The Other Side of the Mountain

by Thomas Merton

  I remember the Moslems’ sunset gun going off in Kandy and shaking the bishop’s house. And the evening I returned from Polonnaruwa the gun went off as I stepped out of the car and a thousand crows flew up into the rain by the Temple of the Tooth.

  Polonnaruwa was such an experience that I could not write hastily of it and cannot write now, or not at all adequately. Perhaps I have spoiled it by trying to talk of it at a dinner party, or to casual acquaintances. Yet when I spoke about it to Walpola Rahula at the Buddhist University, I think the idea got across and he said, “Those who carved those starues were not ordinary men.”

  I visited Polonnaruwa on Monday. Today is Thursday. Heavy rain in Kandy, and on all the valleys and paddy land and jungle and teak and rubber as we go down to the eastern plains. (“We” is the bishop’s driver and the vicar general of the Kandy diocese, a Celonese Sylvestrine with a Dutch name.) By Dambulla the rain has almost stopped. The nobility and formality of an ancient, moustachioed guide who presents himself under a bo tree. We start up the long sweep of black rock, the vicar general lagging behind, complaining that he dislikes “paganism,” telling me I will get much better photos somewhere else, and saying they are all out to cheat me. (“They” being especially the bhikkhus.) Over to the east the black rock of Sigiriya stands up in the distant rain. We do not go there. What I want to see is Polonnaruwa. The high round rock of Dambulla is also quiet, sacred. The landscape is good: miles of scrub, distant “tanks” (artificial lakes dating back to the Middle Ages), distant mountains, abrupt, blue, heads hidden in rain clouds.

  At the cave vihara of Dambulla, an undistinguished cloisterlike porch fronts the line of caves. The caves are dark. The dirt of the cave floors under bare feet is not quite damp, not quite dry. Dark. The old man has two small candles. He holds them up. I discover that I am right up against an enormous reclining Buddha, somewhere around the knee. Curious effect of big gold Buddha lying down in the dark. I glimpse a few frescoes but those in this first cave are not so exciting. Later, some good ones, but hard to see. The guide is not interested in the frescoes, which are good, only in the rank of Buddhas, which are not good. Lines of stone and sandalwood Buddhas sit and guard the frescoes. The Buddhas in the frescoes are lovely. Frescoes all over the walls and roof of the cave. Scenes. Histories. Myths. Monsters. “Cutting, cutting,” says the guide, who consents to show a scene he regards as worthwhile: now sinners being chopped up in hell, now Tamils being chopped up in war. And suddenly I recognize an intent, gold-faced, mad-eyed, black-bearded Celonese king I had previously met on a postcard. It is a wood sculpture, painted. Some nice primitive fish were swimming on the ceiling, following a line of water in the rock.

  Polonnaruwa with its vast area under trees. Fences. Few people. No beggars. A dirt road. Lost. Then we find Gal Vihara and the other monastic complex stupas. Cells. Distant mountains, like Yucatan.

  The path dips down to Gal Vihara: a wide, quiet hollow, surrounded with trees. A low outcrop of rock, with a cave cut into it, and beside the cave a big seated Buddha on the left, a reclining Buddha on the right, and Ananda,82 I guess, standing by the head of the reclining Buddha. In the cave, another seated Buddha. The vicar general, shying away from “paganism,” hangs back and sits under a tree reading the guidebook. I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything-without refutation-without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening. I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape, figure, rock and tree. And the sweep of bare rock sloping away on the other side of the hollow, where you can go back and see different aspects of the figures.

  Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The queer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded (much more “imperative” than Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa because completely simple and straightforward). The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no “mystery.” All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya—everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely, with Mahabalipuram and Polonnaruwa my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. This is Asia in its purity, not covered over with garbage, Asian or European or American, and it is clear, pure, complete. It says everything; it needs nothing. And because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we, Asians included, who need to discover it.

  The whole thing is very much a Zen garden, a span of bareness and openness and evidence, and the great figures, motionless, yet with the lines in full movement, waves of vesture and bodily form, a beautiful and holy vision. The rest of the “city,” the old palace complex, I had no time for. We just drove around the roads and saw the ruined shapes, and started on the long drive home to Kandy.

  December 5, 1968. Singapore

  Lee Beng Tjie, professor of philosophy at the University of Singapore, met me at the plane with his wife. He drove me to the hotel, The Raffles, and then out to Mount Faber, where we had a view of the lights of the city and the harbor in rain. Today I said Mass in the dining room of his flat and we went to an excellent Chinese lunch at a hotel in Chinatown, the Majestic. They called for me again in the evening and we went to a place up Beach Road where they provide you with the fixings, and with a hibachitype of stove. You put this on the table, pick out your own fragments of hard-to-identify meats with chopsticks, and drop them in the boiling water. You hope that when you fish them out again they will be more or less done. I must admit that as an experience this was highly instructive, but as a dinner it turned out to be somewhat less than impressive. The Chinese families sitting around us seemed to be busy with the enjoyment. I admit that I have much to learn before I can profitably enter into it.

