"Some people, you know how it is, they see nothing but the lessons one can learn from an ancient object: its materials, its motifs, its form. Fewer see the great importance of this little thing."
"Which is?"
"How it came to be. One man's hand modeled this, and then disappeared. His civilization became ashes, the wind blew it away, and he was forgotten, the man and his art and his passage through this world. But, later, other artists came here and found these chips of yesterday. They rubbed the balls of their thumbs over the lines; they saw the faces of the Greek gods, Apollo's cold perfection, the satyrs’ grimaces; and they didn't need a French archeologist to recognize gods. They just didn't know the names; they depended on nothing but their artists’ eyes. And the faces of the Buddhas these artists made emerged from the stone of Gandhara with Apollo's profile. With all that and more: the straight nose, the long eyelids, the folds of the drapery, but without the Occidental divinities’ cold posing; because the Buddha is Blessed, he wants to smile. His smile has blossomed. The sculptures have freed it from its encrustations. And the Buddhas show their radiant faces to the world, to fascinate you.
"That is form. The explication, and what your eye sees. The form of the smile, but not the smile.
"Because the smile cannot be understood unless you accept that form is emptiness."
I raise my eyebrows. “Emptiness?"
"Oh, the problems you make for yourself, Iacovleff! When you draw, where's the form of what you're drawing? Is it there, on your sketch pad? No, you know it isn't."
He taps my forehead with stiff fingers.
"It's there. When you put marks on the paper, that's only the way you're explaining the form to yourself, by pretending to show it to others. While you think you're battling impermanence, you're subscribing to it. You're uselessly trying to immortalize a particular form. You want to seize it, comprehend it. But form doesn't exist and you can't draw emptiness. So you artists are never satisfied with your work.
"The potter who makes a bowl creates it with a function in mind, a use. If the bowl fits its use, if it can serve in a tavern or a palace, it's a good bowl and the potter can be satisfied. Making it beautiful, that's between the potter and himself, as long as its beauty doesn't take away from its function. But what you do is nothing but an attempt to give form to the world because you sense its emptiness. You think you can show the form of the world, but on the contrary, aren't you fighting to invent it?"
"Are you saying my work is useless? Is that where we're going?"
"No. What you do is not a work, it's an intention. Intention is not useless, but just more complex than a work that can be submitted to examination. No, what you do isn't useless. Because form is nothing else than emptiness, but emptiness is nothing else than form."
"Then what are you trying to explain to me? That your Sutra has a firm foundation?"
"A Sutra isn't explained. It is transmitted, and some people understand it and receive it into themselves, open themselves to it, and some don't. Those who experience its truth suffer, because it's terrible to accept that everything around us, everything that causes all our joys and sorrows, is illusion. Beauty and suffering, love and pain, and our very selves: all illusion. Nothingness. But it's exactly because our spirits rebel, because we can't detach ourselves from these concepts of beauty and suffering and self, that proves there's a truth for us to understand.
"But a Sutra can't be explained. I'm not explaining it to you, I'm reciting it. It happens that you're here and are listening. The demonstration of a Sutra is the world, Frenchman. It's everything that you see now around us. Me, I'm just reciting."
He looks at me out of the corner of his eye, provocatively. Something in me revolts against what he says, but I don't know how to tell him; so my anger turns on him.
"I'm no Frenchman, stop calling me that. I'm Russian, if I have to be anything."
He bursts out laughing. His laugh is loud, raucous, long and joyful. He wipes his eyes.
"Finally! I thought you'd never dare. No, you're not Russian. You were born in Russia, you left your country for Paris; you're not Russian and you're not French. You're a foreigner. Why do you suppose I chose you to speak to? I'm a foreigner like you, a passerby, a voyager, an exile; you see me as the symbol of what the natives are, but I come from ‘outside,’ like you. One must come from ‘outside’ to be able to take that step from outside to the center, and to wear the mask without which there is no revelation. I came here as a xenos. I asked for hospitality, and it was given to me."
"Who are you? You know too much about everything to be what you pretended to be."
