Even Japan, where the Shingon line did bring much of the Tantric perspective, shied away from the Unexcelled Yogas, and so Zen served the super-advanced there.

Of course, Hvashang Moheyan (1) in Tibet and many others associated with the tradition over-simplified things with the naive Subitist (2) rather nihilistic extremist theory, so I don’t mean all Zen teachers and writers reached the level of their core tradition. I love especially Cleary’s Blue Cliff Record and some other translations, as really conveying the subtleties well.

What is the difference between Nothingness and Nirvana?

Nothingness doesn’t exist except as a negative notion. Nothing is just nothing, technically a non-referring term, and the “-ness” doesn’t make it something.

Nirvana is the experienced freedom from all physical or mental suffering, otherwise known as inconceivable bliss.

In the Mystic Fire videos you describe Buddhism as a great super pattern of moral reality. But from what I’ve read of Zen there doesn’t appear to be anything but enlightenment itself, i.e., enlightenment strikes all at once and has nothing to do with moral actions done in this life. In Zen, there doesn’t seem to be any references to any kind of re-birth pattern, etc.

By the way, your lectures on tape have pulled me through some of the darkest moments of my life

And thanks for that!

I’m so glad and touched.

The thing about Ch’an and Zen is that it aims at people who have grown up with Avalokliteshvara and Manjushri all around them, Amitabha in the West, the Buddhist ethic maintained by monastics and together to be flouted by the many. So the tradition that attracts our notice takes the moral patterns, rebirth as a given, etc., for granted, as already second nature in the common sense of the people. So i seems absent, unless we’ve studied the culture extensively – and not just as many western academics who unconsciously are bent on seeing things in a way that reinforces their sense of their own culture’s superiority.

I’ve been rigorously pursuing my studies in Zen…but my mind is thoroughly en-trenched in Existentialism, as it has for 20 years. I can only seem to get so far with Buddhism, then the door shuts. It would be helpful to me if you could give a Buddhist response to the six Existential principles.

I present these statements with total respect for you and Zen. I’m simply trying to reverse some very nasty intellectual habits.

Existence precedes essence. In other words, “you are not a thing” and there is no structure (Metaphysically or otherwise) that binds you. What is the Buddhist understanding of this assertion?

Existence and essence are a binary conceptual pair, when both are understood as conventional terms. VOIDNESS of essence doesn’t mean there are no essences, only that the habitually imagined, reified and absolutized essence in persons and things does not exist, all being sheer relativity. Existence as opposite of essence is meaningless without relative essence. IN terms of your simple statement, “You are both a person and a thing, but not an intrinsically real person nor an intrinsically real thing.” Relatively, relativistically, there are structure and binding and freedom from binding. Absolutely, ultimately, intrinsically, there is neither bondage nor freedom. Etc. This can go on and on.

Anxiety is the universal condition. Those who claim not to experience anxiety, are either lying to themselves or completely deluded.

Dualistic life is so stressful lived driven by the truth-grasping mind, freedom is imagined to be some transcendent state detached from life. However, beyond that type of escapist fantasy, non-dualistic life is, apparently, blissful beyond conceivability, as relational existence is experienced as magical illusion, indivisible from its matrix of freedom, death and life in balanced communion. Anxiety is caused by the delusion of intrinsically real self-habituation, and is dispelled by wisdom. If you attain the ultimate tolerance of cognitive dissonance that is enlightenment, and can live joyfully as if already dead-free, anxiety about yourself no longer arises; and anxiety about others who are not so aware and not so tolerant emerges as compassion, made tolerable by the infinite well of bliss, the clear light or transparency of the free void.

Absurdity: to exist is inexplicable. Although my existence is free and un-bounded, I exist for no particular reason.

Inconceivable is how it is traditionally put, also inexpressible and inexplicable. Whenever existence is experienced with full relationality, it is evenly free, and certainly a remembered kind of alienated existence as self vs. other is known as pointless not imposed by anyone or anything for any reason. However, one is then free to choose to make its reason the love of compassion for others not so free and so experiencing themselves as suffering.

Nothingness: there is nothing that structures my world. The self is nothing and there’s no way to “transcend” it.

There is no such thing as nothing or nothingness, the ultimately non-referring, or not even conceptually referring, concept! So therefore no thing is nothing, or perhaps, only nothing is nothing. “Is” has no referent as concerns “nothing.” There is no absolute self, has not been found by millions of seekers, so far. However, there is a relative self, always changing, a continuum, a work in progress, ignorant and alienated, always anxious and suffering, wise and connected, enlightened, blissful and confidently in communion with all beings and things. There definitely are transcendent experiences, the supreme perhaps being the transcendence of transcendence, experienced still as being something apart or beyond something else, un-located or nonlocal nirvana, Buddha-hood, bliss-void-indivisible, etc.

