Shopping for Buddhas

by Jeff Greenwald

  Looking for the shoe that might deliver such a kick, I made it a point to visit exhibitions of contemporary Nepalese art wherever and whenever possible. I was in search of that elusive quantity: an Eastern Picasso—or at least a Giotto—who could breathe new life into the tired old forms. What I found surprised me. The whole clogged flue of Western art history, from cubism to fauvism and up through the chimney of abstract expressionism, was represented. One amazing thing about developing nations: when anything happens, from traffic to modern art, it happens all at once. Surrealism, minimalism, post-modernism—all, like amateur climbers on a nasty cliff, were floundering for toeholds. The results of these efforts were sometimes inveigling, but usually imitative and embarrassing.

  I did come across a number of interesting and original paintings, by artists such as B. G. Baidya, Manuj Babu Mishra, Paramesh Adhikari and Ragini Upadhyay; bright or brutal canvases that seemed to be making a point, and might have shown well in the more fearless corners of lower Manhattan or L.A. By and large, though, the situation looked grim. There was some tentative flirting, but nobody had a stiff enough broom to sweep Central Asia off its feet.

  I found this fact inexplicably frustrating. One problem, I reasoned, might be that almost all of Nepal’s contemporary artists had received Western-style training. It seemed unlikely that truly original ideas could spring from such a contrived background. Maybe that fateful kick would have to come from someone who had been schooled in the most traditional of arts.

  Following that thread, I wandered through the alleyways of Thamel and Taleju, dropping in on studios and talking to the best traditional artists I could find. These were all young lamas who paint exquisite devotional canvases known, in the Tibetan tradition, as thangkas. All these artists had studied, from an early age, under traditional masters; all now earned their keep by producing a stream of work that was utterly derivative. Often enough, their paintings were copied directly from books or other thangkas. It seemed a horrible waste. All the artists were impressively talented. A few were nothing less than inspired and created breathtakingly detailed work using natural stone colors, the grinding and mixing of which is an art in itself.

  Didn’t it drive them crazy? Weren’t they totally frustrated? Didn’t they feel an overpowering urge to break from the fold and establish their identities as original, individual names on the Asian art scene? I asked these questions over and over again. The answers were often confused and occasionally eloquent, but they were always no. It was mind-bending; but by the time I left the kingdom, my understanding of Eastern art had undergone a radical change.

  If Nepali artists are not overcome by a zeal to produce contemporary work, it is not by virtue of incompetence. Beautiful paintings, sculptures and ceramics abound, but every single work has a specific—and ancient—devotional purpose. Sometimes the works are beautiful because of their purpose—like the brilliantly colored prayer flags that festoon high hillsides and monasteries. Sometimes the art is beautiful in spite of its purpose—like the sumptuous idols at Dakshinkali, scarlet with the blood of sacrificed goats.

  The most perfect art, according to the Nepalis, stems from the re-creation of perfected formulas. No attempt need be made to realign (much less shatter) the age-old symbolic infrastructure. Why? Because it isn’t necessary. If you can comprehend the symbol at its deepest, most primal level, the image—of a Buddha or Krishna or Tara—can hike your valence just as effectively as a work by Joseph Beuys, Sue Coe or Clemente.

  It’s the difference between “yogic” and “athletic” art. Artists in the Western world work by bending the banister, confident that anyone sitting on it will slide into a new awareness. Our art, abstract and figurative alike, flexes its muscles and pushes. It’s no surprise that contemporary artists have, through the ages, encountered resistance and even scorn; theirs is the burden of dragging the public, kicking and screaming, toward a new awareness of form and self. The art object in the West is not a final destination; it is a place marker in uncharted territory, a piton hammered into the face of a mountain of indeterminate height.

  In Nepal, traditional art is believed to already contain the highest level of understanding possible. Thangkas and dances, bronze Buddhas and ritual bells, all take their shapes from tested formulas, tried and true guidelines firmly anchored in enlightenment.

  The sole responsibility of the artist is to express these formulas as faithfully as possible. There is no need to shock the audience, seduce powerful gallery owners or grope after an individual style. The whole idea of an ego is, after all, a bit beside the point—the one being recognized is God.

