In the course of my research for my book “The Garden” time and again, I came across the work of the husband and wife Eugen Kolisko (21 March 1893 – 29 November 1939) and Lili Kolisko (September 1, 1889 – November 20, 1976).
They shared with Ehrenfried Pfeiffer the role of putting the flesh on Rudolf Steiner’s biological theories. It is my understanding that, while Pfeiffer was tied up on other Anthroposophical business during Steiner’s “Agriculture Course” lectures, the Koliskos were present at Breslau for them. This was the birth of the Biodynamic movement, which this year is celebrating its centenary.
Eugen Kolisko had a perhaps broader range of interest than his wife. This above is my copy of “Zoology for Everybody” (1944) that I discovered in the bargain bin in the bookshop at Emerson College. But his other works include writings on nutrition, natural history, geology, chemistry, medicine, even fiction.
Lili Kolisko, on the other hand, was dedicated to the scientific method. Early on, pursuant to Steiner’s esoteric ideas about the function of the spleen, through her microscope she discovered a new type of speckled platelet, which she and Steiner termed “regulator cells”. This reminds me somewhat of Wilhelm Reich’s microscopic investigations.
As much as Steiner himself celebrated her work, she was met with a cold shoulder by the medics and scientists of the Anthroposophical Society. These internal disagreements between the couple and other senior figures in the movement effectively drove them from Germany to resettle in England in the thirties. Eugen Kolisko died relatively shortly afterwards in 1939 leaving Lili in penury and eking out a living sewing purses.
10 Euros on eBay.
In 1936 Lili Kolisko published “Moon and Plant Growth” in which she showed, by means of statistics and these beautiful photographs, how the influence of the waxing and waning moon could be used to optimise sowing. The Biodynamic idea is, in short, that you should plant root vegetables on a full moon, and leafy ones on the waxing moon.
Agriculture of Tomorrow in the library at Steiner House.
The couple’s book, Agriculture of Tomorrow (1939) is probably their masterpiece. Although Eugen had compiled the research with his wife, just as they were about to start writing it, he died, leaving the task to her. In it, they set out a series of experiments exploring the influence of the moon and planets and the role of chemical elements on plant growth, and upon the subject of nutrition. They also perform a scientific breakdown of Steiner’s suggestions for the renewal of agriculture.
In a sentence that could be penned today, in the book’s introduction Lili writes, “I want to write therefore about the regeneration of agriculture, which is the basis of the physical existence of men. Without proper food mediating life-forces to the human organism, human beings cannot grow strong and healthy, nor become able to develop the clear minds and moral strength we so urgently need.”
Among the photographs in the book (see below) you can glimpse the Kolisko’s house, Rudge Cottage, Edge, Stroud in Gloucestershire. Lili Kolisko died there in 1976, and it’s interesting for me to reflect that at that very moment I was living only 3 miles away in Lypiatt, Stroud.
Because I am in Gloucestershire often, with two uncles and aunts living just outside Stroud, and on this occasion travelling back from Wales, I thought I would drive past their old house and have a look.
But why restrict yourself to the hip retro New Age music of the eighties?
The algorithm introduced me Chantress Seba, an inheritor of the tradition of Black Vedantists such as Alice Coltrane and Laraaji. Her vocals are technically exquisite, but never emotionally robotic, as such virtuosity is in the hands of the helium divas. Her little Hispanic detours are entrancing.
There’s a distinct West Coast vibe to Finn’s bucolic strumming in their rendition of the Shiva mantra. I like how the image of the duo in the mountains is subtly undercut by the traffic racing along the B road in the distance. The recording of both it and the Ganesh mantra is interesting in itself, closely mic’d, they must also be processing the audio with some reverb. The result has a curiously hallucinatory indoors-while-outdoors quality, evocative of inner meditative spaces.
If you’ve ever been curious about the reality of the stoned high of bhakti, clock these guys’ intoxicated, rapt expressions.
Towards the end of June and the wet weather we’ve had has collided with the glorious sunshine, making everything very lush. It’s looking so beautiful and the bees and hover flies are enjoying themselves.
But there’s more to come. The dahlias, zinnias, echinacea, and poppies have yet to bloom. My neighbours, who look down on me, tell me they are enjoying it.
In June 2018, which it marvels me to reflect is now six years ago, researching my book “Retreat” I travelled to a retreat in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Northern California. The region itself is completely mind-blowing as it is.
I was interviewing the legendary hippie guru Bhagavan Das, who is most famous for coining the expression “Be Here Now” which was popularised by Ram Dass.
I stayed on after our interview and took part in the retreat’s closing ceremony, at which the beloved “Baba” gave me the Mani mantra. He whispered it into my ear and gave us some instructions in how to use it with a mala.
