After my visit Vahiduddin walked out with me to get a taxi. Three men, one with an instrument, another with a bag of cobras, passed us with shrill music and an offer to make the snakes dance for us right there in the dust. No thank you!
After sunset we came to the Ladakh Buddhi Vihara. The taxi drove into the midst of a group of Tibetans playing soccer. It is a school-monastery-residence for Tibetan refugees, with a nice shiny new temple and Buddhas somewhat more convincing than the usual. Nothing is more jejune than a Buddha whose smile is stupid rather than nirvanic.
Tibetans wandered about in the dusk, some looking exactly like Eskimos. Some of the men wore high boots. One carried a rosary. One was wandering about with a big transistor giving out Tibetan music from a local station. One woman was carrying a white baby with blue eyes and red hair.
Lobsang Phuntsok Lhalungpa, a Tibetan layman, runs a radio station which broadcasts a Tibetan program in Delhi, where Harold Talbott is taking Tibetan lessons. He came to the Ladakh Vihara with his wife Deki. We went up to one of the cells and talked with Lama Geshe Tenpa Gyaltsan, a teacher who is a Gelugpa monk, and another Nyingmapa monk, a man with a shiny, fresh-shaven head. The latter, I learned, was in fact the Nechung rinpoche, formerly abbot of the great Tibetan monastery of Nechung, and a tutku. Both these monks were impressive people—so different from the Hindu swamis I’ve seen so far, though these too can be impressive in a different way. The Tibetans seem to have a peculiar intenmess, energy, silence, and also humor. Their laughter is wonderful. Lhalungpa translated, but long stretches of talk got lost.
The two laughed when I asked the difference between their orders—Gelugpa and Nyingmapa—and said there was “really no difference.” They stressed, perhaps overstressed, their unity. Someone later remarked that it was not unusual to find a Gelugpa and a Nyingmapa getting on so easily as good friends.
We talked about the goal of the monastic life. They emphasized the ideas of discipline and detachment from a life of pleasure and materialism. Nothing too clear was said about meditation, except that it has degrees and must be preceded by study. “Anyone” can do the simpler kind but a master is needed for the “more advanced.” Boys begin meditation around fifteen or sixteen. They got into an involved question with Lhalungpa, a “problem” of Gelugpa meditation, which he did not translate.
We agreed on the importance of contact and understanding. They urged me to “help Westerners understand meditation,” and the need for a more spiritual life. They laughed when I explained that the contemplative life was not exactly viewed with favor in the West and that monks are often considered useless. There was another lama in the next cell who is related to Lama Deshing Rinpoche at Seattle University who sent me the writings of Gampopa. In the cell there were Tibetan manuscripts wrapped in saffron cloth, bowls of water, an offering of rice in a chalice, and dice for divination.
While we were talking about monastic affairs the King of Gyalrong came in, a quiet, sad man in a gray open-necked shirt. He sat down on the bed and said nothing. After a while, bored by the talk of meditation, he yawned and withdrew.
In the next room of the hotel, having finished his puja my neighbor now talks loudly on the telephone: “Hallo! Hallo! Hallo! I am going to Agra!”
Dr. Lokesh Chandra offered me a mandala, one of his reprints. I picked one, the general pattern of which attracted me as being very lively. On close inspection I find it to be full of copulation, which is all right, but I don’t quite know how one meditates on it. It might be a paradoxical way to greater purity.
It his discussion of the symbolism of the mandala, Tucci explains that the Shaivite schools “divide men into three classes: first the common people, those who live a herd-like life, for whom precise laws and prohibitions are suited, since such men do not yet possess a consciousness which can, by itself, govern itself. Then comes ‘heroes’ who have a tendency to emerge from such a night. But their capacity wearies them. They follow their own consciousness and make their own laws, different from and contrary to those of the herd. They are lonely men who swim against the current; courageously they put themselves into contact with God and free themselves from the uniform life of association. Then come the divya, the holy souls, who are fully realized and so beyond the plane of samsara.”
[Tucci.p. 51]
Five breaths pray in me: sun moon
Rain wind and fire
Five seated Buddhas reign in the breaths
Five illusions
One universe:
The white breath, yellow breath,
Green breath, blue breath,
Red fire breath, Amitabha
[Tucci, pp. 50–53]
Knowledge and Desire
And the quiescence
Of Knowledge and Desire.
Everything I think or do enters into the construction of a mandala. It is the balancing of experience over the void, not the censorship of experience. And no duality of experience—void. Experience is full because it is inexhaustible void. It is not mine. It is “uninterrupted exchange.” It is dance. Five mudras. The dancing god embraces and penetrates the Mother. They are one motion, one silence. They are Word. Utterance and return. “Myself.” No-self. The self is merely a locus in which the dance of the universe is aware of itself as complete from beginning to end—and returning to the void. Gladly. Praising, giving thanks, with all beings. Christ light—spirit—grace—gift.
(Bodhicitta)
“Twofold is the aspect of Divinity, one subtle, represented by the mantra and the other coarse, represented by an image.”
[Tucci, p. 60]
Air-condition mantra. Tibetan bass of the machines.