  Beng Tjie says that he has a hard time getting Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu through to Asian students. The ones here have been formed by English linguistic analysis to some extent. He thought what I have done in “War and the Crisis of Language”83 was the sort of thing that Wittgenstein was really getting at—but I am not so sure.

  SULTAN LEADS RAIDS ON SEA-MINE “PIRATES.”

  “The Sultan of Perak led a police party on a raid yesterday that dealt a crippling blow to the million-dollar syndicates engaged in illegal mining of tin off the Duidings Coast.” The whole story is good funnypaper stuff: even floating pumping stations, “palongs” (fishing boats) “converted at an average cost of $35,000…boats seized…men “detained.” Huts burnt! Hurray for the Sultan of Perak! He is thwarting rich evildoers!

  Two more Bonn [Germany] officials commit suicide. France threatened by crisis, strikes, etc.

  December 6, 1968. Singapore

  I am now preparing to leave Singapore, the city of transistors, tape recorders, cameras, perfumes, silk shirts, fine liquors-carrying away only a stock of 35 mm. Plus X film. I am glad I came here. It is an interesting, “worldly” town, very different from India,
a new Asian city, the cosmopolitan kind, “worldly” too in a Chinese sense. Singapore has a Chinese kind of practicality and reality along with the big Western buildings which, as it happens, are clean and well-kept. The place is not run down, and hence Calcutta is not a necessary pattern for all Asia! And these evidences are needed in order to give a complete picture of Asia. Out in the suburbs hy the university, it is like Santa Barbara or Sacramento.

  I saw the other side of Colombo going out to the Katunayake airport. There were many screwy Catholic statues exhibited in public but sometimes under glass, so that the Catholic saints come a little closer to Ganesha and Hindu camp after all. Suddenly there is a point where religion hecomes laughable. Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious.

  My next stop will be the Bangkok meeting to which I do not especially look forward. Then Indonesia, a whole new journey begins there. And I am still not sure where it wiil take me or what I can or should plan on. Certainly I am sick of hotels and planes. But the journey is only begun. Some of the places I really wanted to see from the heginning have not yet been touched.

  “Most men will not swim before they are able to.”84

  For Nagarjuna, all things are self-contradictory. The root of the Steppenwolf sickness is Steppenwolfs conviction that he is uniquely self-contradictory, and that his self-contradiction is resolved into a duality of wolf and man, self-love and self-hate. But this duality arises from ignorance of the fact that all “things” are self-contradictory in their very claim to privacy. The Steppenwolf, however, creates a double illusion by the price he places on private individuality as capable of special and unique relationships.

  “They had run out of seashells and were using faded photographs, soiled fans, time-tables, playing cards, broken toys, imitation jewelry, junk that memory had made precious, far more precious than anything the sea might yield.”85

  December 7, 1968. Bangkok

  I find that I was secretly enraged and humiliated by the fact of having overweight luggage yesterday. Today, first thing after getting up and saying Office, I went all through my baggage, ruthlessly separating out things to be somehow disposed of. For instance, all cold-country clothes can go into the zipper bag which perhaps I can get the abbot from Hong Kong to take there. Which means, however, I won’t be able to go back to Sikkim, Bhutan, or Nepal. Stupid books I bought can be discarded here or somewhere. I make a desperate plan to finish several books here in Bangkok. But of course with the conference this will be impossible. I sent contact prints to John Griffin with a few marked for enlargement. Took nine rolls of Pan X to the Borneo Studio on Silom Road, hoping they will not be ruined [they weren’t]. Better finally burn up that incense. Threw some useless pills in the toilet. But I find it hard to make any firm plan that positively excludes a return to India, South India that is, in January.

  After arranging my flight for Djakarta on the evening of the 15th, I went dutifully to the palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. I didn’t see the palace-it wasn’t open to the public today-but went through the temple. I saw some of the paintings but was distracted by a Thai soldier who had four U.S. quarters and wanted to change them for 20 baht. But 20 was all I had. The temple itself was impressive in the dark, ornate, spacious way and the small, precious, green Buddha enshrined high up in a lighted niche was somehow moving. The buildings and sculptures of the temple compound I thought precious and bizarre rather than beautiful. They are saved by a kind of proportion which is very evident as soon as you get away from them a little. The guardian deities are not frightening, only grotesque. I kept remembering a picture of one of them on a calendar in the infirm[ary] refectory at Gethsemani sometime back in 1965.

  The palace temple, however, has a basic dignity, a kind of splendor that is genuine, not gross. A bit decadent, perhaps, but I hesitate to say it. There are of course Disneyland tendencies in all these Thai wats, and I suppose at times they go over the line. For instance, in another wat I passed near the palace, the “guardian deities” on two doors were British 19th-century soldiers with white unitorms, helmets, and rifles. All this makes the Tiger Balm Gardens in Singapore (which I missed) more understandable. As for the frescoes: yes, they were good too, in their way, yet so close to a comic strip. (This is not meant to imply a judgment, good or bad.) After all I think the murals are perhaps the best thing in the whole temple. Well, Hanuman has a prominent place in all this. He is at once a monkey, god, and a successful fighter. And I think this says much that illumines the whole comicbook, and pre-comic-book tradition.

