Against shortening or changing the ancient rituals. No concessions to be made. One who cannot fulfill his obligations can somehow substitute by regret and repentance, but the obligations are not to be slackened. Koestler was bothered by this “unyielding attitude.” Sankaracharya’s views, he thought, “bore no relation to contemporaneity.”
In the discourses of Sankaracharya of Kanchi (Raghavan gave me a book of them) I find great emphasis for instance on the orat tradition of the Vedas and the exact chanting of the Vedic texts—and the discipline of learning how to do so. His belief in the importance and efficacy of this. Also, his belief in strict ascetic and religious practice. “To the extent that we make sacrifices in performing acts which we sincerely believe to be good, to that extent will our soul, or atman, get elevated. Even acts done in ignorance, but with faith, will produce spiritual reward. The moment we’ begin to question why a particular religious practice should be observed…we are beginning to lose faith, or bhakti.
“When we perform with faith the prescribed karmas and anushthanas and dedicate them to God, as taught by the Vedas, we attain jnana which clears the way for God-realisation.
“If sannyasins are to take up a profession…they could not become brahmanishtas, persons with their minds fixed in the Paramatman which is their only avocation according to the Sastras [Shastras].”
Sannyasins, he adds, should not be grouped in associations (sangha). “Forming an association pulls down the sannyasins to the level of worldly men.”
Sankaracharya of Kanchi interpreted the Adam and Eve story as a degradation of a Hindu philosophical idea. Atman (Adam) and Jiva (Eve). Jiva eats the fruit of the tree while Atman looks on. (Some interesting possibilities here: cf. my dialogue with Suzuki. Koestler dismisses the whole thing.)
Sankaracharya of Kanchi on the difference between hallucinations and mystic experience: hallucinations are temporary and due to lack of control. “They are caused by the wishes and fears of the ego. The mystic’s mind is a blank, his experience is shapeless and without object.”
By Hindu tradition, the brahmachari or student begs food for himself and his guru. This gives time for study, instead of work, and it instills into him “a sense of vinaya (discipline) without which no vidya (knowledge) can be received and can fructify in the mind.
Aardra darsanam: a puja to be performed at the conjunction of the full moon and the star Aardra in December-January. One bathes the images of Shiva in milk and sandal-[wood] paste in honor of Shiva and his dance, for everything that happens is his divine play.
A conversation last evening with Dr. Raghavan on rasa and Indian aesthetics. He spoke of the importance of suggestion to convey aesthetic implications which transcend ordinary speech. Poetry is not ordinary speech, nor is poetic experience ordinary experience. It is closer to religious experience. Rasa is above all santa: [tranquil] contemplative peace. We discussed the difference between aesthetic experience and religious experience: the aesthetic lasts only as long as the object is present. Religious knowledge does not require the presence of “an object.” Once one has known brahman one’s life is permanently transformed from within. I spoke of William Blake and his fourfold vision.
I visited the National Gallery and Government Museum this morning. Nice paintings of the Rajput, Mogul, and Kangra schools. What is the relation of painting to modes of music? Excellent bronzes. Some nice folk art. Musical instruments again—I seek them out especially. Such lovely shapes! A vina, sitars, temple drums, an arrangement of eighteen porcelain cups to be filled to different levels with water and lightly played with a stick of bamboo. Among the modern paintings-mostly Indian and third-rate—I spotted one which I thought was a very good imitation of Dufy. The card said Duffy. The signature said Dufy. There was also a not very good Gauguin. And a couple of standard Jamini Roys.
Surendranath Dasgupta on idealism:
The Ahirbudhnya Samhita is a post-Upanishadic work from the Vaishnava school of thought which deals with time and Isvara.
“Time is regarded as the element that combines the prakriti with the purushas.” It is the instrument through which the spontaneous thought of Isvara acts. The power of God is not physical or mechanical; it is self-manifestation in thought movement that separates thought and object (mind substance) passing entirely into actuality without obstruction. It is creativity emerging in self-diremption from pure stillness, not as event but as pure consciousness. This self-diremption with power and object is time and all that is measured by time. The brahman perceived he would be many and thus he became many, in time. “Time is identified with the thought movement of God and is regarded as the first category of its inner movement, which is responsible not only for the creation of the cosmos but also of the colony of individual selves.” It is without external cause.