  Given this information, it’s not difficult to see why Nancy and I—embarked on another casual afternoon of spiritual materialism—were thrown for a loop when one Mr. S. R. Aryal, proprietor of the Deity Depot on Durbar Marg, emphatically introduced us to the work of a specific human being: an elderly sculptor from the neighboring city of Patan named Sidhi Raj.

  Aryal’s art collection was the most dense and fascinating I’d seen. Much of it was in the setting; the shop interior was dark and mysterious, slightly musty, lush with art. A potted ivy sat by the door; its tendrils crept up the frame and spread across the ceiling, twisting between the spotlights and piquing my unspoken fear that Kathmandu was becoming, at least for me, a kind of Buddha-buying jungle. Patches of stray light filtered in through the window, glinting off the naked arms, legs and thrice-bent torsos of bronze gods and goddesses that crammed every available inch of shelf space. Tibetan saddle carpets and prayer blankets were piled high against one wall; the showcases were filled to capacity with amulet boxes, ritual daggers, bowls containing silver beads, amber and turquoise.

  Everything in the shop had integrity. There was no junk; Aryal’s eye for statues was eclectic and tasteful. He himself was short and stout, with serious eyes, a pocked complexion and a sparse mustache dusted onto his upper lip. Something about his personality exuded a quiet wisdom that neither Nancy nor I felt qualified to ignore. We felt compelled to trust Aryal’s judgment—and his judgment was that Sidhi Raj was the first and last word in serious Buddha investing.

  It was Sidhi Raj, Aryal told us, whose statues were continually sought after by dealers, curators and lamas. It was Sidhi Raj who was keeping the high art of Nepali bronze casting alive. And—more to the point—it was the work of Sidhi Raj that would appreciate most swiftly in value.

  As if to prove this point, Aryal raised his prices every time we dropped in. . . .

  The salesman’s enthusiasm and conviction were so palpable—such an effective sales technique—that after only a few more visits to the Deity Depot, Nancy and I were caught in the grip of an invincible obsession. The first question we’d ask on walking into any shop became “Do you have anything by Sidhi Raj?” We determined that there must have been more and more buyers privy to this “inside information”: practically overnight, every half-pint gallery in town claimed to be representing the Raj clan.

  But in short order we began to observe, to our confusion and chagrin, that much of this abundant new work peddled off under the “Raj” name was amateurish in the worst way.

  Why? We put the question to Aryal, who offered what seemed to be a reasonable explanation. Even though Sidhi Raj himself might have indeed sculpted the original plaster models from which the molds for these statues were taken, an equal amount of talent is needed to whip the nascent casting into shape. Those castings emerge from the mold looking raw as radishes; it takes a carver of great skill to bring out the highlights, the exquisite little details, intended by the artist.

  With the tourist community clamoring for top-notch devotional art, Aryal explained, old Sidhi’s homegrown foundry had begun to churn statues out one after the other, handing the unfinished bronzes over to his ragged little nephews for the cleaning, carving and finishing touches. Henry Ford might have been impressed; but as far as Nancy and I were concerned, this mass production represented a dangerous trend indeed.

  As the days went b
y, the quest for a quality work by Sidhi Raj began to seem all but futile. The market was flooded with work, some of it good, much of it junk; and everybody was calling everything a Raj.

  One afternoon, as I sat at home devouring a pumpkin pie and slaving over an incendiary letter about taxi horns to the Rising Nepal, I heard a frantic knock upon my door. It was Nancy, flushed and breathless. Her eyes were wild.

  “You’ve got to come down to the Deity Depot with me,” she gasped. “Aryal just showed me a fantastic little Buddha, and I don’t know what to do.”

  I raced into the garage to get my bicycle and found Krishna sitting with Raj, the household’s young gardener. They were at their ease, listening to Radio Nepal and smoking Laligurans filters. Rising nobly at my request, they pumped air into the vehicle’s beleaguered tires and sent me on my way.

  We flew along the dusty, gravel-strewn roads. Past a bunch of boys playing Ping-Pong on a makeshift table, using a row of bricks as their net. . . .

