Prisoners of Shangri-La
Page 20
It is evident that the meaning can only be “thou whose padma is a maṇi,” or “thou in whose padma there is a maṇi.” The former analysis does not seem to give any sense, the latter, on the other hand, is quite satisfactory and no doubt correct. The proper explanation of this designation has already been indicated by Koeppen, who drew attention to the fact that maṇi also means liṅga [penis] and padma the yoni [vagina]. Maṇipadmā is accordingly a female deity with a liṅga in her yoni.72
Thus, the jewel is once again back in the lotus.
One way of telling this tale would be, then, that early Catholic missionaries to Tibet, despite the fact that they did not know Sanskrit, correctly identified the mantra as an invocation of Avalokiteśvara, seeing maṇipadme not as two words, but as the name of a deity, whom they called Manipe. European philologists of the early nineteenth century dismissed this information as erroneous, derived, as it was, from Romish clerics who did not know Sanskrit grammar and thus did not recognize that padme was the locative of padma and that the mantra meant “the jewel in the lotus.” Empowered by the authority of scholarship, this rendering of the mantra gained wide currency and took on a life of its own, floating free from Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism to be employed in a remarkable range of contexts. The occasional dissent has gone largely unheeded, even today, when Tibetan texts that specifically identify the mantra as a vocative have become available. Thus the missionaries, who lived among Tibetans, were right. The nineteenth-century philologists were wrong. Knowledge does not always march forward along the road of progress.
The penultimate irony is that a Tibetan text that describes it all quite clearly has been available to Europeans since 1762, and in the publication Alphabetum Tibetanum, a summary of the records of the Capuchin mission to Lhasa (1708–1745) by the Augustinian friar Antonio Agostino Giorgi. In this massive work one finds a Tibetan text that was included among the documents of Orazio della Penna. It is called Brief Commentary on the Letters of the Six Syllable [Mantra] (Yi ge drug ma ’i ’bru ’grel mdor sdus) composed by one Ngawang (Ngag dbang) of Ra mo che monastery. It had been available to European scholars for two centuries, and thus did not need to be discovered among works previously unknown to the West. In this short text (which is followed by a Latin translation), many questions are answered. It explicitly states, for example, that padma is in the vocative.73 It goes on to say, “O Jewel Lotus. For example, just as a young child fervently calls the name of its beloved mother, the practitioner fervently calls the deity Mahākāruṇika (Supreme Compassion), having a jewel and a lotus in his hands, calling, ‘O Jewel Lotus.’ Mahākāruṇika, remembering his prior promise, comes quickly.”74
A modern Tibetan commentary on the mantra by the late tutor of the present Dalai Lama, Trijang Rinpoche (Khri byang rin po che, 1901–1981), contains a similar explanation but connects the jewel and the lotus to the fourarmed form of Avalokiteśvara, who holds a crystal rosary in his right hand and a lotus in his left hand; his two other hands clasp a jewel at his heart:
Regarding maṇi padme, “Jewel Lotus” or “Lotus Jewel” is one of the names of the noble Avalokiteśvara. The reason that he is called by that name is that, just as a lotus is not soiled by mud, so the noble Avalokiteśvara himself has, through his great wisdom, abandoned the root of saṃsāra, all the stains of the conception of true existence together with its latencies. Therefore, to symbolize that he does not abide in the extreme of mundane existence, he holds a white lotus in his hand. . . . He joins the palms of his two upper hands, making the gesture of holding a jewel to symbolize that, like a wish-granting jewel, he eliminates all the oppression of suffering for all sentient beings and bestows upon them all temporary and ultimate benefit and bliss.75
It would seem, in conclusion, that the early missionaries were correct that the mantra is a vocative invocation of Avalokiteśvara, who is depicted holding a jewel and a lotus, with the reason for the feminine form of the Sanskrit vocative remaining something of a mystery. In her recent Traveller in Space, June Campbell points out the unlikelihood of the term maṇi meaning phallus, vajra being the more common term. She suggests that, instead, maṇi means clitoris and that the mantra is thus an invocation of “the deity of the clitoris-vagina,” a pre-Buddhist Tibetan deity whose gender was changed by “the zealous missionaries of Indian Buddhism.”76
Be that as it may, based on the Tibetan sources and an analysis of the grammar, it appears that the mantra cannot mean “the jewel in the lotus” and that the endless variations on this misreading are merely fanciful. The ultimate irony, of course, would be to discover a Tibetan text that somehow supported this most famous but apparently erroneous rendering. And such a text exists. In the commentary mentioned above by the Dalai Lama’s tutor, one of the most distinguished scholars of his generation, we find the following passage: “First, in terms of signification, maṇi indicates the vajra jewel of the father, padme the lotus of the mudrā [consort], and the letter hūṃ [indicates] that by joining these two together, at the time of the basis, a child is born and at the time of the path, the deities emanate.”77 Or, perhaps translated more loosely, “The jewel in the lotus. Amen.”