  One of the villains of the temple is a “bad yak” called Nonkatal. Here a “yak” is not a Tibetan animal but an inhabitant of Ceylon. “Nonkatal behaves carelessly with a girl in heaven…he is commanded to become a buffalo.”

  “Rama, the hero, arrives at the palace of the king and sees the second queen on the throne alone. She tells Rama that the king wants him to become a hermit for a period of fourteen years and after that time he is to return and take the throne as king of Ayodhya. Rama is pleased to do as the king’s will commands…. The chief officer has set up a farewell parade for Rama…. The king’s heart grows sad and troubled by what he has done to Rama, and, as if he can stand no more, dies suddenly in the night.”

  Caption of a picture in which the yaks are trying to force Hanuman into a huge black cauldron: “The Yaks try very hard to slay Hanuman by putting him in the mash. Hanuman turns and slays the Yaks instead.”

  “The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.”86

  December 8, 1968. Bankok

  A Dutch abbot who is staying with an attaché of the Dutch Legation came around to the hotel yesterday and we went to Silom Road again, to find Dom Leclercq and others who had arrived. Most of the delegates were arriving today and I will go to the Red Cross place where we are supposed to stay and where the meeting is to be held. It is 30 kilometers out of Bangkok. The Dutch abbot was trying to talk me into participating in a TV interview but I am not sure it is such a good idea, for various reasons. And first of all I find the idea very distasteful. The suggestion that it would be “good for the Church” strikes me as fatuous as far as my own participation is concerned. It would be much “better for the Church” if I refrained.

  It is good to have a second time round with these cities. Calcutta, Delhi, and now Bangkok. It now seems quite a different city. I did not recognize the road in from the airport, and the city which had seemed, before, somewhat squalid, now appears to be, as it is, in many ways affluent and splendid. What has happened, of course, is that the experience of places like Calcutta and Pathankot has changed everything and given a better perspective in which to view Bangkok. The shops are full of good things. There is a lot to eat. Lots of fruits, rice, bottles, medicines, shirts, shoes, machinery, and meat (for non-Buddhists). And the stores near the Oriental Hotel are really splendid. So too is the Oriental itself. I have a fine split-level dwelling high over the river, and you enter it through an open veranda on the other side, looking out over the city.

  I went to Silom Road, walked into the French Foreign Missions place and found it deserted. I wandered around in the rooms looking at the titles of books on the shelves: [Sir Walter) Scott’s Marmion, André Maurois, along with Edward Schillebeeckx, a set of Huysmans, I forget what else-lots of magazines from Études to Paris-Match. Finally Fr. Leduc appeared, and presently-he told me to wait-the superior, P. Verdier, came in with Abbot de Floris, who is running the meeting, and Fr. Gordan.87 They said there was mail for me; it turned out to be a letter from Winifred Karp, the young girl who stayed with the nuns at the Redwoods, forwarded from Calcutta. I have a hunch some of my mail will be getting lost in this shift.

  The flight over Malaysia: dark-blue land, islands fringed with fine sand, aquamarine sea. Lots of clouds. It was a Japan Air Lines plane. They made me weigh my hand luggage, which put me overweig
ht for the economy class allowance, so instead of just paying more for nothing I paid the difference for a first-class ticket, thus covering it with the bigger baggage allowance. And had a very comfortable ride, overeating, drinking two free, and strong, Bloody Marys, and talking to a diplomatic courier for the State Department, who by now is getting ready to fly on to Karachi in Pakistan on the night Pan Am plane.

  This evening I took a walk through Bangkok, down past the Post Office and into Chinatown. A Chinese Buddhist temple was all lit up and having some kind of fair, preparing a stage for a show, food for a banquet, and booths were selling all kinds of trinkets, lights, and incense. I went in and wandered around. There were hundreds of kids playing. Older people happy and fairly busy preparing whatever it was. Perhaps something to do with the king, whose birthday was yesterday. The city is full of flags, signs saying “Long live our noble King” and huge pictures of Phumiphol Aduldet himself, now as a Thai general and now as a bhikkhu in the lotus posture.

  Last night I had a good Hungarian dinner at Nikas No. 1 (where, however, I seem to have been grossly shortchanged) and went on to see an Italian movie about some criminals in Milan, a quasi-documentary. It was not bad, very well filmed, and worth seeing.

  Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In a little while I leave the hotel. I’m going to say Mass at St. Louis Church, have lunch at the Apostolic Delegation, and then on to the Red Cross place this afternoon.

  A Glossary of Asian Terms

  Abhidharma: a Buddhist metaphysical system; pure, intuitive knowledge of the dharmas.