Each time you mutter the six sylabbles, “OM-MA-NI-PE-MAY- HUNG”, you move a single crystal bead around the mala, a kind of rosary. The mala has 108 beads, and you are encouraged to circle it in this manner ten times each day.
Evidence of a early receptivity to these ideas. A drawing I made in Durbar Square in Katmandhu in August 1990.
As documented in “Retreat”, I subsequently kept coming across the mantra in my research, from the writings of Jack Kerouac to those of Carl Jung.
I had the definite sense that I had been drawn towards it and its surrounding teachings. It was as though the fascination I had for certain music and that era was leading me, through inexorable logic, towards the ideas enshrined in the mantra. Certainly, that’s the substance of my book, “The “S” Word.”
The mantra in a screenprint by Jung Associate the Dutch Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn in 1930
You don’t need any religious qualification to give someone the Mani mantra. Parents give it to their children, which is no surprise, as using it is tremendously reassuring. There’s nothing exclusive about it. In Tibet, which is its adopted country, men use the Mani mantra (Om Mani Padme Hung) and identify with the bodhisattva Chenrezig. Women use the Tara mantra (Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha) and identify with Green Tara.
My little Chenrezig statue. The four-armed version holding his crystal mala and white lotus flower.
The bodhisattva Chenrezig (the Tibetan nomenclature) is known by many names, but primarily they are Avalokiteśvara (in Sanskrit), Kannon (in Japan from which we get the brand name Canon), and Guānyīn (when they take the form of a woman in China).
Possibly the most important mention of the bodhisattva comes in roll eight of the Lotus Sutra, which has the reputation of being the most important sutra (scripture) in all Buddhism.
In it the Buddha explains, “Good man, if incalculable hundreds of thousands of myriads of millions of living beings, suffering pain and torment, hear of this bodhisattva He Who Observes the Sounds of the World and single-mindedly call upon his name, the bodhisattva He Who Observes the Sounds of the World shall straightway heed their voices, and all shall gain deliverance.”
One celebrated translation of the Lotus Sutra.
This act of listening and being heard relates to the legend of Chenrezig, once a young man, who vowed “May I not attain enlightenment until every last being has been liberated.” This renunciation is the essence of the Mahayana Buddhist proposition of the bodhisattva – it’s very different from the arhat of Theravada Buddhism, wherein the focus is upon the individual’s own liberation.
In the course of his endeavour to achieve this liberation of all beings, owing to the effort, Chenrezig shattered into a thousand pieces. The Buddhas pieced him together after this attempt, whereupon he had a thousand arms – the better to achieve his aims. This is why he sometimes depicted as having a thousand arms.
The thousand-armed Chenrezig. This painting from the Dalai Lama’s residence at McLeod Ganj.
Even by Buddhist standards, the complexity of ideas around the Mani mantra are involved. Literally every single aspect of the process of its recitation, and the individual syllables themselves, have intensely ornate symbolism.
You couldn’t pack more meaning into a single phrase if you tried. A great example of this is Leary, Metzner, and Alpert’s idol, the German Lama Anagarika Govinda‘s classic book “Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism”. This goes into dizzying detail about the meaning of mantra.
Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism has the six syllables in clockwork on its cover with, as is common, the magic word HRIH in the centre.
Another great book on the Mani mantra is Alexander Studholme’s “The Origins of Om Manipadme Hum: A Study of the Kārandavyūha Sūtra” (2002). Studholme recounts the mantra’s supposed inception at the holy Indian city of Varanasi, and makes a cogent case for its use as being a twin of the Pure Land strain of Buddhism. Pure Land Buddhism revolves entirely around chanting the words “Namo Amituofo” (in essence, the Amitabha Buddha’s name) or just “Amituofo”. It is itself a very elegant reduction of a myriad of ideas.
The mantra on the cover here as it appears in Karandavyuha Sutra written in the Lantra script not the more common Sanskrit.
The more one researches the mantra, it seems, the more one finds out about its meaning. This is how it has been engineered as a vehicle of boundaryless absorption. The yogic mechanism of bhakti, a spiritual union in the way of all yogas, inculcates its “high” through this loving devotion, to which the mantra brings only intensification.
The actual Kārandavyūha Sūtra on display at the British Library
If you think about it, most focal points of our obsessions have definite boundaries. Take record collecting as an example, in my own opinion, there are delineated boundaries beyond which point it ceases to be productive behaviour. There are limits to the amount of music to which one is naturally receptive, there are limits too to the amount of time one can devote to listening, and certainly in own experience there came a moment when I just “got it” – as though, still a tasty dish, it were a kind of food I had gorged on to the point at which I found the returns were diminishing. Something like the mantra, or other spiritual “technologies” like the worship of deities, work around this problem and offer boundless vistas for our meditation and preoccupation.
