What is the purpose of the mandala? Sonam Kazi said one meditates on the mandala in order to be in control of what goes on within one instead of “being controlled by it.” In meditation on the mandala one is able to construct and dissolve the interior configurations at will. One meditates not to “learn” a presumed objective cosmological structure, or a religious doctrine, but to become the Buddha enthroned in one’s own center.
Elements of the mandala for Tucci: it is man’s psychic heritage, to be accepted, not repressed. “It is better, then, to assume possession of them at the first and then by degrees to transfigure them, just as one passes from the outer enclosure of the mandala successively through the others until one reaches the central point, the primordial equipoise regained after the experience of life.”
(Tucci, p. 83)
I talked to Sonam Kazi about the “child mind,” which is recovered after experience. Innocence—to experience—to innocence. Milarepa, angry, guilty of revenge, murder and black arts, was purified by his master Marpa, the translator, who several times made him build a house many stories high and then tear it down again. After which he was “no longer the slave of his own psyche but its lord.” So too, a Desert Father came to freedom by weaving baskets and then, at the end of each year, burning all the baskets he had woven.
(Tucci, pp. 83–84)
Outside the dirty window I have just opened there is pure morning light on the lower rampart of the Himalayas. Near me are the steep green sinews of a bastion tufted with vegetation. A hut or shrine is visible, outlined on the summit. Beyond, in sunlit, back-lighted mist, the higher pointed peak. Further to the left a still higher snowy peak that was hidden in cloud last evening and is misty now. Song of birds in the bushes. Incessant soft guttural mantras of the crows. Below, in another cottage, an argument of women.
Sonam Kazi is against the mixing of traditions, even Tibetan ones. Let the Kagyudpa keep to itself. He suggests that if I edit a book of Tibetan texts, let them all be one tradition. A fortiori, we should not try to set up a pseudocommunity of people from different traditions, Asian and Western. I agree with this. Brother David Steindl-Rast’s idea perplexed me a little—as being first of all too academic. But I had wondered about some different approach: a mere dream. And certainly no good in my own life. Now, since seeing the books the other night in Canada House, I am curious about re-exploring the Romanesque artistic tradition and the 12th-century writers in Christian monasticism in relation to the Eastern traditions, i.e., in the light thrown on them by the East.
Sonam Kazi spoke of acting with no desire for gain, even spiritual—whether merit or attainment. A white butterfly appears in the sun, then vanishes again. Another passes in the distance. No gain for them—or for me.
Down in the valley a bird sings, a boy whistles. The white butterfly zigzags across the top left corner of the view.
Man as body—word—spirit. Three ways of handling anger, lust, etc. Hinayana—Mahayana—Tantric.
Tucci on the liturgy and rites of the mandala:
“The disciple, blindfolded, is led to the eastern gate of the mandala and there receives from the master a short stick of wood (such as is used in India for cleaning the teeth) or a flower which he must throw on to the mandala. The section on to which these fall (which is protected by one of the five Buddhas—or their symbols) will indicate the way that is suited to the disciple.”
“…the initiate should honour this God (in the aspect of jnanasattva) with exoteric and esoteric ritual of various sorts: flowers, incense, lamps, vestments, umbrellas, flags, bells and standards, all of celestial quality.” [But a Hinayana master from Burma went to Ceylon and was scandalized to find there monks with umbrellas—this of course was quite different.] [Merton’s brackets]
(Tucci, pp. 90 and 95)
The disciple, blindfolded, is led to the east gate of the prepared mandala. Blindfolded, he casts a flower on the mandala. The flower will find his way for him into the palace. Follow your flower!
I must ask Sonam Kazi about dreams. Tucci placed under his pillow a blessed leaf given him by the Grand Lama of Sakya. He dreamed of mountains and glaciers. (See Tucci, p. 92.) A yellow butterfly goes by just over the heads of the small purple flowers outside the windows. Firecrackers explode, perhaps in the yard of the school. Hammering in the village.
Sonam Kazi criticized the facility with which some monks say nirvana and samsara are one, without knowing what they are talking about. Also, though it is true that “there is no karma,” this cannot be rightly understood by many, for in fact there is karma, but on another level. He also liked the idea of Trappist silence at meals, at work, everywhere. He said the name Trappist was interesting since in Tibetan “trapa” means “schoolman” or monk. He likes Krishnamurti.
The bhikkhus at the conference all had umbrellas. They all sat in a saffron row at the banquet, eating and drinking nothing and saying almost nothing except, “You should have had this affair before noon.”42 They smiled and were content.
This cottage has a washroom with two stools. Concrete floor. A hole in the corner leading out. You empty the washbasin on the floor and the water runs out the hole. Through this hole a cobra or krait could easily come. Fortunately the nights are cold. There are banana trees everywhere—the nights are not cold enough to harm them. Two wrenlike birds bicker together in a bush outside the window.
