Tag Archives: divination

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The Nidana Cards: A Buddhist Oracle

Bhikkhu Parasamgate dropped by a few days ago. He’s a self-styled monk, whom I hadn’t seen in a while. He brings a bag, a bedroll, and goes around the country staying with people – usually for about a couple of weeks. He’s very low-maintenance. Provide him with access to a bathroom, kitchen, and a space for his bedroll, and he’s more than happy. People who invite him often ask him to teach meditation, yoga, or other esoteric stuff in return for his keep. I just like having good, long chats with him, about his current views, and what practices he’s using to deepen his understanding of awakening. In fact, ‘the Tibetan monk from Bedford’, who appeared in the previous article on this site, was pretty much based on Bhikkhu Parasamgate (although the real bhikkhu was first trained in the Theravadan tradition).

I was glad to see he’d put on a little weight since last summer, when he was looking far too skinny. I like the way he organises his life, always roaming around, completely outside the system, teaching and writing in his notebooks. (I’m not sure where he puts them once they’re full.) It’s a pretty insecure existence, however. We’ve discussed this, and I know it’s something he thinks about occasionally.

He told me about an idea he’d had to make a little cash, which he hoped to put away in case of emergencies. He’d noticed how popular tarot cards have become, and how useful they are for opening up insights into personal issues, or providing forecasts of possible events. But he’d also noticed how Buddhism has nothing equivalent.

nidana cards

Three of Bhikkhu Parasamgate's nidana cards in action.

This set him thinking. The reason that tarot is so effective, he decided, is because of how it maps the entire panoply of mundane experience. Everything is there in those 78 cards: the suits representing earth, water, air and fire; the minor arcana embodying the 10 sephiroth of the Tree of Life; and the major arcana corresponding to the 22 paths between between the sephiroth. Yet the main concern of Buddhism is with finding an exit from ordinary experience (or ‘suffering’, as the Buddha characterised it), rather than revelling in all its mundane glories.

Of course, for Buddhism to achieve that, it has to provide a full understanding of exactly what must be ‘escaped’. And this was what brought Bhikkhu Parasamgate, finally, to the nidanas – or ‘chains of causation’. These are the teachings within the Buddhist tradition that describe in greatest detail the ordinary, unenlightened world. So it was upon the nidanas that the bhikkhu built his new and uniquely Buddhist oracle. And the more he thought about it, the more amazingly suited to this purpose the nidanas seemed to be.

However, leading the sort of lifestyle that he does, his resources were limited. Luckily, he had a friend who could typeset the book he wrote. Although Bhikkhu Parasamgate is many things, he’s no draughtsman, and sadly he couldn’t find an artist with the time and interest to create original images for each nidana. He had to resort instead to trawling the internet for suitable pictures. Of course, he knew he couldn’t make money from these (that would be copyright theft) but he hoped that a professional publisher would take up the idea, run with it, and hire a suitable artist for the job.

Unfortunately, given the current state of publishing, no one was interested in taking on the substantial up-front cost of producing an original deck of 26 cards. Bhikkhu Parasamgate carried the nidana oracle in his bag, still hopeful, for three or four years, but last week he handed me a USB stick and explained he’d given up on making money from the idea, although he still thinks the nidana cards are too good an idea to waste. He has asked me to release both his book and the cards onto the internet, for free, with an assurance he hasn’t profited financially from anyone else’s work. He can’t remember now where he culled the images from. Hopefully, many of them are already in the public domain.

 

The Nidana Cards: A Buddhist Oracle and Teaching Tool, by Bhikkhu Parasamgate. (Book. 112 pages.) Download [PDF 14.1MB]
The cards. (26 cards, plus single backing design.) Download [PDF 32.6MB]
Backing design. (For use in making a deck of cards – see below.) Download [PDF 64Kb]

 

What the cards mean, how they’re used, and what divination has to do with Buddhism anyway, are questions the bhikkhu explores in his book, written in a style more wonderfully concise and engaging than anything I could manage. I hope readers of this website will find it as interesting as I did. It really does seem to offer a uniquely Buddhist system of divination.

The nidana cards are a nuanced and subtle oracle, nowhere near as ‘earthy’ as the tarot or the runes, and probably best applied to issues that are primarily psychological, or concerned with spiritual development. Even if you don’t use the cards, there’s plenty of interesting material in the book concerning Buddhism, meditation, enlightenment and divination. Spiritual geeks will probably enjoy the appendix, in which the bhikkhu shows how the nidanas can be mapped onto the tarot, the Tree of Life, and onto salient concepts from Integral theory. But if you decide you would like to use the cards, then you’ll need to make yourself a deck by hand, from the files supplied.

I never imagined this blog would turn all ‘arts and crafts’, but here are some instructions, based on how I made my own deck of cards:

  1. Print out the cards at as high a quality as your printer allows onto separate sheets of thick photo paper. I used glossy, A6 sized sheets (148 x 105 mm; 5.8 x 4.1 in), which worked really well.
  2. For the backing of the cards, print off a few sheets of the backing design onto A4 (or similar-sized) thick photo paper.
  3. With scissors, trim the nidana cards fairly close to, but not exactly on, the edges indicated by the fine black line.
  4. Using PVA glue, stick a group of cards face up onto a backing sheet. Make sure the backing sheet is oriented in the same direction for each group, otherwise it might be possible to guess the front of the card from its back!
  5. Cover the glued sheets with a cloth, and press overnight under a pile of books (or other weighty object) to flatten and prevent curling whilst the glue dries.
  6. Then, with a scalpel and ruler, cut out each card (now glued securely to its backing) along the fine black lines. Trim the rounded corners with sharp scissors.
  7. You’ll need some sort of covering to protect your cards, because printer inks are very vulnerable to moisture. I used self-adhesive plastic to cover mine – which turned out okay, although it was tricky to avoid air-bubbles. Various kinds of spray-on varnish are available, which might produce a good effect, if you’ve a suitable space in which to apply them.