Individuals are pure insofar as they are “in God” but involved in moral struggle insofar as they are “outside him,” cut off by extraneous limits, but they must purify themselves of separative root tendencies. Not, however, from matter. Matter and spirit are two necessary poles in the dialectic.
November 29, 1968. Colombo
The follies of tourism. Time and tourism! The dissolution of one’s touristic duty into incredibly long blank areas of time. Waiting in strange airports. Or in airline offices. Or in free buses from airports to hotels. The flight to Colombo was barely two hours, perhaps less. (I forgot to look.) But there were more than two hours of waiting before we started and we were almost an hour in the airport bus at Colombo. Some Poles had visa problems and eventually could not come with us. Yet it was cool in the Air Ceylon office in Madras, next to the hotel with the sea wind blowing in everywhere, and the faces at the airport were good, the chairs comfortable. I read large chunks of Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy and found it boring, especially the bit about the amateur dramatics. It’s not a good book, barely interesting, though occasionally he’ll have an intuition that makes sense-such as, self and not-self. The “selfless” world of the machine. A good angle. Are we really heading for a kind of technological corruption of Buddhism? A secular nirvana?
The flight to Ceylon: flying smokes of hot, steamy, monsoon cloud and the flat gray-green coast of South India full of rain-ponds and lagoons. Then India veered off blackly to the west, the sun went down, and presently the lights of Jaffna were under us. There are many flat islands along the Ceylon coast. Coming down into Colombo was lovely. We sailed in low over the harbor full of lighted ships.
“On the West the City of Columbo, so-called from a Tree the natives call Amba (which bears the mango fruit) growing in that place; but this never bare fruit but only leaves, which in their Language is Cola, and thence they call the Tree Colambo, which the Christians in honor of Columbus turned to Columbo.”79
Driving into any Asian city at night is like driving into, say Flushing, Long Island—except for the coconut palms. Colombo, evidently, is cleaner and better ordered than any of the others I have seen so far: Bangkok, Delhi, Calcutta. (Madras is not bad.) Neat houses, open to the night air, with people sitting peacefully talking inside. Good shops. Gardens. Flowers in the dark. Flowers in lighted shops. Piles of fruit. As usual I am in Hotel Karma. My karma. Nineteen Twenties, British Rajkarma. The faded cream splendor of the Galle Face Hotel. Everywhere I run into it: the big empty rooms, carpeted stairs, slowly turning fans, mahogany floors, where once the Cantabs [Cambridge students] walked grandly in black tie (at night) or blazer and flannels (afternoon). And the music, too—now American—but still the same songs (names I forget) they played in the Thirties. Meaningless songs that still disturb some dark residue of sentiment somewhere in me, enough to embarrass me, but not much.
I ordered arrack [an alcoholic drink] in the Mascarella Room but the waiter told me, in horror, they could not carry it. “A wild crowd would come. There would be no respect for the hotel.” My idea of the magic powers of arrack was thus confirmed. I drank some local rum, with profound sentiments of “respect for the hotel.” As for the Mascarella Room,
it could be any room in any college town, any bar and grill off any campus or in an Omaha hotel. The same dim lights, same tables, same people, same dancing. A local band, but straight American music, competent, brisk, minutes of quiet watching the moonlit sea, and discovered I was directly over the night club and the muffled noise of the band reached up through the pillow. I went right to sleep anyway.
On the shore. A hot night. Warm, rubbery waves shining under the moon. It is just after the first quarter; Poya day [weekly holiday] was the day before. A new strange feeling out there-westward nothing until Africa. And out there-to the south, nothing til Antarctica. Wow! I was shocked to see Orion hanging almost upside down in the north. I still could not pick out the Southern Cross with assurance but think I saw some of it in the mist and moonlight in the south.