"You try to solve my mystery the way you approach anything that is other. You want to learn what I know about the Buddhas’ smile—by studying what I am; but you haven't understood that what I am means nothing. I am nothing. I am a moment in your life. A mask over emptiness.—Don't get angry, Russian. I like to amuse myself, but I don't mean you harm.—Don't ask who I am, ask who you are. Who is Alexandre Iacovleff? Brown hair? Raised eyebrows? A hand that draws? A foot, a hand, a face—.—.—.—or any other part of the human body.” He laughs. “Shakespeare had a phrase for everything. ‘What's Montague? What's in a name?’ Without a name, are you not still yourself? And if you do need a name, would you keep Iacovleff, or Alexandre? Be careful if you keep only Alexandre, though your first name is the more personal of your names. For another Alexander came here once. He did wonders. He conquered, he built, on his way toward the incredible Indies. And he returned broken, sorrowful, betrayed. Are you that Alexander, returned to Gandhara? Are you another Alexander? Or no Alexander at all?"
I want to laugh myself. “All that and nothing."
"Yes. Nothing and all that."
And he laughs unaffectedly. Not like a Buddha, but like a trickster warrior who has momentarily put down his weapons.
"Is there a reason to laugh about it?"
"Oh, you never get tired of looking for a reason. Is that really what you want to look for? All right. Look. You see this land all the way to the horizon, bare, dry, but it wasn't always that way. A long time ago, these valleys were rolling and green. When Genghis Khan came, he destroyed the inhabitants’ painstaking work, the vital and fragile reservoirs. What they say about him is true, you know? Where he passed, the grass never grew again. So many peoples before him, so many dynasties. The Bactrians, Darius, Alexander, the Scythians, so many others, and now the Muslims whom you blame for firing off their rifles—.—.—.— They have all fought, conquered, and built; built and built again; and, even if they don't want to, they have all inherited layers of ancient forms, geological strata of forms. The profiles of the Emblemata have given their faces to the Blessed but also their versos to the Bactrians’ coins. Inheritance is a difficult job, stranger. It means living on the hinge between past and present; in a past that isn't even yours, that can be hatefully greater than you. A past of other architectures, languages, arts. Other gods.
"So many gods, so many different gods! Zoroaster, and all the Persian deities, and Zeus and his turbulent crew, and more, and more, and the Buddha whom Ashoka chose, and now the One True God of Mohammed. Which one is the rightful one, and which one hasn't borrowed a few of his predecessors’ traits, thanks to his worshippers? For good and evil, human perceptions are part of the form of the layers. Yesterday sacred, tomorrow profane; yesterday revered, tomorrow profaned; because men change their minds to defy the changeableness of the world. Men seek eternity, and they think they achieve it by burying what preceded them. By burying it, by destroying it. Living on the hinge is dangerous if you don't accept change; you pinch your fingers.
"And the sand comes. It transforms everything. People think it erases everything, destroys everything, but it links everything, it transforms everything. It's men who destroy and deny, when they can. And when it's impossible to destroy, they appropriate, which is at least preferable. And everything is changed and destroyed, and everything remains. You perceive only one layer of the st
rata, the present, of this land, of yourself, of myself. Because you have not accepted that sensation, perception, intention, consciousness ... that they're all the void."
He contemplates the horizon for a moment, dreaming, almost grave, then turns back.
"You're still reciting the sutra."
"Yes. Come, night is falling, it'll be cold. We'll make a fire and have some tea."
Parasamgate (beyond)
Behind us the horizon is scarlet. My guide cradles his little terra-cotta bowl. I have lighted my pipe and he's rolled himself a ragged cigarette perfumed with spices. Between us the fire burns, small but fierce. Light between us; around us, the dark.
"Tell me the rest of it,” I say.
"Ask me a question. Questions get me started."
"If our names are unimportant, why not tell me yours?"
"A good question,” he laughs, “I didn't expect it. If you need a name to help you remember my form, call me Tunkun. In the Uzbek language, it means night and day, one thing and the other, or the space between them. It's the name I have here, now. But what's your real question?"