Death: the final nothingness: death is total non-existence.

Death does not exist, except conceptually, just as a line has no width, a point no size, an instant no duration. Therefore there are no dead persons, no one can “be” dead, and it is an arbitrary seeming boundary of a perceived form of life. The subjectivity of a person passing from one life form into another experiences only threshold states of obliteration of habitual states of awareness, replaced seamlessly by other states. Just as the person falling asleep and letting go of coarse consciousness in the softness of the pillow is not aware of any state of nonawareness before rising in subtler dream awareness, and also passing again from dream through non-aware deep sleep and arising in wakefulness. We can say “final nothingness” and “total non-existence” and “death”, longing for a final anaesthesia, but we are reifying non-referring terms into a picture of a dark oblivion space which no relative being can ever inhabit, there being only continua in relational existences. We are never going to be dead. And those, like the wonderful Miguel de Unamuno, who thought themselves into being afraid of la nada, were simply focusing their alienated anxiety on the notion of nothing in their heads. “There is nothing to be afraid of!” “I am afraid of nothing!” These are more sensible locutions, more sensible use of the term “nothing.” What is fearful actually is continued states of existence becoming negative, painful, horrible, etc. What is frightening is endless continuity without understanding or control. “To die. To sleep. Perchance to dream, Aye there’s the rub….” etc.

Alienation: I cannot truly connect with others, nature, culture, etc.

“Alienation” means feeling one is really a self apart and different from other beings and things. Prthagjana (Tib. so sor skye bo) means literally “separate person,” the opposite of ārya, a “noble” person, who has had some visceral experience of selflessness and so feels the life of others as equal to her or his own life, and so feels a noblesse oblige about those others. Shakyamuni, apparently, brilliantly took terms that were race- or class-based in Vedic India, “noble” as twice-born upper class, and “separate person” as someone excluded from the Vedic rite, low caste outsider, and transvalued them into meaning, respectively, individuals who felt a relational unity with others and so had the nobility of empathetic wisdom, and persons who were enclosed in self-centeredness, obsessed only with their self-concerns, and so felt alienated and disconnected from others, unaware of and unconcerned about their condition.

I enjoyed engaging with these questions and topics. I hope the answers are helpful.

Notes:

Hvashang Mohoyen (also spelled Heshang Moheyan or Hva-shang Mahayan) was an 8th-century Chinese Chan Buddhist monk. He is famous for representing the sudden enlightenment tradition of Chinese Buddhism during the historic Council of Lhasa debate against the Indian scholar Kamalaśīla. (Wikipedia).
In Buddhism Subitism, derived from the French word for sudden awakening, illumination subite, refers to a complete and instantaneous awakening or revealing of the truth, with no gradual steps.

Louis Bourgeois was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry and interviews in over two hundred magazines and journals in North America, Europe and Asia. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing. He is the Executive Director of VOX PRESS, as well as the Program Director for the Mississippi Prison Writes Initiative.

Birdmen & Astronauts

Birdmen and Astronauts
by Dharmavadana, Poetry Salzburg, £9 + £3 p&p
35 pp, paperback, http://www.poetrysalzburg.com

With this audacious title Buddhist poet Dharmavadana has brought out his first published poetry pamphlet, from the well known Poetry Salzburg Press, who although they are based in Mozart’s birth place have for many years produced excellent english language collections from the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Salzburg.

Dharmavadana presents a collection of fascinating characters and incidents. Some, like the opening ‘Birdmen of London’, with a visionary somewhat Blakean tinge. Others are more down to earth with incidents from family life perhaps, but still rich and colourful.

In the poignant ‘My Braver Younger Cousin’ for example, we find a vivid picture of an idolised childhood figure with many telling details such as:

your foot-high model Harley –
proud forks, dragon flame tank.
Your brother had his plastic dinosaurs
and reading lamp.

Later we get the tragic reprise:

Your father’s gaze
is on your brother’s now,
good in his suit, my father’s on me.
I fold my hands in front of my lap

as we maunder through the hymns.
The sodden leaves you saw too late,
spitting engine, smoke searing your eyes…

Other poems are more mythic and mysterious, none more so than ‘The Spaceman and Cybele’ where the astronaut appears to follow the goddess’s ancient devotees and castrate himself in her honour! Is this ritual or psychological abasement? What has become of this grounded spaceman who is now reduced to sucking his thumb as Cybele watches a talent contest on her ‘sleek black TV’?