  . . . Past Elsie the cow, who burst out of a thick copse of ganja shrubs as we rode past, her head rearing and eyes rolling. . . .

  . . . Past a toothless woman strolling down the road, holding the leash of a black goat in one hand and a carved walking stick in the other. . . .

  . . . and around the gold cobra capital rising from the murky pool of Nag Pokhari—Snake Lake.

  Down the hill. Now we were really in town. We cycled past the cinema, its parking lot crowded with snack stalls; past the brightly painted shingle announcing “LALJI: HAND ANALYST”; past the elephant-cage fence that defines the Royal Palace. We were just about to turn onto Durbar Marg—the broad avenue that begins at the Palace Gate—when we were forced to a halt.

  “Stop!” A Nepali policeman accosted us, overflowing with an urgent sense of mission. “You must wait! The King is coming!”

  There was no doubt about it. A huge crowd thronged the sidewalks all the way down broad Durbar Marg. Policemen with woven cane riot shields stood guard every three or four meters, some chatting self-consciously into loaf-sized walkie-talkies.

  A palpable enthusiasm hung in the air. The Nepalis shifted around us like agitated molecules, speaking in short, enthusiastic bursts. The woman we had seen leading the goat caught up to us; she forced her walking stick into a little patch of earth and tethered the animal to it. Three old men squatted by the entrance to the Gaida Wildlife Camp office entrance, their baggy drawstring pants billowing onto the ground as they passed a smoldering clay chilum among themselves. Little girls perched on their fathers’ shoulders, clutching red paper flags.

  Neither bicycles nor cars are permitted to park on an avenue that will be graced by the supreme presence of the King of Nepal—a man who is touted as a modern incarnation of Vishnu, the Great Preserver. Windows are shuttered and curtains drawn, giving the normally frenetic boulevard an austere, model-railroad town appearance. As Nancy and I walked our bikes along the sidewalk, we came across a poignant sight. Some poor ignoramus, uninformed of the pending procession, had left his car parked unattended on Durbar Marg. A Nepali tow truck—a crane, essentially—was loading it onto a flatbed truck as a mass of spectators watched in awe. The Toyota sedan dangled in the air, twisting slowly in the breeze. Nancy and I watched the loading process until it was over, and the flatbed roared away and disappeared around the corner in a cloud of black diesel smoke.

  Nancy turned to the man beside her, who had just bent over to light up a cigarette.

  “Where will they take that car?” she asked.

  He cast her a baleful eye. “To a lonely place,” he replied.

  After what seemed like an eternity, an eerie hush descended like a fog bank on the masses. A tiny crackling sound, like frying guppies, could be heard in the distance: applause for the royal motorcade as it emerged from the palace parking lot around the corner. The oddly restrained clapping—more appropriate for a retirement dinner than the appearance of Lord Vishnu’s human incarnation—dominoed down the sidewalk, finally engulfing us. We craned forward as the vehicles blinked by.

  The King of Nepal, Sri Panch Maharaja Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, waved cheerfully to his constituents from behind the wheel of a vintage Corvette. He was alone in the car, but surrounded on all sides by military police on motorcycles. His informal attire suggested he might be going to a wedding: he wore a sports jacket, white tunic and colorful topi—the soft, fez-shaped hat that serves Nepali protocol much like the Western tie.

  Sri, incidentally, is a term of lofty respect in Nepal and India, equivalent to “lord” or “saint.” And panch means “five.” The royal epithet, “Sri Panch,” is simply a shortcut for saying “Sri Sri Sri Sri Sri”—“saint” to the fifth power.

  I craned my neck for a look at the Corvette’s rear bumper, imagining how refreshing it would be to see some hint at humor, any indication of a personality behind the royal mask, expressed with a cunning bumper sticker like “Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost” or “My Other Vehicle is Garuda.”

  “Yes, As a Matter of Fact, I Do Own the Whole Goddamn Road!”

  “I’d Rather Be Counting My Money”

  “Kings Give a Royal Fuck.”

  Needless to say, there was nothing on the bumper but brightly polished chrome.

  As the procession zipped out of sight, I was struck by an unnerving coincidence: His Royal Highness bore an uncanny resemblance to my cousin Scott, a certified public accountant living in Deer Park, Long Island.

  The strangely un-Nepali silence returned for a split second; then it disintegrated. Traffic flooded the street, horns blasted, and Durbar Marg regressed to its natural state of pandemonium.

  There were a couple of collectors at the Depot when we arrived. Nancy looked around in a panic and heaved an audible sigh of relief when she spied the little Buddha still meditating contentedly on its shelf. The moment the other customers—our sworn rivals—left, she glanced at Aryal. He nodded, removed the statue from its place, and brought it over to show us.

  It was tiny, but absolutely exquisite, with a little ruby set into its urna. And the piece, Aryal assured us with a twinkle in his eye, was by the hand of Sidhi Raj himself. It had to be, he explained, because this was not a cast piece at all. It had been executed in repoussé: a technique that involves painstakingly hammering a sheet of copper into a finely sculpted mold. Considered the hallmark of an expert metal smith, repoussé, is a one-person job; no twelve-year-olds need apply. And, of course, this astral level of expertise was reflected by the statue’s truly lavish price tag.

  The first time Nancy had seen this piece, she had scrutinized it for nearly an hour, making every attempt to weigh its attributes against its flaws. Most of the “flaws,” I soon discovered, were unavoidable; they were a function of the process of repoussé, itself. On closer inspection, though, they did seem a bit iffy; the hand had a rather paddle-like look, for sure, and there was a clumsy, scar-like seam showing down the back. There was also, needless to say, the size factor. If the statue had been any smaller, you could have worn it around your neck.

  And so I found myself, once again, undertaking a process at which I was quickly becoming an expert: searching for points of irritation in an image of the Buddha.

  Nancy and I argued the issue back and forth, rocking from one position to the other like elephants caught in a mire. Finally we reached a total impasse. The statue was great, it had its problems, the detail was fabulous, the seam was showing, the expression was celestial, the price was astronomical, and hey! How did we even know that it was by Sidhi Raj?

  Aryal must have been anticipating this very thought. He picked up the statue, turned it upside down, and squinted at the bottom as if noticing it for the first time. Then he beckoned us forward.

  “Look.”

  He pointed toward the edge of the oval of copper that sealed the statue’s base. Were my eyes deceiving me? No; there it was, eminently readable and rendered in the unmistakable flowing script of the Nepali language. One word, etched awkwardly into the metal:r />
  “Sidhi”

  The Buddha was signed!

  “Incredible,” I said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day. What do you say, Nancy?

  “Nance?”

  But she was in a trance—signing away her travelers’ checks like lightning.

  11

  Now that Nancy had her heart’s desire, there was no particular reason for her to hang around in dusty, noisy Kathmandu. She and Rick, deciding they needed a little vacation, set off post-haste for Royal Chitwan National Park—a steamy jungle preserve full of leopard, deer and rhinoceros, deep in the Terai Desert of southern Nepal—leaving me with a wad o’ cash, and no likely prospects in sight. I shopped alone, accompanied only by a mounting sense of pressure. Prices continued to soar. Meanwhile, dozens of Japanese dealers combed the streets of Kathmandu, sometimes buying out entire galleries in one fell swoop.

  There was a place right down the block from Hanuman Dhoka—the old Palace Square—across the street from what had once, in days of yore, been Kathmandu’s only one-hour color lab. My eyes wandered over the neatly ordered row of statues in the window. Hmm. . . .

  The interior of the shop was filled with glass cabinets, their insides painted sea green. A long-handled feather duster leaned against the wall. The sowji himself was fast asleep, lounging on a pile of cushions behind a display case full of earrings. A massive gold wristwatch hung loosely on his dangling wrist, like a bracelet. An uncanny sixth sense awakened him just as I was about to sneak back out the door. He swung into sitting position, cleared his throat with a horrible, retching gurgle, turned slightly to his left, and spat expertly out the door. He then unfolded a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, fixed them on his nose, and faced me with a severe, scholarly eye.

  “You are looking for something?”

  “Yes. . . .”