Bhikkhu Parasamgate sends his best wishes to readers of this website, hoping that you find the book and cards useful, and he wishes you the very best of luck with finding enlightenment in this lifetime. If you have any feedback on his work, let me know, and I’ll pass on your comments the next time he swings by.

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A Drift At Dawn

It is light now by 4am. Outside, the roads are deserted in a post-apocalyptic silence. The sun is not quite risen and the bluish daylight has a copper tinge. Tennyson captured the loneliness and melancholy of this time of day:

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square… [1]

But this time is also special for its otherworldly quality. When I lucid-dream, why is it I always find myself either in twilight or at dawn? Mervyn Peake seems to have felt something similar:

It is at times of half-light that I find
Forsaken monsters shouldering through my mind… [2]

A summer dawn is an ideal time for meditation and magick. We are not asleep and not quite awake. It’s a powerful experience to wander abandoned streets, as if the world belonged only to ourselves. This sensation is practically a form of gnosis – a pseudo- or semi-mystical experience – in itself.

Having set myself the aim of a drift at dawn I woke spontaneously at 4.30am, went to my altar, lit a candle and performed a banishing ritual. But half-way down the street toward the crossroads I cursed myself, remembering that I’d forgotten to extinguish the candle. Should I go back and blow it out? At the crossroads I realised I’d also forgotten to bring offerings for the spirits. This wasn’t going well; my mind was half-asleep. Never mind. Forget the spirits of the crossroads. This wasn’t going to be about them…

A stranger in the dawn

A stranger in the dawn.

A man was walking down the hill wearing high visibility work-clothes. I wondered how deserted the streets would actually prove to be. Already I’d been overtaken by a shiny purple van half-way down my street. Then I realised it was probably an undertakers’ van. I learned to spot them after working in an office that overlooked an understakers’ yard. All day long they took delivery of corpses from suspiciously shiny Transit vans.

At the crossroads I heard faint electronic beeping, which I failed to trace. It didn’t seem to come from inside the pollution monitoring station that has recently appeared on the traffic island. But then I felt drawn up the hill in an easterly direction, where the sunrise was gathering strength. In a building adjoined to the church a warm, welcoming lamplight burned. Did this mean someone was on hand to comfort the troubled throughout the night?

I turned left into and up a steep residential street. There were no signs of human life here at all. On the pavement outside a house was an odd-looking object that proved to be a child’s plastic spoon. I picked it up and took it with me. The hollow of the spoon was stained, as if someone had fed their offspring mouthfuls of turmeric.

Welcoming lamplight from the church

Welcoming lamplight from the church.

Near the top of the road crows called loudly. One sat on a roof. The other broke cover from a tree and flew to sit on an entrance post. They put me in mind of Huginn and Muninn, the ravens of Odin who leave the god each day at dawn to gather intelligence from across the entire world. Their names mean ‘thought’ and ‘memory’. Some commentators have suggested Odin’s continual concern that they may not return has a shamanic significance.

At the top of the hill I stood in the middle of the deserted road and looked down toward the park. Belisha beacons were flashing on the pedestrian crossings. There were no people or cars. I was reminded of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan at a lecture he gave in Baltimore:

All that I could see, except for some trees in the distance, was the result of thoughts actively thinking thoughts, where the function played by the subjects was not completely obvious… The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning. [3]

A child's spoon

A child's spoon. If you've lost it I'll send it back!

In other words, the unconscious is thought without a thinker; a city with no citizens. When there are no people we become aware of the built environment and the natural world, of traffic signals and crows, yet these (perhaps too readily) become metaphors to us of our own human process.

Indeed, by this point I had already turned back into the road where I lived. I’d not ventured far at all but had merely walked around the block. The unattended candle on my altar was nagging me. Probably it was safe, but I couldn’t chance it.

There was a van stopped in the road with its hazard lights on. A man was loading something. I hid my camera, in case he was a burglar. Another oddity of this time of day is that despite the daylight we treat others with the suspicion we usually reserve for the hours after dark. It feels uncomfortable to approach or be approached by someone at 4.30am. Yet the man’s activity looked innocent, so when I’d passed I stepped into the road again and let myself be seen. Perhaps I startled him, or he was puzzled by what I was doing, because he made an odd sound, like a shocked or strangled Hi?!

Huginn or Muninn?

Huginn or Muninn?

A pattern of struts against a wall caught my eye. It was like a combination of the runes Odal and Gyfu, which signify ‘material possessions or inheritance’ and ‘gift or generosity’. The divinatory meaning became clear after I’d returned home. The candle was already out; I’d not forgotten to extinguish it after all.

‘What we have is freely bestowed’ the runic pattern had said. This is the secret of a drift: we must include everything as part of the experience, as a gift, and regard nothing as an impediment. The burning candle was not an obstacle. But neither did the discovery that it had been out all along mean that my worries were pointless. What I’d been given I would accept: this had been a walk on which I’d felt constrained because of what I believed I’d overlooked, but the constraint was illusory. The real obstacle was in believing that my oversight had ‘spoiled’ the occasion. Yet a walk around the block is always as real and as fulsome an experience as any.

An audio montage / cut-up of sounds during the drift.

References

Runes everywhere!

Runes everywhere! Odal + Gyfu.

[1] Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Tears, Idle Tears‘ (1847).

[2] Mervyn Peake, ‘At Times of Half-Light’, in: Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1972).

[3] Jacques Lacan, ‘Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever‘. A talk at John Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1966.