Even the most mundane of encounters, as in a fish and chip with the chip man’s blunt advice on marriage in ‘Friday Night’, or a ‘peeping tom’ childhood encounter in the local dump (“our savannah strewn with wrecked TV’s”) – in Through the Fence to the Dump’ – have a strangeness to them in this collection which lingers in the mind.

Tolkien’s alternative ending

The Lord of the Rings – alternative ending

The existing ending of Tolkien’s masterpiece is neither sad nor happy. Elegiac is perhaps the best description. Frodo, Gandalf and Galadriel depart over the Western seas towards Valinor, the blessed realm of the gods. Sam Gamgee, however, returns to the Shire to begin along and happy life – ‘well, I’m back he says, and that is the end. Simple and satisfying.

Ending a fantasy masterwork is extremely difficult, as many authors, including George R R Martin with his Game of Thrones series still unfinished, have found to their cost. Tolkien had it all clear in his mind. Life ends in the eternal, but temporal life, in Middle Earth, goes on. Sam and his family represent fruitful continuity.

The unpublished epilogue fills this scenario out and is a little more optimistic than the published ending about the fading of magic from Middle Earth. Sam talks to his beloved daughter Elanor and explains what has happened to some of the main characters in The book. But most touchingly he also tells her that King Aragorn is coming to visit, to Lake Evendim just north of the Shire. Sam, Elanor and his whole family are invited to join the king by an ornate invitation in Elvish script – which Tolkien of course drew up in great detail. Queen Arwen and a company of elves will also be there and there will be singing by the lake. Sam explains to Elanor (Tolkien’s spelling) that some high elves have remained to look after Rivendell and the forest of Lothlorien. Indeed it is hinted that they may be around for some hundreds of years to come. As Sam says, ‘the light is fading Eleanorel but it won’t go out yet…’

The next issue of Urthona will contain much more about Tolkien’s vision his down to earth heroes and the anti-quest of the Ring. Subscribe at shop above.

You can find the text of the unpublished epilogue in the book ‘Sauron Defeated’ and the more accessible ‘The End of the Third Age’.

You can find facsimiles off the manuscripts in the book Tolkien, the Art of the Manuscript. ‘

Currently, searching for ‘Lord of the rings unpublished epilogue’ with bring up a PDF of the text.

Image – a publicity still from the Prime series…

Issue 37 ‘Dharma of Fantasy’ out soon

The Dharma of Fantasy

Our issue on fantasy literature, issue 37, is almost ready to be printed!

There will be amazing articles on :

* Addiction and renunciation in The Lord of the Rings by Dayajava

* The Oxford Inklings and the quest for mythic renewal by Ratnagarbha

* Finding love, patience & forgiveness through fantasy, by Maitriyogini

* Wonderful mythic artwork from Vishuddimati and Moksananda

With fantastic artwork , including this rendition of ‘the eye of Sauron’ by Stirzocular –www.deviantart.com/stirzocular/gallery

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Naming the wind

With great power comes great responsibility

Some of the greatest modern fantasy novel series are unfinished. The Game of Thrones series by George Martin has five novels published, the final two have been awaited eagerly since 2011. Similarly for Patrick Rothfuss’ unfinished Kingkiller trilogy.

Here at Urthona we cannot speed up these authors but we can ask why they have been so successful, making fantasy novels by far the best selling literary genre. And more importantly, we can ask what such writing has to offer the world. Is it just escapism? Or does it offer a doorway into wider vistas of myth, meaning and engagement with the human condition not easily available elsewhere?

Urthona Issue 37, due out later this summer, is about fantasy writing that engages the fundamental issues – of birth, death, power, pleasure, friendship, love and the need for wisdom in a fractured world, that all human beings must face one way or another.

Mythopoetic novels might be a better name for the genre at its best. It is writing that engages with who we really are, rather than offering comforting regression to a past that never existed.

Realism (whatever that is) can show us these issues embodied in the lives we think we actually live in the modern world. Fantasy writing can highlight the perennial themes of human life stripped of incidentals, in all of their raw, luminous power…

In Urthona Issue 37 well as articles covering the Inklings – C. S Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams – Buddhist writer Caroline Ivimey-Parr will be taking a broader look at modern fantasy and how it has helped her on her spiritual path (she has just been ordained into the Triratna Buddhist order):

“Fantasy novels were the outlet for an imagination and ambition that had little interest in worldly prosperity or status. I couldn’t articulate even to myself what I wanted, but I knew it was something of a different order to mundane life (‘This can’t be it. This can’t be all there is to life’). I wanted a purpose worth giving my whole being to; a family, mortgage, and 9-5 wouldn’t cut it. I was following an inkling of a meaning for life, a meaning that was cloaked in mystery and soaked in magic..”