For the Tibetans, every conceivable sound is both music and mantra. Great brasses. Trumpets snoring into the earth. They wake the mountain spirits, inviting canyon populations to a solemn rite of life and death. The clear outcry of gyelings, (shawms), the throb of drums, bells and cymbals. The “sonorous icon” with its unending trance of atonal sound repels evil. But a huge mask of evil is pressing down close. The deep sounds renew life, repel the death-grin (i.e., ignorance). The sound is the sound of emptiness. It is profound and clean. We are washed in the millennial silent roar of a rock-eating glacier.
Dance is essential for initiates.
The dance of the Supremely Wrathful One, with his long-sleeved retinue and his bride of wrath.
The dance of dorje phurpa, the eternal dagger, which is done in Sikkim by lamas issuing from a long period of retreat.
Padma Sambhava,38 masked as a stag, smiles, wags his great horns, puts the evil away in a little box.
An oracle with an enormous helmet draped in a score of flags runs in a wild trance along the highest parapet of the temple.
I have a view of some of the Delhi embassies from my hotel. Over there, with the tall flagpole and red flag, is the big Chinese Embassy compound. What do they know in there? What do they do? Of what do they accuse one another, and what do they say of those they believe to be in places like this? Or is one of them secretly writing a poem?
October 31, 1968. Vigil of All Saints. Delhi
I read the Vespers of All Saints in my hotel room. Tonight I’ll go by train to the Himalayas. Monsieur Daridan at the French Embassy gave me the two addresses of Dom Henri Le Saux’s hermitages—in the foothills of the Himalayas, one near Madras—but I don’t know which one he is at.39 Probably the Himalaya one is too far from Dharamsala in any case.
Today I spent a long time in the Pan American office getting my ticket rewritten. In the end I don’t go to Katmandu, at least not this time. Maybe I can do it if! come back in January. On returning from Dharamsala, Harold Talbott and I plan to go to Darjeeling and perhaps Sikkim. Then I go to Madras, Ceylon, Singapore, and Bangkok for the meeting. Last night Commissioner and Mrs. Dames] George had me to dinner at the Canadian Embassy with Lhalungpa, his wife, Harold Talbott, and Gene Smith.40 George showed a longish movie he had taken of Tibetan dances at Dalhousie, an extraordinary ceremony presided over b
y Khamtul Rinpoche. A couple of Tibetan hermits appeared fleetingly in the film—I may perhaps meet them. We compared illustrations from books on Romanesque art with Tibetan mandalas, etc. Gelugpa equals like Cluny!
I was invited to another Birla party in Delhi but I did not go. Not much sightseeing either. Only the Red Fort and the big tomb. Some lovely Mogul paintings in the National Museum! Tea with Vahiduddin at the university on Tuesday—lots of good Sufi stories. Supper at the Moti Mahal restaurant where there was unfortunately no Urdu music (only on Saturdays). I am tired of too much food—and too much curry. Back to European food part of the time. The French cooking at the French Embassy was excellent, and the two very nice wines. I must say I rather like embassy parties, and Madame Daridan was particularly charming and interesting. We had a good talk sitting in the garden. She likes Shaivism and in a way seems to have some of the grace and maturity that true Shaivism must imply. But I confess I am not very open to Hindu religion, as distinct from philosophy. But I can’t judge yet. Will suspend judgment until I get to Madras. I am much more impressed by the Tibetan lamas I have met.
All official modern religious art is to me forbidding, whether Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu or whatever. Only the very unusual means anything to me—Jamini Roy, and then, perhaps, not for any connection with prayer.
November 1, 1968. Dharamsala
I came up by train from Delhi to Pathankot with Harold ’Iiilbott last night. Then by jeep with a Tibetan driver to Dharamsala. Slept well enough in a wide lower berth. It was my first overnight train trip since I went to Gethsemani to enter the monastery twenty-seven years ago. When light dawned, I looked out on fields, scattered trees, tall reeds and bamboo, brick and mud villages, a road swept by rain in the night and now by a cold wind from the mountains, men wrapped in blankets walking in the wind. Teams of oxen ploughing. Pools by the track filled with tall purple flowering weeds. A white crane starts up out of the green rushes. Long before Pathankot I was seeing the high snow-covered peaks behind Dalhousie.
On our arrival at Pathankot there was a madhouse of noise, bearers balancing several suitcases and packages on their heads and all trying to get through one small exit at once with a hundred passengers. We were met by a jeep from the Dalai Lama’s headquarters.
It was a beautiful drive to Dharamsala—mountains, small villages, canyons, shrines, ruined forts, good, well cared for forest preserves. Then the climb to Dharamsala itself and the vast view over the plains from the village. It rained when we arrived and thunder talked to itself all over and around the cloud-hidden peaks. We came to the cottage Talbott lives in—everything very primitive.