"What are you?"
"Ah ... But what do you think I am, if I'm not a warrior who is much more well-informed than you expected?"
"You are a being of the desert—a Djinn."
"A Djinn?” He laughs. “No. I'm not one of that ancient race. I come from another, less subtle and less frank, a race that has codified and ruled this world for too long not to see its power fail from its own contradictions. But you're right, I have a great deal in common with those spirits of the burning winds of the desert. Fire, for one."
He passes his hand over the flames and they lean toward him.
"I love the fire,” he quotes teasingly, “and the fire loves me.” He laughs. “Excuse me, I love a good phrase, I love all the arts of men! The Djinns and I, yes, both born of fire. But they are entirely fire, at home where they live, may the dust of time spare them! Me, I'm not so direct. I was designed twisted. Halfway between fire and cold, day and night, white and black. A foreigner. I told you."
"But you're not a man."
"Excuse me?” He raises an amused eyebrow.
"Not a mortal man. You are older, more powerful. A sort of genius loci. A ... god?"
He sighs.
"What does it matter what I am? I'll tell you what I saw, if it helps you. Long before Alexander, I came here, along the silk thread that leads to the Orient, fleeing my madness and paying my debts. They say I had a chariot drawn by leopards and many kinds of exotic creatures followed me. True. False. My followers were with me, yes. But here, in these once-fertile lands, I felt alone, as if spread between the angles of the world. Here, it's the part of the map where men should engrave a compass rose. A crossroad, a cross, a star. A mark and a marked spot: where so many tides have turned and turned, so many dynasties and creatures; so many invasions and crimes perpetuated again and again, so many cities that rose and fell, so many blindly transmitted strata of the past...
"A meeting place, fugitive, ephemeral, a place that geography didn't intend to endure.
"A crossroads, historians call this place; and that's true. But if a crossroads is a point of convergence and fusion, it's equally a breaking point. The one doesn't exist without the other. At a crossroads, which my people, like yours, have always recognized as a place of danger and power, the certainty of the path breaks down, feet stumble; for a moment one stops, one contemplates one's choices, one conjures gods.
"Here, at this junction and breaking point, there was beauty. The beauty of fusion, of melding, of the melting pot. Better made from combinations of good. But also negation, denial, utter violence, stupidity.
"Everything seems so set, so fixed now, but that is a dangerous illusion. Everything is movement. This fixedness is nothing but the brightness of the desert, which hides the unstoppable movement of the dunes. Destruction, believe me, is more powerful than any melting pot. Rifle-stocks across the noses of your Buddhas, that's the crossroads at work. There has been beauty here; but beneath it, always, there's hatred. Here men marry art to art and create a mingled beauty; but not forever, never forever. And who's to blame? The Muslims; the northern pillagers; Genghis Khan; your countrymen, the Russians, who one day will import here the tyranny of the proletariat? Even the French, who began their excavations by disemboweling the stupas ‘to see what was underneath'? Who's guilty? Men, time, life, the world? All of these, and none. It's not important.
"Because yesterday, today, tomorrow all exist together, for those who know how to see. Because all things, which are by nature emptiness, have neither beginning nor end.
"Listen. I have told you what was and I will tell you what will be. Your French compatriots will find the Alexandria they're looking for. They've excavated patiently but they'll find it by luck. A few years from now—in a time you won't see, because you aren't long for this world—a shah out hunting will see the capital of a column rising like a vision from bare ground. He will talk about his vision, and the French, less mystical than he, will dig. And they will find Ay Khanum, the royal capital. They will uncover its endless ramparts, the towers of its citadel, its enormous palace, its theatre and its sanctuaries. They will walk in Alexander's footsteps and prove their theories. And doubtless some of them will weep with joy at the miraculous mingled beauty of Greece and the Orient. Better born from two goods. There, in the north, at Ay Khanum.
