From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings

by Lawrence Durrell

  If, therefore, no compromise is possible, why not return to the old principle which has worked so far? With Caramanlis at the wheel in Athens one could be sure of a fairly peaceful policy instead of one which inflamed the hotheads of EOKA in this astonishingly unlucky island.

  The republic has, after all, worked once. Under Makarios it might work again, and we must not forget that the Republic of Cyprus was stable owing to the fact of banking in the City of London, and it would be a pity to throw everything overboard unless one found a better solution to a hedgehog of a problem.

  Lamas in a French Forest

  1984

  WHEN THE HOLY MEN FLED from Tibet in 1950 they sought to follow their Buddhist faith in the west. Some of them found a home in a strange monastery in Burgundy. This is their story.

  Just before winter sets in I like to indulge in a journey, a ramble with a friend about an unfamiliar corner of France. It is usually the end of October—the first skirls of snow have settled in the mountains and the first winter thunderstorms have come and gone. The tourists have fled, but there are often spells of good weather until Christmas. Though the little hotels are empty, the food is still ambrosial—after all, this is France.

  It was on one of these rambles, a few years ago, that I discovered the Château de Plaige, a Buddhist centre in the heart of the Morvan mountains, near Dijon. It was the oddest happening. Only that afternoon we had been talking about the poetry of Mila Repa,[1] the Tibetan hermit-poet. Suddenly we were riveted by the unmistakable sight of a couple of lamas walking down a country road in the snow laughing their heads off. There was no sign of any habitation—it was as if they had been dropped from the clouds.

  Bemused, we stopped to talk to them, finding to our relief that one of them spoke French. He pointed towards the deeper woods, indicating where the château they had come from lay hidden. Obviously thinking that we sought instruction, he urged us to go there and we obeyed without a word.

  It was rather an odd château, more like an overgrown seventeenth-century manor house which had had funny conical towers added to it at the start of this century—altogether whimsical and appropriate to its present use. Beside it stood a great white stupa, or Buddhist statue, looking rather like a hippopotamus at its prayers.

  A symbol of the so-called “awakened state,” it is a strange emblem of a faraway land to find in the misty vales and woods of Morvan.

  We were received courteously and invited to participate in a short service. Then, over tea and sweet cakes, the forty-two-year-old Tibetan in charge of the monastery, Lama Sherab, answered our questions. He explained that the version of Buddhism expounded at Plaige was derived from the inspiration of none other than Mila Repa himself. It seemed a lucky omen and it made my first contact with Plaige a memorable one.

  Until the fall of Tibet, Buddhism was a plant of slow growth in the west, though there was much sympathy with the oriental point of view and it had been given some intellectual respectability by famous writers such as Aldous Huxley and Somerset Maugham.[2] But the Chinese invasion of Tibet produced a radical change, something like the fall of Constantinople:[3] for the holy men and the priests were forced to fly into India, taking with them the jealously guarded holy texts of their faith. Suddenly we found ourselves overwhelmed not only by the documents (it would have taken us another 200 or 300 years to get our hands upon all this important documentation), but by the very presence of the religious leaders themselves. New centres and agencies for the study and practice of Buddhism sprang up of which several hundred are listed in the directory of the London Buddhist journal, The Middle Way.[4]

  Plaige was bought in 1974 by Buddhist adherents and was among the first of these new institutions. It was offered as a teaching centre to the Venerable Kalou Rinpotché,[5] a renamed master of higher insight. He named it Kagu-Ling and dedicated it to the central work of his life and creed. Plaige was to be a centre of repose, study, and meditation, and Kalou Rinpotché proposed to run it on exactly the same lines as the larger seminary over which he now presides in Darjeeling.

  The abbot, now over eighty, visits Plaige several times a year and is always on hand during the principal ceremonies. But the day-to-day running is confided to three of his most cherished and trusted lamas, among whom the expansive and jovial Lama Sherab rules, because of the excellent knowledge of French he has acquired after ten years in the country.