My Wonderful Mani MandalaClose-up
Although by now I have, to some extent, popped out the other side of this intense fascination, for a while I was very wrapped up in it. And loving it, frankly! Here for instance are two high-resolution renditions I made of the magic syllables and one of its corresponding colours.
From the SanskritIn the Lantra textThe Mantra’s coresponding colours.
A very central part of the Chenrezig mythology is the idea that the Dalai Lama, the “Ocean Lama”, is the emanation of the bodhisattva on this plane of reality.
Therefore, as part of my research trip to India in December 2019, moments before the COVID shutdown, I went to Bodh Gaya in Bihar to witness the Dalai Lama giving Chenrezig Initiation at the Kalachakra Teaching Ground. Participants in this ceremony are able to claim themselves to be emanations of the compassionate bodhisattva!
Where’s Woebot? I am visible in this wonderful photo of his holiness holding my mala aloft.
I took a lot of pleasure in discovering that this picture of the 14th Dalai Lama, the first internationally propagated image of him, was commissioned by, and printed in our family’s newspaper, The Illustrated London News.
As nebulous as the meaning of the mantra is, we can, I believe, simplify it somewhat. In Sanskrit, sandwiched between the two divine sounds “Om” and “Hum”, we have “mani” meaning jewel, and “padme” the locative of lotus.
Academics have many takes, they refer to the bodhisattva as a “Jewel-lotus”, or “She of the Jewel-lotus”, or describe “a lotus that is a jewel”, or a “jewel in the lotus”, or celebrate “O, she with the jewel in her lotus” (sounds like vajazalling…), or (according to the aforementioned Studholme) think that it is best rendered as following, “in the jewel lotus” or “in the lotus made of jewels”.
However-which-way one interprets these words, even if they are a description of the bodhisattva, they remain a conjunction of two ideas. The idea of the jewel and, crucial to my own interpretation, the idea of the Lotus flower.
A lotus in the swampLotuses in KyotoMore Lotuses in Kyoto
Within the context of Hindu thought, the Lotus flower is meaningful because its pristine architecture rises from the swamp. There’s even a punchy slogan in contemporary Buddhism which picks this up: “No Mud, No Lotus.”
In comparing or equating the Lotus to a jewel, there is a further intensification of this conceptual underpinning of immaculate beauty arising from a base material, for just as the lotus arises from the mud, the jewel arises from the lotus. But it’s especially interesting, I believe, to put ourselves in the mindset of the agricultural society of the 4th and 5th century when the mantra was coined. This society would have been preoccupied with the miracle and importance of plant growth and vitality, and an understanding of the worth, not so much of “mud” but soil, and seen the mantra in that context.
Buddhism, with its emphasis on total interconnectivity, is the original ecological philosophy. Of course, the other famous plant in the Buddhist cosmology is the Bodhi tree. It was seated under the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya that the Buddha had his satori.
The author at the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya in 2019.
Back from India, and parsing all these ideas about compassion and ecology, I started working more and more on growing. Here for instance is my experiment of growing Lotus flowers on Old Street in 2021.
Growing Lotuses at home in 2021
For a long time, sensing in a way the threat of this boundaryless activity, I was quite keen to place it within some framework. We did discuss these ideas subsequently, but ultimately it was unfortunate that Bhagavan Das lived way across the Atlantic, where it wasn’t possible to be in his physical presence.
Consequently, I decided it was an idea to take refuge, the Buddhist equivalent of confirmation, and so through the Kagyu Samye Dzong organisation in London I made the pilgrimage up to Samye Ling. This experience crucially took me, not to the subcontinent, but Dumfriesshire in Scotland. Fascinating for me was the order’s decision to put the statue of Chenrezig in the middle of their Organic Herb and Vegetable Garden overseeing the kale, spinach, and potatoes.
The view from the statueTibetan Buddhist Garden Shed
Indeed, Buddhas are often a feature of gardens. Placed there usually without great consideration.
The Buddha at Charles Dowding’s HomeacresA Bodhisattva at the Esalen Vegetable Garden
I don’t know if it’s a common phenomenon, but more and more with Buddhism (and this is in no way a criticism of the philosophy), I found it was meaningless to describe myself as one.
Buddhism itself doesn’t mean anything. By which I’m suggesting that, at its purest, it is practically invisible; is no more than common-sense. Its principles of dependent origination, impermanence, and compassion are nothing more than the evidently correct order of the universe. To become fixated on its glittering imagery and exquisite ritual, as I tremendously enjoyed for a period, is somehow to miss the point – even if it’s something I would never wish to entirely leave behind. On my own journey, I started growing plants as a form of “practice” before eventually, by no means superficially, I found myself just growing them.
I noticed this chap’s grave on my periodic visit to Bunhill Fields to say hello to William Blake and the other nonconformists. This being 2024 you can look up a performance of Shrubsole’s music. May he rest in peace.
As a grower, as in so many areas of life, I am very much still learning. My biggest newb error this year has been to sow seed too densely. It’s very embarrassing. In mitigation, I haven’t made this error universally across my growing, only with these plants.
The problem is that all the seed for these plants is my own. And I have so FUCKING VERY much of it. Plants create incredible amounts of seed, it only stays viable for a certain amount of time, and it seems rude to waste. And so like a total idjut I have sperlunked too much of it into these pots. As a result, were I not to intervene, things are going to go from bad to worse. These would all choke themselves to death,
I’ve made a crude attempt to thin them out. Yanking seedlings out by the roots (badly disrupting their neighbours) and either repotting the remains, or putting more soil underneath them in their exiting pots. It looks like a total car crash right now. The limanthes, butchered. I’m hoping most will recover… I’m optimistic. But what else can you do?
The broad beans that I planted in December were ready to be picked. They hadn’t formed nearly as big a bush as last year.
The harvest wasn’t bad, but was not as impressive as before.
These stems went onto the compost heap.
I think this shows the limits of the viability of applying No Dig principles to containers. There’s not enough nutrients OR biology to support more growth.
And I’d taken measures. Rotating the crops, and after all beans are a legume, after the first round of them I’ve had buckwheat and nigella before this crop. I’ve also applied leaf mould. And chanted my mantra over them too, innit.
Digging it out, I WAS surprised to see that the trough was not root bound.
But equally it was rooty enough…
The box itself, given to me by my dear-departed father-in-law, was in need of some repairs. This was another reason to crack into it.
Sieving the soil produced these nuggety chunks of clay. So hard they felt almost like gravel. Sorry, but in no way could these be an optimal growing environment…
Biology
But it wasn’t all barren! There was a lot of insect life. No doubt from the poor guys who lost their homes in my demolishment. Aah, they’ll be OK! I will look after them. It’s mainly wood lice, but there’s other stuff happening. Wait for the cat’s miaow at the end.
But check out these nitrogen nodules on the broad bean plant’s roots. This has been the first time I have seen this with my own eyes. Very impressive.
I mixed the sieved soil from the wooden trough with a mixture of Lakeland Gold compost and some Carbon Gold fertiliser pellets. Heaven knows if that will work?
This new soil went into a shelter I’ve built for the next crop, buckwheat and a few others in pots.
The beans themselves were delicious.
I shared them, steamed and then dressed with olive oil and salt, with Mrs Ingram.
Fooling around with 20m2 on a roof terrace in the centre of London, there are distinct limitations to one what can achieve in a garden. I could, as the genius Mark Ridsdill Smith does, grow a lot more vegetables. However, my own view is that whatever vegetables I grow to eat – and this year it’s been spinach, leeks, rocket, red cabbage, yacon, potatoes, runner beans, broad beans, beetroot, and tomatoes – is only ever going to be a token, for giggles…
For whatever reason, after growing cavalo nero, lettuces, and spinach erbette, I’ve cooled on growing leaves. I’ll grow spinach again over the winter but, although they are touted as the best things to grow in the city (because they are fast to grow and expensive to buy), I find leaves somehow boring.
Equally I find most ornamentals, often highly cultivated plants you couldn’t imagine happening in nature, almost products of a laboratory, a very tedious thing to grow. The flowers I’m growing, borage, phacelia, limanthes, marigolds, sunflowers, dandelions, nasturtiums are found at vegetable-growing seed suppliers as varieties that are good for insect life. Even my most ornamental flowers honeysuckle, poppies, zinnias, dahlias, (this last especially a concession to Mrs Ingram who loves them – they are beautiful…) are renowned for being attractive to pollinators.
What works very well among these select vegetables, trees, and carefully-chosen flowers, are herbs. Ever since I came across Juliette de Baïracli Levy and went on Kirsten Hartvig’s amazing country ramble at Forest Row I’ve been enchanted by them and their awesome potential. In the city they really work well, they don’t take up masses of space, the bugs love them, and they are fascinating. Currently, I am growing nothing particularly far out.
ThymeOreganoBayLavenderRosemaryChamomileMint
I believe that what one grows in the city should fundamentally address our urban alienation from nature. That selection should be geared to making us connect with the process of growing, with the seasons, with the cycle of life and death, and our cosmic alignment. In the city, we can’t pretend that we’re living wholly natural lives, but at least we can use growing to keep in touch with those things; like a diver underwater has an oxygen tank.