"At Begram and at Peshawar, they will find the treasure of treasures: sublime works in glass, Hellenistic bronzes, perfume-flasks, unbelievable Indian plaquettes. Emblemata by the hundreds. They will find the crossroads within the crossroads: face to face, Athenas with the curves of sacred dancers and Buddhas more beautiful than the ones you have seen here. Angels and devils born of the crossroads; the world will be struck with amazement. Some of these treasures will remain here, some will be taken to foreign countries; and only the stolen and the exiles will survive. Because the sand will blow. There will be war and destruction. The City of the Moon Lady, Ay Khanum, so recently returned to the surface of the earth, will be sacked and raped. The museum will be pillaged. And the great Buddhas of Bâmiyân themselves, which have stood for so many centuries, will fall under blows struck in the name of younger and fiercer gods. No one will see this plain from where we have seen it, standing on the head of a patient Enlightened One, climbing to understand better, tracing a new path in the weave of this crossroads, adding to the millions of threads the improbable and unimportant thread of our encounter.
"Stranger, you're pale. I am too, perhaps. No need. These things are emptiness. They neither begin nor end, they are neither vicious nor pure, not perfect nor broken. They cannot be those things, or become them. Never, in any time, in any place."
He says this, but his eyes are grave, and his mouth has a crease I haven't seen before. He sighs and is silent a moment. I respect this pause in the mourning that he does not allow himself. When he turns back toward me, his voice is infinitely calm.
"I met the man they call the Awakened One. I loved him, even though his lesson was difficult and painful. And still—.—.—.—To take the lesson into oneself, one must be willing to see everything, all these eras at once. The greatness, the falls, the heights, the pillage. Even to accept, as he told me, that these statues will fall, and what he taught will count for nothing.
"Will Ay Khanum be more beautiful tomorrow, for having been excavated and exhibited? Was she more beautiful yesterday, when burnt offerings were made at the foot of monumental Zeus? Is she less grand for being underground today? Is she even real? More real in the sunlight, or underground? Real because she was built by the exalted hands of man? When those hands will have destroyed the Buddhas, what shall we say to ourselves? That it's a terrible loss, that we're horrified by the stupidity that lost us the beauty of Apollo's meeting with Siddhartha? Should you and I be glad because we saw them with our own eyes, while their beauty lasted? And you, stranger, who have already cried over their wounds, should it
console you that you have preserved their image for the future?"
I have trouble answering him. My voice sounds dry when I speak.
"If I accept what you tell me, no, I won't feel any of that. Because, since they have existed, they cannot be destroyed. Because, never having existed, they have never been drawn. They do not exist. They are forever."
He smiles at me still, but his eyes are somber.
"Yes, Iacovleff. Yes. And now you are reciting the Heart Sutra yourself. And now you understand why they are smiling, the Boddhisattvas and the blessed ones of Gandhara, smiling that secret smile that comprehends everything and never alters. And the eyes, too, stranger. Haven't you seen their eyes? Half-closed, because they know in advance, and admit, what is going to happen. They know the emptiness of everything, including themselves and what they have left behind them.
"It is the echo of the Zen master's answer to his pupil: ‘What do you do when you encounter the Buddha in your path? Kill him.’ Even ultimate wisdom must be abandoned as one more illusion.
"It's here, you see, at the crossroads of all things, that the last lesson of impermanence had to be learned. The emptiness of form, the form of emptiness.
"And here I returned, after Alexander and all his conquests. Without a chariot, without leopards, without honor or escort. To sit in front of an old friend, like an obsolete and outworn god who takes off his sandals and becomes a follower of another god, one wiser and infinitely more humorous, who has understood and accepted that we all wear out, gods though we were.
"In the end, at the crossroads, we are all caught in the hinge of time.
"To recite the hard lesson of the Heart Sutra.
"No eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no self. No Alexandre."
I repeat after him, one step behind his smile, “No Alexandre."
And he replies, one beat behind me, “No Dionysus. And you know, don't you, where this logically leads us, once we've accepted the emptiness of all things; do you know why the Buddhas smile?"
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