  As the establishment has gradually expanded over the years, a whole cluster of little chalets has grown up in the surrounding woods. The château offers its novices the means to practise the tough withdrawal period of initiation which lasts three years, three months, and three days.

  Accommodation at Plaige is limited to about thirty resident lamas and novices, but people often come and lodge in the village to spend a few days of study and meditation at the centre.

  A Tibetan lamasery encourages visitors even if they do not attend services; in Plaige many local people like to have picnics with their children in the grounds. In fact anybody can just arrive at the château and ask for instruction—there are courses dealing with every stage of Buddhist realisation, classes in yoga and meditation, and even simple language courses in Tibetan. But the religious services, also open to all, are the most important part.

  A similar Buddhist centre, called Kagyu Samyé Ling, presided over by the same teachers, exists in Dumfriesshire in Scotland. The two communities keep in close touch, despite the language difference, and British novices often do a stint at the French centre.

  On my first visit, Plaige, like other Buddhist centres, was suffering from lack of space. According to Lama Sherab the plan was to build a temple as a centre of assembly and welcome, a chapter house and a lecture hall.

  “Plaige is growing out of its limits,” he said. “The temple is the pet notion of our spiritual master, Kalou Rinpotché, who has been dreaming about it for some time.” And Lama Sherab added: “Whatever he dreams up there in Darjeeling tends to come true, either here or in Scotland.”

  More than a year later Lama Sherab appeared on my doorstep in Provence in the depths of winter. He had come to ask me if I would consider helping to raise funds for the temple. The basic structural work had been done but they had run out of funds to complete the project.

  I agreed and formed a small committee with my brother Gerald and two French writers.[6] Together we plotted a few fund-raising gambits, the most successful being our lotus wall inside the temple itself: each person who gave money was encouraged to plant a lotus leaf or flower which would bear the name of a loved one.

  Last autumn I returned to Plaige to see what progress had been made on the temple. The chosen design was the inspiration of the Abbot: an exact copy of the Temple of Samyé, the first Buddhist temple to be built in Tibet during the eighth century. All the heavy construction work on the building was complete, but the decoration and colour still had to be added. It stood there looking rather forlorn but so eloquent—like the skeleton of some prehistoric animal.

  My visit coincided with a three-day “coming-out” party for twenty new Western lamas, ten women and ten men; their initiation was complete and they were due to emerge the next day. The ceremonies were being attended by lamas from several countries, including the United States and the UK. Kalou Rinpotché was there for the occasion. Though at first he seemed very old and as frail as a gnat, the energy which poured out of him was closer to that of a vivid little dragonfly. He hardly seemed to breathe; he never gestured. But he was everywhere, and so was his compassionate smile of welcome, so typically Tibetan.

  There was a distinctly festive air: friends and relations had come to greet the novices and swap the traditional white scarves of congratulation. Lama Sherab was quite adamant that the three-year incubation period was not too long. “It’s not long enough to make either a surgeon or a violinist. It’s simply the initial contact with all the muddle and mix up and distortion of the psyche. But it’s the first grasp or inkling. If successful then it’s a point of departure out
of which one can develop a new sort of life-pattern.”

  Nevertheless, toughness and resolution are essential qualities for the novice. Another young Buddhist felt that three years was just the right length of time. “It’s decisive, why don’t you try it?” he said. The Tibetans themselves obviously do not think the retreat is onerous. The pamphlet which describes the activities of the château refers to it as “delicious.” But it also emphasises that Buddhism takes work, effort, and diligence.

  At the ceremony, as well as a few French boys and girls who had taken the plunge into the Dharmic life, there were two couples, one American and one Canadian, and an English lama called Alasdair MacGeach. Having done welfare work, chiefly in India among the poorest communities, he saw this European retreat as a refresher course, a welcome breath of air after the torrid heats of India. Soon he would be returning there, after a short visit to England. The Canadian couple described with warmth and humour the sacrifices they had made to pay their way and become members of the little community—no job had been too humble for them to take on if it answered their purpose.

