If you are attached to appearances, you cannot meditate.
If you are attached to your own soul, you cannot have bodhicitta.
If you are attached to doctrines, you cannot reach the highest attainment.
He asked me to give an outline of Christian meditation and mysticism, which I did. He seemed very pleased and wrote a poem for me, and I wrote one for him. He also spoke of the need for good interpreters, Sonam Kazi being the best. He told of his experiences with a Polish lady he was instructing: with a good interpreter they went on famously; with a bad one she ended up asking things like, “How many little bowls of water are up there?” and he pointed to the shelf with his water offerings.
On the way down we met the Gadong oracle,55 an old lama, and a former member of the Tibetan cabinet, an old man with a big brown beard, who had also formed pan of a delegation that went to look for and identify the present Dalai Lama as a child.
The Dalai Lama’s proper name is Gejong Tenzin Gyatso.
Sonam and I were looking at the stars. He said for Tibetans the Dolphin and Eagle go together as “the sling.”
“Know the sufferings although there is nothing to know; relinquish the causes of misery although there is nothing to relinquish; be earnest in cessation although there is nothing to cease; practise the means of cessation though there is nothing to practise.”56
The flower endeavoring
Of excess good will
Regards him the Sunshine
Making command of many learned.
To that beautiful one
Adored by all the Occident,
This bee wishes all the best
With its heartfelt delight.57
“People who make no mental effort, even if they remain in mountain retreats, are like animals hibernating in their holes, only accumulating causes for a descent into hell.”
(Tibetan saying quoted by the Dalai Lama, pp. 15–16)
“Let us embrace the day which assigns each of us to his dwelling, which on our being rescued from here, and released from the snares of the world, restores us to paradise and the kingdom of heaven….”58
I have to pack early. My last interview with the Dalai Lama will be in the morning, with the jeep coming for me at 8:15. Then right after dinner we leave by jeep for Pathankot to take the evening train for Delhi.
The sky is reddening behind the big spur of mountains to the east. The days here have been good ones. Plenty of time for reading and meditation, and some extraordinary encounters. So far my talks with Buddhists have been open and frank and there has been full communication on a really deep level. We seem to recognize in one another a certain depth of spiritual experience, and it is unquestionable. On this level I find in the Buddhists a deeper attainment and certitude than in Catholic contemplatives. On the other hand, in Catholics, such as the nuns at Loretto Motherhouse [Kentucky] and a fortiori the Redwoods [California], the desire is deep and genuine and so too is a certain attainment, even though it is much less articulate.
Nixon of course has won the presidential election. But Humphrey was closer than I expected. Wallace was nowhere, and I am glad to hear he did not take Kentucky (Nixon did). Our new president is depressing. What can one expect of him?
November 8, 1968
My third interview with the Dalai Lama was in some ways the best. He asked a lot of questions about Western monastic life, particularly the vows, the rule of silence, the ascetic way, etc. But what concerned him most was:
1) Did the “vows” have any connection with a spiritual transmission or initiation?
2) Having made vows, did the monks continue to progress along a spiritual way, toward an eventual illumination, and what were the degrees of that progress? And supposing a monk died without having attained to perfect illumination? What ascetic methods were used to help purify the mind of passions? He is interested in the “mystical life,” rather than in external observances.
And some incidental questions: What were the motives for the monks not eating meat? Did they drink alcoholic beverages? Did they have movies? And so on.
I asked him about the question of Marxism and monasticism, which is to be the topic of my Bangkok lecture. He said that from a certain point of view it was impossible for monks and Communists to get along, but that perhaps it should not be entirely impossible if Marxism meant only the establishment of an equitable economic and social structure. Also there was perhaps some truth in Marx’s critique of religion in view of the fact that religious leaders had so consistently been hand in glove with secular power. Still, on the other hand, militant atheism did in fact strive to suppress all forms of religion, good or bad.
Finally, we got into a rather technical discussion of mind, whether as consciousness, prajna or dhyana, and the relation of prajna to sunyata. In the abstract, prajna and sunyata can be considered from a dialectic viewpoint, but not when prajna is seen as realization. The greatest error is to become attached to sunyata as if it were an object, an “absolute truth.”
It was a very warm and cordial discussion and at the end I felt we had become very good friends and were somehow quite close to one another. I feel a great respect and fondness for him as a person and believe, too, that there is a real spiritual bond between us. He remarked that I was a “Catholic geshe,” which, Harold said, was the highest possible praise from a Gelugpa, like an honorary doctorate!
November 11, 1968. Calcutta
Before coming to Calcutta, I spent the weekend in Delhi, arriving there before dawn from Pathankot. The afternoon before, a good jeep ride through the Kangra Valley to Pathankot. The mountains were covered with a pile of high clouds, blue under them. ’lrees. A river. Nurpur and a Mogul castle. Winding roads. Shady villages. Many buses. Flocks of sheep and goats.
In Delhi there were empty streets for the taxi. Wide avenues. Here and there campfires. People living in tents in front of government buildings.
I went to the Imperial Hotel, older, less expensive, and quieter than the Ashoka. A bath and tea and the newspaper; there are student riots in Henares, Rawalpindi, Amritsar, and a dozen other places.