It is evening and again I have not done my duty as a sightseer. I went out onto Galle Face Green this morning (earlier two men were vigorously shadowboxing there), walked along the shore to “The Fort,” that is to downtown Colombo, and found the place charming. I went to check my Singapore flight at Air Ceylon, then walked about the streets looking at the big old English buildings-banks, shipping offices, government offices, etc. A couple of shiny new buildings are there, too. But the clock-tower lighthouse right in the middle of town gives the place a curiously West Indian flavor for some reason. Big gardens around what I take to be the governor general’s mansion. Everywhere there are police and military, very aggressive, with sharp fixed bayonets or machine guns even. Ed Rice had told me something of this but I had forgotten. There is a Post Office strike and I suppose they are there to prevent rioting, looking vicious and humorless as such types usually do. It’s their business.
The King of Kandy, wrote Knox, has a palace like a labyrinth called “The Woodstock Bower,” “with many turnings and windings and doors, he himself having contrived all these Buildings and the manner of them…. By means of these contrivances it is not easie [sic] to know in what part or place his Person is, neither doth he care they should. He has strong Watches day and night about his Court…. At night they all have their set places within the Court where they cannot one come to the speeche of the other…. There are also elephants which are appointed all night to stand and watch, lest there should be any Tumult; which if there should, could presently trample down a multitude.”
I went into the old Anglican Church on the harbor front and prayed a little. It has a certain charm, built in Dutch times. Afterward I read some of the memorial tablets, curiously touching in their “eloquence,” or in the simple visual quality of their lettering, especially the older ones in the back. Then I went into the Taprobane Hotel and got a bottle of Ceylonese beer which turned out to be fairly good, better than Indian. I bought Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé at the Taprobane bookstand, anticipating future hours in airports.
There is little that is Oriental here—or little that I have seen that is so. I have not been to any Buddhist temples, but tried a couple of times, vainly, to contact Walpola Rahula at the Buddhist University. I went to the USIS office at Bob Boylan’s suggestion and ended up having lunch with the director, Victor Stier,80 at his house. Some talk with his child about the relative merits of various funnies. But the wife is the one who has seen Buz Sawyer in the international edition of the Herald-Tribune. Buz has been out of jail for some time. The Mexican mine problem is settled. A new adventure has begun. I am glad to hear of this evident progress.
I went back to the Taprobane in the evening only to find it hot, messy, full of drunks, and with an accordionist wandering among the tables playing “Danny Boy” and “Annie Laurie.” A disaster. However, upstairs in the Harbor Room I got a (bad) dinner with a good view of the docks and lighted ships, so that I began to consider the idea of returning to India, if I return, by boat from Djakarta. Back at my own home, the Galle Face, I thought the Mascarella Room, though pretty awful, was a bit better and more decent than the laprobane, at least the musical part of it! But here too the Ceylonese girl singer calls herself “Heather.”
November 30, 1968. Kandy
Last night I did manage to contact Walpola Rahula by phone and plan to see him when I get back to Colombo on Tuesday. Today I took the early train to Kandy. Got here about 10:30. The trains in Ceylon are extraordinarily cheap. I paid only 6/55 for the three-hour journey, second class, and had a compartment (“For Clergy Only”) all to myself, though expecting a bunch of bhikkhus to move in on me at any station. Six rupees are what a taxi might easily charge you just to get to the station. Actually, the taxi in Colombo was three, and the one in Kandy two. The latter was pure robbery; no distance at all from the hotel to the station. The views from the train were sometimes quite impressive: coconuts, rice, tea, bananas, bamboo, and mountains covered with jungle.
Now I find myself looking out the hotel window at an inexplicable English village church up against what might, but for a couple of coconut palms, be a Surrey hillside. But the breeze is cool and a letter was awaiting me from the German bhikkhu, Nyanaponika Thera. After dinner I went to him in his hermitage in the jungle. It is a very solid little house near a rest house for convalescing monks. One cave-dwelling monk was there convalescing; he looked seedy and harassed. But we went to see another cave hermit and his cave was reasonably tidy and comfortable, after having been suitably humanized by generations of hermits. It seemed perfectly dry. The front had been blocked off with a brick wall and a door. It was an attractive cave with slanting ceiling and floor, a ledge to sleep on, one to eat on, and a place for a small, simple shrine. It was roomy and I must say attractive. The tenant was a young German bhikkhu who recently completed his training at the same South Ceylon island monastery in a lake near Galle as Nyanaponika Thera. He is only temporarily there, occupying the place of another hermit who is on a trip to India.