  The scene in the forest in the early morning was strange and moving. The initiates emerged pale and exhausted from their long vigils, to be greeted by the roaring and blaring of Tibetan horns, the gnashing of gongs—a strange barbaric orchestra of salutation to be heard in a French forest at the crack of dawn. Then followed the ceremonial procession round the grounds of the château and the religious offices in the old shrine room which marked the re-entry of the novices into the ordinary world. Some were to stay on at the château; others were to travel or work elsewhere. The celebratory air of these Buddhist services was striking—there seemed nothing penitential or gloom-laden about them. It was as if the spectre of original sin had been laid to rest.

  Perhaps the feeling of ease and ampleness about Plaige was due to the Tibetan view of reality with its accompanying belief in human reincarnation: what you cannot achieve in this life you can attend to in the next.

  The Karmarpa, one of the great Tibetan doctors of divinity who had a share in the founding and expanding the work of Plaige, had recently died.

  In discussing the loss with Lama Sherab I was told that before his death the Karmarpa had left the most precise instructions as to where and when he would be reborn. I supposed it would be a generation or more before this happened. “Not at all,” said the lama. “In a couple of years or so. With so much to be done, why waste time?”

  Ideas about Literature

  The Prince and Hamlet

  A Diagnosis

  1937

  Englishmen have always, in spite of the national anthem, been slaves.

  —from a letter to Henry Miller[1]

  THE CRITICS, FOR INSTANCE.[2] One cannot help thinking as one reads them, that criticism is a trade which deals with inessentials: with artifice and not art. For the joy of art is in its privacy, in its exclusiveness. In this Museum the artist is the only one who is really at home; we, as privileged guests, are allowed to wander round it provided we do not touch. And criticism loves to touch, to handle, to analyse, to assess.

  The artist retires into his private pandemonium and emerges suddenly with a few scraps—a notebook jotted in a kind of gnomic shorthand: a description of what the critics are forced to call the “life beyond life.”[3] His work is a battle to superimpose this private reality on the common reality of men. His battle, in fact, is really to destroy literature pure—the organism on which the critic fattens. When he does fuse the two realities he creates a work of art. He describes his interior world and through his medium, makes it overlap with the world of common or garden reality. Hence the disgust. Because you cannot criticise a world of which the artist is the sole inhabitant. You can only analyse the external reality which you share with him. The internal one is always beyond you.

  In our time the critics have almost persuaded us that in order to be sensible to art one must understand it rationally. Whereas it must be obvious to at least twelve or thirteen people that art—the real core of a work of art—does not need to be understood. It is a pure experience, and only needs faith in the prophetic sense. Who can understand, for example, Lawrence’s world, or Gauguin’s?[4] But it is there as an experience to be partaken of by the butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker: anyone with the faith to give himself to a new reality without question.

  This is important to realise when one reads Hamlet. The interior battle which rages suffocatingly as an undercurrent the whole time. It is from the remote battle-front of the self that the artist sends us back his messages, gnomic scribbles, fragments, which we can never understand, but which thrill us, pierce us, and remain with us for centuries as a sort of tribal experience. Let us, for once, dispense with its critical literature, not only on the purely agricultural side (Dover Wilson, Harrison,[5] etc.), but also on the side of pure criticism.

  Hamlet is a representation of the inner struggle written in terms of the outer one. It is the union of the “dream” and the reality, that Breton[6] mentions. All the critical mouse-traps set to catch the king fail,[7] because up to now, everyone has tried to relate the outer reality (the murder, Ophelia, etc.), to the interior reality. Fail completely, because the inner and outer move along separate planes, and seldom meet. There are two co-existing Hamlets. Or, to be deadly accurate: there is the Prince, and there is Hamlet.