Sonam Kazi condemned “world-evasion,” which he thinks ruined Buddhism in India. He would be against an eremitism entirely cut off from all contact, at least for me. But in another context he admired the recluses who severed all contacts, seeing only a few people or perhaps none at all, reserving special contacts only for a restricted list. Harold asked whether others would respect this arrangement. Sonam Kazi thought they would. When a hermit goes on full retreat he places a mantra, an image, and a seal on the outside of his cell, and the mantra reads: “All gods, men, and demons keep out of this retreat.”
Cocks crow in the valley. The tall illuminated grasses bend in the wind. One white butterfly hovers and settles. Another passes in a hurry. How glad I am not to be in any city.
Tucci in explaining the liturgy of the mandala speaks of palingenesis, “the revulsion which has taken place and by which consciousness that was refracted, lost and dissipated in time and space, has become, once again, one and luminous.”
(Tucci. p. 97)
Whatever may be of value of all the details of mandala meditation—and all the emergences of all the Buddhas from all the diamond wombs—this passage remains exact and important: “…the mystic knows that the principle of salvation is within him. He knows also that this principle will remain inert if he does not, with all his strength, seek it, find it and make it active. On the way of redemption, to which he has devoted himself, he has need of all his will-power and vigilance in order to put in motion the forces of his own psyche so that it, which keeps him bound, may furnish him, nonetheless with the means of salvation provided that he knows how to penetrate into his psyche and subdue it.”
(Tucci, p. 110)
November 3, 1968
Quiet after sunrise. In the silent, cool, misty air of morning a sound of someone chanting puja floats up from the village. The report of a gun far down in the valley echoes along the walls of the mountain. Now too they are shooting. Yesterday, near the army post at Palampur, there was machine-gun fire back in the mountains while we sat by the road in the tea plantation talking with Khamtul Rinpoche.
We had some trouble locating Khamtul Rinpoche. We went to the place where he is setting up a new monastery and lay colony, also on a tea plantation near Palampur (he is moving away from Dalhousie), but he wasn’t there. A monk served us some tea. We waited a while but Khamtul did not come. Later we met him on the road at a lovely place with many pines and a fine view of the mountains. (Khamtul Rinpoche is the one who was in Commissioner George’s film.) He is an impressive, heavily built Tibetan with a brown woolen cap on his head. We sat on the ground amid young tea plants and pin
es and talked, again with Sonam Kazi translating. Khamtul Rinpoche spoke about the need for a guru and direct experience rather than book knowledge; about the union of study and meditation. We discussed the “direct realization” method, including some curious stuff about working the soul of a dead man out of its body with complete liberation after death—through small holes in the skull or a place where the skin is blown off—weird! And about the need of a guru. “And,” he asked, “have you come to write a strange book about us? What are your motives?” After quite a few questions, he said I would be helped by talking to “some of the Tibetan tulkus who are in India” and added that Gyalwa Karmapa, the important guru who has a monastery in Sikkim, was coming to Delhi on the 15th. Afterward someone said no, it was Calcutta on the 15th. In any case I do hope to meet Karmapa somewhere.
It was a long drive back to Dharamsala. The mountains were lovely in the evening light. We arrived after dark, went to a (rather crumby) restaurant in town for some food, and Harold Talbott bought a paper with a banner headline, LBJ ORDERS COMPLETE BOMBING HALT and WAIT FULL SCALE PEACE TALKS CLEARED—a dramatic announcement. It is long overdue, but I am glad of it, even though it may be only a matter of last-minute expediency for the election—I hope it can mean peace.
What is important is not liberation from the body but liberation from the mind. We are not entangled in our own body but entangled in our own mind.
Spiritual sterility can be due to the fact that fertilization by the union of prajna and upaya (wisdom and discipline) has not taken place. Wisdom as sperm, discipline as ovum give us the “new creature,” the living reintegrated and growing “personality” (in a special spiritual sense: not “individual”). Hence comes new consciousness. “Pollution” is the spilling of the seed without union, without fertilization of discipline, without “return” to the summit of consciousness. A mere spilling out of passion with no realization. “The end of passion is the cause of sorrow, the precipitation of the bodhicitta.”
(Tucci, pp. 108–33)
Bhikkhu Khantipalo in Bangkok has spoken of peaceful coexistence with insects, etc. One tries to catch poisonous ones, tactfully, and throw them out of one’s hut. Matchboxes, he said, are good for catching scorpions. In the forest wats, a noisy large lizard sometimes gets in the straw of the roof and disturbs the meditation of the bhikkhus by loud guttural cries.
Gandhiji’s broken glasses—Johnson has stopped the bombing. Two magpies are fighting in a tree.
Are Tantrism, and meditation on the mandala, the evocations of minute visual detail like the Ignatian method in some respects? And as useless for me? A white butterfly goes by in the sun.
One difference is the sixth point above the mandala’s five points. The mandala is constructed only to be dissolved. One must see clearly the five points—or there is no sixth, which also includes them all. No six without five. The six make “eternal life.” Note that when the body is regarded as a mandala, the five chakras (sex, navel, heart, throat, head) are completed by the sixth “above the head.”
For the dissolution of a mandala the dusts and colors are taken in ceremony with the solemn snoring of trumpets and thrown into a mountain stream.