Nyanaponika Thera is old now, in his sixties or perhaps seventies. Originallya German Jew, he became a Buddhist years ago. Now he lives as a hermit in the cottage once occupied by his master, also a German and now dead. He writes and is charged with a great deal of editorial work for the local Buddhist publishing outfit, which does some quite good things. He went to Europe last year and saw the Tibetans in Switzerland. (Rikon is near Winterthur which is near Zurich. Tossthal is the name of the locality.) His hermitage is in full jungle, in a reservation, but the jungle is right at the edge of Kandy so he is really not far from town. But it is very wild and quiet. We walked out on the brow of a hill where the jungle has been cleared a bit and there is a fine view of the peaks to the southwest and northwest. I hope my camera caught some of the enchanted beauty of this landscape! Ceylon is incomparable!
Mter that I saw a little temple, Gangaramaya, on the edge of the same jungle, but down below. There is a great Buddha carved out of a huge rock rising out of the earth, and a small temple built around it. Fascinating Ceylonese folk-type paintings on the walls and ceiling. And the Buddha figure, behind glass, still quite impressive, much more so than modern ones. This one must be about two hundred years old.
Later I visited Bishop Nanayakkara in the cathedral compound; built by Sylvestrines [monks], it was originally a monastery. The cathedral is fairly handsome in its 18th-century colonial sort of way. Bishop Nanayakkara is very progressive and we talked long about my idea of Buddhist dialogue and of a meditation monastery that would be open to Buddhism. He drove me up to the top of the hill looking down on Kandy—it is lighted up after nigthfall—and continued to talk about the Church today and the problems of Christians. I think he sees the situation clearly—or in any event we agree.
Anything going to or coming from the King of Kandy is held sacred, says Knox, and the people move aside out of the way not only of the white flowers that he likes, when they are being brought to him, but also his dirty linens when they are taken to the lake to be laundered. “And when they are carried to washing, which is daily, all, even the greatest, rise up, as they come by, which is known by being carried on a hand heaved upwards, covered with a painted cloth.�
� [Knox, op. cit.)
December 1,1968
It is hardly like any December or Advent I have ever known! A clear, hot sky. Flowering trees. A hot day coming. I woke at the sound of many crows fighting in the air. Then the booming drum at the Temple of Buddha’s Tooth. Now, the traffic of buses and a cool breeze sways the curtains. The jungle is very near, it comes right to the top of the city and is visible a bare hundred yards from this window. Yet I am on a very noisy comer as far as traffic is concerned!
December 2, 1968. Kandy
Yesterday much of my time was spent with the bishop, visiting the monastery of the Sylvestrines, a quiet place on a hillside amid tall palms, with pleasant cloister and chapel. There I met the retired bishop of Kandy, a jovial and deaf Italian with a long gray beard, Bishop Regno. He said he judged from my Seven Storey Mountain that I had been one of the “first hippies.” “Oh! Oh! Oh!” he said with upraised hands, “All the whisky! All the cigarettes!” I reminded him that hippies had no interest in whisky and that they smoked pot, not cigarettes, but I don’t think this penetrated the wall of deafness. In spite of which he urged me, since the world was going utterly mad, to write on the authority of the Pope. Then I saw the seminary, a large, roomy, shady place, where all the twelve dioceses of Ceylon send their candidates for training. A big Romanesque German-style church. When I came back in the evening for dinner and a talk to the seminarians, the Alma [Mater] Redemptoris [Loving Mother of the Redeemer] was sung rather faintly in Latin and Gregorian and I could not feel this was any more out of place then, say, English hymns!
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 37