In Tolstoy’s story, the bishop gazes back at the island as the ship resumes its course. He is startled to see a white light in the distance moving toward the ship at high speed. Looking more closely, he sees that it is the three hermits, hand in hand, gliding across the surface without moving their feet, surrounded by gleaming light. As they reach the ship, they say in unison, “We have forgotten your teaching, servant of God. As long as we kept repeating it, we remembered, but when we stopped saying it for a while, a word dropped out, and now it’s fallen to pieces. We can remember none of it. Teach us again.”78
CHAPTER FIVE
The Art
What, then, is the characteristic feature, the basic element which makes such work typically Tibetan? It is, in the first place, that principle of placing borrowed features side by side. . . . Further, the typical colour scheme, the immense dynamic activity, demonic appearance, ferocity, savageness and rapacity. The unconditional service and submission to the religious cult, the piety, mysticism, and magic. And the great contrasts, in which two contradictions are clasped together and forced to live side by side in constant tension.
LUMÍR JISL
Just as Victorian scholars could not see Tibetan Buddhism as anything other than the nadir in their history of Buddhism, so Tibetan art arrived too late to figure in any formation of a Western aesthetic of classical Asian art. The sculptures of buddhas and paintings of wrathful protectors could find no place among Ming vases, Sung landscape paintings, Edo prints, and Mughal miniatures. Sherman Lee’s authoritative History of Far Eastern Art (1964) is credited with being the first book to successfully introduce Asian art to a wide audience in the United States. It opens with a two-page color map of Asia indicating the provenances of works of art: some three dozen in India, for example, five in Ceylon, four in Java. But although the name “Tibet” appears on the map, not a single site is marked, not Lhasa, not Gyantse. At the bottom of the map a disclaimer reads, “Only those sites mentioned in the book appear on the map.” A perusal of the contents confirms the absence. Of the book’s 656 paintings, sculptures, temples, shrines, ceramics, and lacquerware, none is described as Tibetan. It is not that Tibet is not mentioned (though almost always in the phrase “Nepal and Tibet”). It is rather that Tibetan art seems to be little more than a hopelessly complicated and desiccated elaboration of things already done better elsewhere. “With the developed use of the Buddha image, we begin to sense an impoverishment of imagination and subject. This is particularly true with the Mahayana material, where images are repeated for their own sake and ultimately reach their most elaborate forms in Nepal and Tibet, with frightfully complicated and seemingly endless systems of quantities and manifestations.”1 By 1994 and the publication of the fifth edition of A History of Far Eastern Art, the number of illustrations had increased to 801, including 66 in color. T
wo of the 735 black-and-white illustrations are of Tibetan works, a buddha and a wrathful deity. Lhasa has been marked on the map, but the name of the region (now enclosed by a line) is “Tibet (Xizang).” Xizang, China’s name for its Tibetan colony, means “Western Treasury,” a treasury that since 1959 has been rapidly emptied of its art. It was only then that these treasures would, for the first time, draw the sustained gaze of art historians who had neither been to Tibet nor read Tibetan, and a process of interpretation would begin in which, once again, Tibet and Tibetans were strangely absent.