The highest of vows, Sonam Kazi said, is that in which there is no longer anything to be accomplished. Nothing is vowed. No one vows it. Tibetans sacrifice their own gods and destroy spirits. They also mock, solemnly and liturgically, the sacrifice itself—a spirit in butter, an image of a god to be burned in a straw temple.
Reverend Sirs, I am not here to write a manual of Christian Mantras!
I must see John Driver if I get to Wales. He wrote a dissertation at Oxford on Nyingmapa, but his professor would not accept it. He is connected with Trungpa Rinpoche and his place in Scotland. The dissertation is apparently brilliant.
I met a woman and child walking silently, and woman slowly spinning a prayer wheel—with great reverence and it was not at all absurd or routine—the child with a lovely smile.
Harold Talbott says the Dalai Lama has to see a lot of blue-haired ladies in pants—losers. And people looking for a freak religion. And rich people who have nothing better to do than come up here out of curiosity. His Western visitors are not well screened. He has very few real advisers who know anything about the world as it is. The Dalai Lama is still studying under his tutor and also is going on with Tantric studies, and I was told by Tenzin Geshe, his secretary, that he enjoys his new house, where he has quieter quarters, is less disturbed, and has a garden to walk in now, without being followed around by cops.
The Dalai Lama is loved by his people—and they are a beautiful, loving people. They surround his house with love and prayer, they have a new soongkhor [barbed-wire fence] for protection along the fence. Probably no leader in the world is so much loved by his followers and means so much to them. He means everything to them. For that reason it would be especially terrible and cruel if any evil should strike him. I pray for his safety and fear for him. May God protect and preserve him.
7 P.M. Tenzin Geshe, the very young secretary of the Dalai Lama, has just left. He came down to tell us of plans for my audience tomorrow at 10 A.M. A young, intelligent, eager guy. He seems to be only in his twenties, and the Dalai Lama himself only thirty-three. He brought me the first copy of a mimeographed newspaper that is being put out here for Tibetans. There are great problems for the Tibetan refugees like those I saw today in Upper Dharamsala living in many tents under the trees on the steep mountainside, clinging precariously to a world in which they have no place and only waiting to be moved somewhere else—to “camps.”
We had walked up, Harold and I, to Upper Dharamsala by the back road to McLeod Ganj, which is where the Dalai Lama lives. It is really the top of the mountain we are on now. Suddenly we were in a Tibetan village with a new, spanking white chorten in the middle of it. There we met Sonam Kazi, who was expecting us to come by bus. We climbed higher to the empty buildings of Swarg Ashram which the Dalai Lama has just vacated to move to his new quarters. A lovely site, but cramped. The buildings are old and ramshackle, and as Sonam said, “the roof leaks like hell.” Then further on up to the top—an empty house surrounded by prayer flags.
Tibetans are established all over the mountain in huts, houses, tents, anything. Prayer flags flutter among the trees. Rock mandalas are along all the pathways. OM MANI PADME HUM (“Hail to the jewel in the lotus”) is carved on every boulder. It is moving to see so many Tibetans going about silently praying—almost all of them are constantly carrying rosaries. We visited a small monastic community of lamas under the Dalai Lama’s private chaplain, the Khempo of Namgyal Tra-Tsang, whom I met. We were ushered into his room where he sat studying Tibetan block-print texts in narrow oblong sheets. He was wearing tinted glasses. The usual rows of little bowls of water. A tanka. Marigolds growing in old tin cans. Artificial flowers in a Coke bottle. A little butter lamp burning. Ajar with a plentiful supply of Entero-Vioform tablets. Shelves of Tibetan texts carefully wrapped in bright yellow and orange cloth. A beautiful room—the Coke bottle was not immediately obvious—it did not look like a junk yard, but like a shrine, as a lama’s room should. A quiet, scholarly man, eloquent and articulate, with a lot to say.
The Khempo of Namgyal deflected a question of mine about metaphysics—he returned to it later—by saying that the real ground of his Gelugpa study and practice was the knowledge of suffering, and that only when a person was fully convinced of the immensity of suffering and its complete universality and saw the need of deliverance from it, and sought deliverance for all beings, could he begin to understand sunyata.
Thus when European authors such as Tucci seem to talk of bodhicitta as an intellectual or metaphysical seed of enlightenment, the khempo showed it clearly to be a right view of suffering and a deep sense of compassion for everything and everyone that suffers. Then he went on to talk of Prajnaparamita and the teachings of Nagarjuna43 as the intellectual basis of his own tradition, and of the need to study these and to practice them, to reduce
them to experience. He also—like all the others—stressed the need of a master for progress in meditation. He spoke of Santi Deva44 and I replied that I liked Santi Deva very much, had reread him this summer. He said the compassion of Santi Deva was so great that his teaching touched the heart very deeply and awakened a spiritual response. When one read the Prajnaparamita on suffering and was thoroughly moved, “so that all the hairs of the body stood on end,” one was ready for meditation—ealled to it—and indeed to further study. He was very reserved about mandalas—“I would not even pronounce the name mandala except that you have come from such a great distance”—and insisted on the esoteric secrecy of Tantric disciplines and symbols. This refusal to speak directly of symbols was very interesting.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 29