Caroline doesn’t mind that the Kingkiller Trilogy is unfinished:

“It seems fitting that my favourite fantasy series is exquisite, yet incomplete – like the Dharma life, beautiful and poignant, constantly moving towards an incomprehensible end.”

Kvothe, the flawed hero of the Kingkiller Chronicles, stuck in a literary bardo though he is, learns how to control the wind by the power of naming. With great power, naturally, comes great responsibility. Something that Kvothe does not always live up to. Just so Ged, in Ursual Le Guin’s Earth-Sea novels, misuses the power of naming to call up a shadow from the world of the dead that haunts him for the rest of the series. As Caroline says:

“In The Kingkiller Chronicles real magic is incomprehensible to the ordinary mind. Even when Kvothe stumbles across the true name of the wind, it is not a word he can simply recall. The knowledge is hidden within his mind; he does not control this power… Really seeing the world (either through the lens of magic, or removing the lenses/veils through Dharma practice) is such a different perspective to the everyday mind; it is essential to act with responsibility and with great care.”

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Your editor VS AI

Ratnagarbha verses AI!

So I am working to some translations of Petrarch sonnets. I did some in blank verse but I aspire to do 14 of them in rhyme. Here is my attempt at the first in his famous sequence to the mysterious Laura. For fun I asked google’s Gemini to have a go. It preserved the rhyme scheme, added an extraneous stanza which I have omitted, but failed to preserve the meaning of the very complex second stanza. And somewhat garbled the rest, but at least it does rhyme. A McGonagall version. Win to the human race!! But isn’t it amazing that it managed to have a go…

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Sonnet to Laura, 1, Ratnagarbha translation:

All you who’ve heard from wandering scraps of rhyme

those sighs on which I fed my foolish heart,

when in my youth I felt love’s brutal dart –

I was not then the person I’ve become.

All you who mark the reasoned sorrows found

throughout my songs, of hope and fear born.

If you yourselves have felt love’s bitter thorn,

then may your pity be with pardon crowned.

But now, alas, I see how my good name

is hopelessly embroiled in public scorn.

Myself I must convict of foolish schemes,

for the fruit of all my vanity is shame,

and deep repentance, of the knowledge born

that life’s sweet joys are merely fleeting dreams.

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Sonnet to Laura, 1, Gemini AI translation:

Ye who in scattered verses hear the strain

Of sighs that fed my heart in youthful days,

When in my early years, I, yet unchained,

Was but a fledgling, far from what I’ve grown to be, this way,

Mark now the change, the years that swiftly glide,

The hopes once bright, now dimmed by time’s cold hand,

The love that burned, now cooled by age’s tide,

The dreams that soared, now buried in the sand.

But well I see, a spectacle to all,

A long-held tale, a source of frequent shame,

Wherefore I blush, within my heart’s own hall,

And from my folly’s fruit, regret’s sharp flame,

And bitter knowledge, clear as day’s bright gleam,

That all the world’s delights are but a fleeting dream.

Coleridge & the Landscape of Vision

Coleridge and the landscape of vision

A psycho-geographical essay by Ratnagarbha

The Quantocks in Somerset saw one of the greatest years of creativity in the history of English poetry when the Wordsworths lived at Alfoxton Park (which is now a Buddhist retreat centre that runs retreats on mindfulness, communication and creativity) and Coleridge was living close by in the village of Nether Stowey.

Dhammapada – choral

Ronald Corp has written a magical sacred choral setting of the Dhammapada

The Dhammapada is one of the most sacred texts of Buddhism, it contains pithy sayings of Gautama the Buddha. Composer Ronald Corp has written a wonderful sacred choral setting of some verses from the Dhammapada. Not himself a Buddhist Corp was clearly deeply inspired by these ancient verses and has written a piece very much in the tradition of British sacred choral music. I was reminded somewhat of the work of the celebrated Scottish Catholic composer James MacMillan. I was inspired and uplifted by these contemplative settings of a key Buddhist text.

The forgotten Inkling & the Buddha

C. S. Lewis (left) with brother Warnie, date unknown, presumably taken during Major Lewis’s retirement

The Inklings, that informal but highly influential Oxford literary group, has had many books written about it. These days it is fairly well known that as well as J. R. R. Tolkien & C. S. Lewis it contained such luminous figures as linguistic philosopher Owen Barfield and the poet and arthurian visionary Charles Williams. Easily forgotten however is C. S. Lewis’s brother major W. H. (Warnie) Lewis. He was a talented writer, on French cultural history, though not by any means a genius. More importantly he attended the Inklings for many years and kept a beautifully written diary.