This chapter will consider some of the assumptions and interpretative flights of fancy that were launched when Tibetan works came under the art historical gaze during the present century, flights of fancy that through the power of repetition came to acquire the status of knowledge.2 The Tibetan works, sometimes seen as artifacts, sometimes as art, did not simply lose their contexts when they came under this gaze, transported, as they had been, from temples, monasteries, and private shrines in Tibet to museums, art dealers, and private collections in New York and London. Rather, because “objects are not only what they were made to be but what they become,” these Tibetan works, materially stable yet somehow out of place, became a palette with which to paint a portrait of a Tibet unlocated in history.3
The dearth of Tibetan works in Lee’s survey cannot be attributed to a lack of available scholarship on Tibetan art. In 1925 George Roerich published Tibetan Paintings, in which the major schools of Tibetan art were identified and Nepalese, Khotanese, and Chinese influences were noted. Nonetheless, art-historical scholarship on Tibet during the first half of the century was devoted largely to the vexing task of identifying deities; works from that period include Alice Getty’s 1914 The Gods of Northern Buddhism (which speaks of “Lamaite painting”), Walter E. Clark’s 1937 Two Lamaistic Pantheons, and Antoinette Gordon’s 1939 Iconography of Tibetan Lamaism, which illustrates the process of identifying a deity: “Of what type are the ornaments and garments? (See Key to Sacred Images, p. 39.) Answer: Bodhisattva ornaments. To which group of Bodhisattvas does it belong—the non-Tantric or the Tantric forms? (See p. 39.) Answer: The Tantric group, since it has eleven heads and eight arms.”4 And in 1949 Giuseppe Tucci published his monumental, three-volume Tibetan Painted Scrolls, which begins prophetically, “Tibetan painting has not met so far with the same appreciation as that received by its Indian and Persian counterparts. In a way this is not surprising, as collections of Oriental art are rich of too many modern Tibetan paintings of little merit, in which the same subjects appear over and over again. For this reason it has been difficult to overcome the impression that Tibetan painters have little originality and are so subservient to the rules of iconography that they are hardly able to give individual forms to their own fancy.”5
The Tibetan diaspora of 1959 made a great flood of Tibetan art available to dealers and collectors in the West, including both those works that Tibetans themselves carried out and often had to sell for their sustenance as well as works that the Chinese looted and sold through art dealers in Hong Kong and elsewhere.6 These works attracted a special breed of connoisseur, one for whom the artistic commodity (whether a painting or sculpture or a skull cup or ritual dagger) was often further fetishized by the conceit that the work, through its acquisition and display, had been rescued from destruction so that a part of Tibet’s unique and endangered cultural heritage could be preserved.
So by 1969, ten years after the Dalai Lama’s flight from Lhasa, the Asia House Gallery in New York was able to mount a major show of Tibetan art, although the attitude toward it, expressed in an extended excerpt from the preface to the catalog by the gallery director, Gordon B. Washburn, remained largely the same as that expressed by Lee, but with certain elaborations:
These remarkable relics of the culture of Tibet, together with other equally precious records of her inheritance that have come from museums and private collections in Europe and America, should give us a wholly new conception of Tibetan art. We have been used to seeing the sterile repetitions produced by pious monks who often occupied their time in copying manuscripts or scroll paintings (tankas) as exercises in devotion. These hundreds, or even thousands, of dutiful artifacts cannot be counted among the great creations of the Tibetan genius. In a country where the number of monasteries has been reckoned in the thousands, and the number of monks had once comprised nearly a third of the population, it is not surprising to discover that so great a number of implements of worship of merely conventional value were produced across the centuries.
Tibetan art, whether in the form of scroll paintings, sculptures or “ritual implements,” did not have the inciting of aesthetic delight as its primary function, if indeed this element could be included in its purpose at all. Both tankas and bronzes were regarded as instruments of invocation and meditation—tools, that is to say, to help the worshipper rid himself of the outer world of illusion and so find salvation within. This sacred art is not, therefore, the fruit of a free invention but is, rather, the product of strict theological and liturgical canons that have dictated the iconography, the proportions, and even the colors of the paintings and sculptures. Anonymity was always taken for granted, and it transpires that hardly a handful of artists’ names are known to us from this Land of Snows. Effective paintings from famous shrines were endlessly repeated, and models of high excellence brought from foreign sources were deeply revered. . . .
In view of this ritual approach to the creation of art, it is quite natural that only a few images will exceed in quality the level of mere liturgical command. But Tibetans were not simply subservient copyists of Indian, Nepali, Mongol, or Chinese models, however much her artists may have been influenced by these works from earlier Buddhist cultures.7
Much is already familiar here. Tibetan artists are portrayed as anonymous (in fact, many names are known) and Tibetan art as the rote imitation of foreign forms, lacking in the freedom and individuality associated with creative genius. The eighteenth-century view of monastic life as the sterile copying of Latin manuscripts is here transferred to Tibet (where monks were not so occupied) and the number of Tibetan monks is exploded to encompass one-third of the population (the most recent research suggests that between 10 and 15 percent of males were monks). The anonymous artist is thus portrayed as concerned not with the aesthetic but with the instrumental, with mere ritual use, constrained by rigid liturgical requirements governing line and color. As the works are essentially ritual objects, the emphasis is on the repetition of borrowed models. Describing the placement of figures on a scroll painting, Lumír Jisl explained, “This apparently mechanical arrangement and stiffness should, however, not be ascribed to a lack of invention on the part of the Tibetan artist. He cannot do otherwise. He is a monk. We have already spoken of his dependence on church orders which he cannot infringe without committing a sin.”8
Among the uses to which the art is put, meditation is mentioned, characterized as a means of finding truth within a reality absent in the external world. As we will see below, meditation would come to be portrayed by some as the motivating aesthetic of Tibetan painting, rendering it somehow more sublime than other art forms. But here Tibetan art remains merely sacerdotal, mixing influences from elsewhere; as Pratapaditya Pal, the most prolific of the art historians on Tibet, writes in the Asia House catalog, “An account of this constant co-mingling is, in brief, the story of the art of Tibet.”9
Apart from the notion of outside influence, an obligatory element in Western writing about Tibetan art has been a discussion of the Tibetan mentality, of precisely what it is that has moved Tibetans to produce such strange images. Here art historians honor a venerable tradition, one that includes some of the most famous travelers to Tibet. In his 1931 The Religion of Tibet, Sir Charles Bell describes the Tibetan mind: “The dry, cold, pure air stimulates the intellect, but isolation from the cities of men and from other nations deprives the Tibetan of subjects on which to feed his brain. So his mind turns inwards and
spends itself on religious contemplation, helped still farther by the monotony of his life and the awe-inspiring scale on which Nature works around him. . . . There is all the difference in the world between the devout, religious outlook of Tibet and the philosophic materialism of agricultural China.”10 One wonders whether Bell was aware of the work of Ernest Renan, who some decades before argued that the character of Semitic religion (both its belief in one God and the minimalism of its language) derived from landscape: “The desert is monotheistic, sublime in its immense uniformity.”11
Describing his visit to western Tibet in 1933 in The Way of the White Clouds, Lama Govinda offers a somewhat more mystical variation on the same theme: “Thus, a strange transformation takes place under the influence of this country, in which the valleys are as high as the highest peaks of Europe and where mountains soar into space beyond the reach of humans. It is as if a weight were lifted from the mind, or as if certain hindrances were removed. . . . Consciousness seems to be raised to a higher level, where the obstacles and disturbances of our ordinary life do not exist, except as a faint memory of things which have all lost their importance and attraction. At the same time one becomes more sensitive and open to new forms of reality; the intuitive qualities of our mind are awakened and stimulated—in short, there are all the conditions for attaining the higher stages of meditation or dhyāna.”12