  It is this dual growth which has made the moods so incomprehensible; the interplay between the social and the psychic pressure which creates the unique Hamlet: the creature living in a new chronology, the new universe, which we call insanity. Was he mad or did he only pretend he was mad? A century of theorising has not answered. Hundreds of genial idiots have sifted every line of the play, to no effect. Hamlet was no madder than Shakespeare. In fact it was the new sanity which was killing him, and which drove Shakespeare away to his farm in silence, leaving all his work in chaos, unedited, unhonoured, and unsung.

  The Age of The Prince was the Elizabethan Age. An Age that poisoned its young men with the humanities and then showed them none. The Prince was society. But the pressure that closed on the personal, the gentle, the malleable Hamlet, was the pressure of all circumstance common to all ages. Hamlet is the psyche for ever trying to fight its way out of the armour of the Prince; through the chinks we catch glimpses of this ephemera, in revolt against its social function, resentful, but dying—all the time very quietly and vividly dying. But the real death, the internal quietus was never delivered by Laertes but by Hamlet himself. The real play, in fact, is Hamlet and nothing but Hamlet. The King, the Queen, Horatio, Ophelia—they were all nothing but conventional voices calling him to conventional action—rut, revelry, or sentiment. Most terrifying of all to the dying Elizabethan was the ghost: that representative of the other world who became nothing but a social gramophone, calling for a conventional revenge. “The world is out of joint, O, cursed spite, that ever I was born to put it right!”[8]

  The inner Hamlet, when it sees that the ghost, even the ghost, is just another social mouthpiece, begins its death, its personal declension. Here you have a loneliness which is only emphasised by the mouthing of the chorus, by the external action—murder, love, revenge. There is your tragedy. For the rest, the insane machinery of the plot, the heroics of Laertes, the sweet stupidity of Ophelia—these are just different flavours of irony which leave nothing but a bitterness in the mouth. Hamlet is dead—Long live the Prince!

  Two chronologies: two lives: two separate sanities: two planes of action moving disjointedly along together: and two protagonists who are one. Hamlet and the Prince.

  Now this may sound nonsense, but it is not. In order to illustrate it, let anyone turn to the first quarto version of the play.[9] He will find the whole idea laid bare for him with an accuracy the more astonishing because it was unconscious. The long Folio version of Hamlet, as we know it, was much too long for presentation on the Elizabethan stage. According to custom it was cut, and in this cut and partly altered version we find t
he real clue to Hamlet, given to us probably by Shakespeare himself.[10]

  His problem was this. To present Hamlet to the public in a comprehensible form. But to the public the inner struggle has always been incomprehensible, always will be. But the outer struggle—the material, the social, the ancestral problem—that is another question.

  In this Quarto we find a play that the public must have understood and enjoyed with comparative ease. It is a play without any Hamlet. Unerringly the whole of the inner struggle, which clogs the action of the Folio, has been cut away. There is only the Prince. And the Prince is subject to fits of madness in a beautifully comprehensible way. Everything is explainable without any reference to the phenomenon of genius.

  Now in the long version, the Folio, the whole cast revolves around the central figure of Hamlet. Everything in the play is significant only in its immediate relation to him. The cumulative voices of King, Courtier, Lover, Liar, cajole him to relinquish his inner psyche in favour of a material role on the social stage. Even the ghost, that ancestral voice, joins its platitudes to those of Polonius, and cuts him off from supernatural aid. This is the final horror. He cannot call on God, since it is the representative of God who has set him this maniac jig-saw to solve, and added his voice to the voices of society. He is so caught up in the machinery that there is no hope of escape. His death begins at the first appearance of the ghost and ends in the ravings over Ophelia’s grave.[11] It is death by what the oceanographers would call “implosion.” He is crushed inwards, on to himself.

  Then, on the other hand, you have the Quarto, in which any signs of the inner feud are cleverly related to external things, to love, to revenge, to madness. The very structure of the play is altered to diffuse the emphasis which lies on the protagonist. The Queen, for instance. What a superb simplification it was to follow the source-story—to make her unconscious of the murder. How human and sentimental the ghost’s request: