Where theWay Surfaced

A history written by people whose teaching says history cannot be written.

Wayism teaches that every teller has an audience, half the facts, and a thumb on the scale. So Where theWay Surfaced does not attempt a chronicle. It follows a single metaphor: the Teaching as a river running mostly underground. No one can map the full course - but here and there a spring opens, people gather, and some of them remember. Each chapter is one such surfacing. Between them lies the underground, the long dark stretches the book does not pretend to know.

The surfacings span forty thousand years:

• The first spiritual knowing of the Paleolithic - energy sensed before language existed to name it
• Five lines of Sumerian cosmology, set in stone and carrying a complete teaching folded small
• Two communities half a world apart who did something no one had done before - named themselves after water
• A century of witnesses in first-century Kashmir, and the refuge built above a valley
• The scribes and queens who kept the copies when no one else would pay
• Bodhidharma, told the way Wayists tell him - as legend, plainly named and well told
• The crowned compassion of Angkor and the families of the Lotus, persecuted across centuries for the crime of living too well
• A modern teacher born in Konya into the house of a whirling dervish, and the consortium that carries the work forward

Along the way, the book keeps a guest room - for Socrates, Seneca, Rabia, Rumi, Lalleswari, Janabai, Mirabai. People who dug wells in their own yards, with their own tools, and struck the same water. Loved and remembered, but never claimed. A tradition confident of its water does not need to relabel other people's wells.

Where the ground is legend, the book says so and tells the legend well - because legend told well is not a lesser history but an older kind. Where it does not know, it says we do not know, and means it as a complete sentence, not an apology.

Written by Salvar Dàosenglu - the consortium of Wayist scholars whose own story is told in these pages. Not an introduction to Wayism. A reunion.