The first thing I did after tea was to go to the 18th-century observatory, Jantar Mantar, with its endless abstract shapes and patterns. In a few minutes I had run out of film. In the afternoon, after too expensive a dinner at the Oberoi Intercontinental, which is shiny and American and depresses me, I drove out into the country with the Lhalungpas to see the Cambodian monk at the Ashoka Vihara. The temple there is an old mosque, small and tranquil. We sat on the floor and talked. The monk spoke of his visit to the U.S., where he had been impressed with Hollywood movies and the RCA building in New York. Then came out again into the sunlight, marigolds, garden, dog, dust, gate, road. Gutb Minar, the tall Moslem tower, rose nearby out of trees and half-ruined domes. The Moslem aspect of Delhi is arresting—but the tombs perplex one. Except the tomb of Sufi Nizamuddin—and the other burial places of poets around it, where poems are sung on the proper anniversary in September. I would have liked to wander quietly among them.
We heard some Urdu singing in the evening at the Moti Mahal Restaurant. We were tearing red chickens with teeth and fingers to the sound of drums and accordion and the civilized gestures, dialogue, complaints, and witticisms of the singers. The singing was accomplished, intelligent, sophisticated, and very human. It belonged to a better civilization; contrast that with the rock music in the Laguna where we stopped first on the way, and the live Muzak at the Oberoi Intercontinental—appalling! The place quickly became crowded. We had to leave so that others could get to the table. Then a wild taxi ride—the Sikh driver nearly killed three people and then got lost, couldn’t find our hotel. We found it for him.
Sunday morning Lobsang Lhalungpa and Deki came and we drove out to a Moslem college, meeting the principal, et al. It seemed to be an alert and sound place. The principal spoke of the Islamic Institute at McGill and other places where he had studied.
There were snake charmers outside the Moslem colle
ge, but they had disappeared by the time we left.
After the visit to the Moslem college I said Mass in Holy Family Hospital, not in the chapel, as I at first expected, but in the room of James George, the Canadian High Commissioner, who had had a minor operation the day before. He sat cross-legged on the bed with his wife, their son and daughter on either side. Also there were the Lhalungpas, Kunga, the companion of Trungpa Rinpoche, who is staying at the High Commissioner’s, and Harold Talbott, who served the Mass. Afterward we went to the Georges’ and had lunch in their garden. Trungpa Rinpoche was there; he is hoping to meet the Kannapa Lama in Delhi.
Sunday morning I finished the notes for my Bangkok talk and sent them off and wrote to Fr. Flavian, asking if I might return through Europe. The cost of many stamps is breaking me! I had borrowed a typewriter from Commissioner George, and today Mrs. George and her son drove us at 5 to the Palam airport in the dark—and there drank coffee, asking questions about reincarnation.
Yesterday I also decided to write a newsletter, mostly about the Dalai Lama, Dharamsala, and all that. I sent it to Brother Patrick for mimeographing. Also sent my films to John Howard Griffin for processing, including a roll on Jantar Mantar—a fascinating place!
SONGS OF EXPERIENCE: INDIA, ONE
POEM AND PRAYER TO GOLDEN EXPENSIVE MOTHER OBEROI
O thou Mother Oberoi
Cross-eyed goddess of death
Showing your blue tongue
Dancing upon Shiva or someone
With sharks in front gas—
Tanks empty the ambassadors
Coming tonight they
Shine you up
You Intercon-
Tinental Mam-
Moth Mother Kali Con-
Crete Oberoi not yet
Stained with the greygreen
Aftermoss of the monsoons
And a big clean pool
(Shacks out front and kids
In the red flowers and
Goats) a big clean pool I say
With one American
General Motors type
Doing a slow breast-
Stroke in the chlorinated
Indigo water where no
Slate-blue buffalo has ever
Got wet
O thou merciful naked
Jumping millionaire
Rich in skeletons and buffets
You have taken
All our money away
Wearing a precious collar
Of men’s heads
(Those blacks love you at night
In a trance of drums
Sitting with red headlights
Between their eyebrows)
With shacks out front
When kids are playing
With dusty asses
In scarlet flowers
While on your immaculate
Carpets all the am-
Bassadors from General Electric
Slowly chase their blue-haired wives
In high-heeled sneakers.
November 12, 1968
Returning to Calcutta, I have a completely new impression: greater respect for this vast, crumby city. There is a lcind of nobility in its sordidness: the sheer quantity of everything. And in some ways the absence of all that the rich world regards as quality, except in the banks, the Governor’s mansion, and the high prices in the Oheroi Grand. First, as we came in from the airport, I saw how many ponds there are along the roads, among the fields, and new, but already shabby, apartments. How many purple flowers in the ponds. How many lotuses. How many long brick walls painted with Communist slogans in Bengali, with powerful decorative effect. And again, all the cows and slate-blue buffaloes, twice as many as in Delhi. Then as we got into town, the sidewalk markets, the rickshaws, the fantastic and dowdy buildings, the tattered posters advertising Bengali movies. On Maniktala Main Road I saw no sign of Bramachari’s Ashram,59 which I am told has moved—no one seems to know where—and I can’t find out.