In the afternoon I got my first real taste of the Himalayas. I climbed a road out of the village up into the mountains, winding through pines, past places where Tibetans live and work, including a small center for publication and a central office. Many Tibetans on the road, and some were at work on a house, singing their building song. Finally I was out alone in the pines, watching the clouds clear from the medium peaks—but not the high snowy ones—and the place was filled with a special majestic kind of mountain silence. At one point the sound of a goatherd’s flute drifted up from a pasture below. An unforgettable valley with a river winding at the bottom, a couple of thousand feet below, and the rugged peaks above me, and pines twisted as in Chinese paintings. I got on a little path where I met at least five Tibetans silently praying with rosaries in their hands—and building little piles of stones. An Indian goatherd knocked over one of the piles for no reason. Great silence of the mountain, except for two men with axes higher up in the pines. Gradually the clouds thinned before one of the higher peaks, but it never fully appeared.
On the way down I met a man on the road, a man in European clothes walking with a lama. He introduced himself as Sonam Kazi,41 the man who translated for Desjardins. He sent the lama on his way, and we went to the Tourist Hotel to drink tea and talk.
“The milk of the lioness is so precious and so powerful that if you put it in an ordinary cup, the cup breaks.”
(Tibetan saying)
November 2, 1968. Dharamsala
Yesterday as I came down the path from the mountain I heard a strange humming behind me. A Tibetan came by quietly droning a monotonous sound, a prolonged “om.” It was something that harmonized with the mountain—an ancient syllable he had found long ago in the rocks—or perhaps it had been born with him.
The Tibetan who cooks for us was formerly a monk in Tibet who got released from his vows to fight in the resistance against the Chinese.
The guru is he who “must produce the revulsion of the adept.”
(Tucci, p. 76)
“The aim of all the Tantras is to teach the ways whereby we may set free the divine light which is mysteriously present and shining in each one of us, although it is enveloped in an insidious web of the psyche’s weaving.”
(Tucci, p. 78)
Tucci explains that there are four different Tantras to suit four categories of men (and gods):
“…the Kriyantantras, particularly devoted to liturgical complications. It is a homeopathic treatment by which it is sought, gradually, to open the eyes of the officiant and to show him what a complex instrument of psychological revulsion he has at his disposal, provided that he knows how to understand its meaning. The gesture (mudra) of the Gods is here a smile.
“The Caryatantras are suited for the rje rigs, the nobleman, in whom a respect for ceremonial is accompanied by a capacity for spiritual meditation. These Tantras are addressed to persons who may experience the dawn of spiritual anxiety and in whom there may be present the intellectual and spiritual prerequisites for the Return. The gesture here is a look. The Yogatantras are addressed to the rgyal rigs, of royal family, powerful men, who cannot manage to renounce the goods of this world. For their meditation is offered the mandala with a lavish display of Gods, Goddesses and acolytes—like the court of a king in his palace. For one must begin by speaking to such men a language which they can understand, if one does not wish to drive them away for ever. What would be the use of renunciation and sacrifice to those who love the joy of living, if they are, to begin with, ignorant of the fact that real beatitude is an overcoming of that which they most desire? The gesture here is an embrace.
“The Anuttarantantras are reserved for the creatures who sin most, who do not distinguish good from evil, who lead impure lives. It is on the very fault itself by which they are sullied that is built up slowly the work of redemption. The gesture here is union.”
Tucci points out that it would be wrong to imagine that a meditation type should be urged to follow anuttarantantra.
(Tucci, pp. 79–80)
“The symbolism of the ritual act is clear. A mandala…, is an ideal Bodhgaya, an ‘adamantine plane,’ that is an incorruptible surface, the representation of the very instant in which is accomplished the revulsion to the other plane, in which one becomes Buddha.”
(Tucci, p. 86)
“One is to attain enlightenment and become a Buddha only for the sake of others; it has therefore been said, ‘Bodhicitta is perfect enlightenment (attained) for the sake of others…’”
[S. B. Dasgupta, An Introduction to Tantric Buddhism (Calcutta, 1958), pp. 280–83]
Mandalas can incorporate non-Buddhist deities and even Christian symbols. “Every shape and form that arises in the soul, every link which, in a mysterious way, joins us to the Universal Life and unites us, maybe without our being aware of it, to Man’s most ancient experience, the voices which reach us from the depths of the abyss, all are welcomed with almost affectionate solicitude.”
(Tucci, p. 83)
Sonam Kazi is a Sikkimese who went to Tibet to consult doctors about an illness, then rode all over Tibet and took to meditation, studying under various lamas, including a woman lama in Lhasa. His daughter is supposed to be a reincarnation of this woman. She entranced Aelred Graham by reading comic books while he argued with her father. There is a sweet photo of her in the Desjardins
book.
Sonam Kazi is a lay Nyingmapa monk. He has had several good gurus and seems far advanced in meditation. He is of course full of information but also of insight. He thinks I ought to find a Tibetan guru and go in for Nyingmapa Tantrism initiation along the line of “direct realization and dzogchen (final resolution).” At least he asked me if I were willing to risk it and I said, “Why not?” The question is finding the right man. I am not exactly dizzy with the idea of looking for a magic master but I would certainly like to learn something by experience and it does seem that the Tibetan Buddhists are the only ones who, at present, have a really large number of people who have attained to extraordinary heights in meditation and contemplation. This does not exclude Zen. But I do feel very much at home with the Tibetans, even though much that appears in books about them seems bizarre if not sinister.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 28