Further and further into town. Buildings. Crowds. Rags. Dirt, laughter, torpor, movement. Calcutta is overwhelming: the elemental city, with no room left for masks. Only the naked truth of overpopulation, underemployment, hunger, disease, a mixture of great vitality and permanent exhaustion-but an exhaustion in which the vitality renews itself. How does it happen that the skinny men in bare feet trotting with rickshaws don’t all drop dead? And maybe many do!
Before, when I was here first, I was too shocked; the trauma made me see the city as a big blur. Now I see detail, contrast, the infinite variety of light and shade. All the colors—though they are drab and obscure, they are colors. This is one of the greatest cities in the world, with a character completely its own, full of contrasts and yet beyond contrast. The vast noise of Calcutta seems somehow to be also a silence. There was a spectacular robbery on Sudder Street three weeks ago and it is a city of crime; somehow the crime gets lost in the sheer massive poverty and exhaustion—the innocence of despair. The place gives no impression of wickedness. For the masses of Calcutta, you dimly begin to think, there is no judgment. Only their misery. And instead of being judged, they are a judgment on the rest of the world. Yet curiously nonprophetic—nonaccusatory. Passive. Not exactly resentful. Not yet…
How long before it explodes? What will the explosion mean?
One imagines an enormous, elemental, thoughtless, confused violence like that of a sweeping storm of rain after a sultry summer day. Will it cleanse anything? Clear the air? Will the city simply go on stifling in its own steam? It breathes, sprawls, broods, sweats, moves, lies down, and gets up again.
“Exemploque pari furit omnis turba, suoque
Marte cadunt subiti per mutua vulner a fraters.”
“The same madness raged through them all, and those
who had been brothers an hour before perished by wounds they gave each other.”
(Ovid, Metamorphoses III)
[Edward) Conze deplores the “dragon’s brood,”—the alphabet seed—the armed machinery rising out of the earth. It disturbs his meditation. I argue with Harold Talbott that the world is crazy, but he thinks this an extreme opinion.
November 12, 1968. Darjeeling
This is a much finer place than I expected—a king of places, full of Tibetans, prayer flags, high in mists, wonderful mountains, all hidden as we came up the wretched road along which there have been some seventy very bad landslides. We were held up an hour in Kurseong waiting tor the worst stretch to open up again.
But from the plane which we took from Calcutta to Bagdogra, all the high mountains were visible above the clouds: Kanchenjunga nearest, and Everest several hundred miles away, tall with a black side, a stately mountain. And the lovely pointed one next to it. Directly below, it might have been Indiana as well as India. But we went over the Ganges. The ride from Bagdogra was long, through thick woods, then higher and higher into the clouds. Finally we came to the Windamere Hotel, the most pleasant place I have been to in India. We arrived, up a long flight of steps, out of breath, in the dark. Had tea. It is cold.
In the plane I read a good article on Michel Foucault—or fairly good, I did not agree with all the judgments—in Encounter and also began one by Raymond Aron60 on de Gaulle and the Jews. In the morning, before the flight, I had several hours to read in the Oberoi Grand—and then was glad to get out of it.
There was a white-robed, bearded, European Jesuit in the pharma(.y at Kurseong. I said nothing. Bought some apple juice. Then some beer further up the road in a clean little Tibetan-run liquor store. I will probably go down again to the scholasticate at Kurseong, but much later. And to St. Joseph’s College here also.
November 13, 1968. Darjeeling
The “Windermere”61 is really named Windamere. And since “the disaster” the town has been short of electric power, so last night in the middle of dinner all the lights went out and we groped our way to the sitting room where there was firelight, then candlelight, then the too bright light of a Coleman lantern. The Windamere is too ceno
bitic. Everyone gets together and talks, or participates in a kind of common gathering, as do the three silent Englishmen who just drink beer and listen. A German family from East Pakistan are, I guess, the nicest. They have two pretty little children. Then there are the two girls from N’Orleans, one who works for a travel agency and the other for an airline, so they planned themselves a trip which included a stay on a houseboat in Kashmir and of course all the temples of Katmandu. They had shared the same ride with us up the mountain from Bagdogra, which took four hours with the delay at Kurseong.
Will we be able to get into Sikkim? I don’t know. There was talk of this last night. The Sikh army major assured us the only way was to drive three hours to Siliguri and then ten hours roundabout to Gangtok. Another said there was a footbridge nearby and if a jeep would meet us at the other side…Harold has failed to contact Gangtok by phone and has sent a telegram.
I remained in bed until dawn rather than light a candle. No use trying to read by candlelight, and as I have a slight cold I thought I’d stay under the good blankets. As soon as it was a little light outside the window I got into my clothes and went out, up the hill to the temple on top with all its prayer flags and incense. The children meanwhile were chanting down at the Tibetan school—joyous, lusty chanting that fitted in with the mountains. And there was Kanchenjunga, dim in the dawn and in haze, not colored by the sun but dovelike in its blue-gray—a lovely sight but hard to photograph. I went back after breakfast when the light was better. The view of this mountain is incomparable. I need to go back for more.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 32