To a Mountain in Tibet(13)
‘You know this is a mountain of great power. To travel there multiplies merit. The Buddha often flew there with his followers. And spiritual treasure-seekers meditated there –thousands of them–so its caves are full of blessing.’ Sometimes I cannot decide whether he is a sage or a child. And often his words are drowned by the pounding drums beneath us. ‘People walk around the mountain to cleanse their evil, the ten seats of sin. Yes, they may also come because they want things, perhaps success in some business, perhaps they have too many daughters and want a son…’
After a while, when the sound below subsides, he gets up and we descend to the prayer hall. The monks are dispersing in flocks of crimson and saffron, and the temple darkens.
He takes me round a dim confusion. The avenue of low pews, where the monks had sat among cushions and bells, leads to the painted skeleton of a great altar. It rises in tiers of bright artefacts: offerings in barley dough and wax, guttering butter-lamps and bowls of water, plastic flowers, monstrances, peacock feathers, topped by photographs of prestigious lamas in ceremonial crowns and dark glasses. Above these again a huge gilded Buddha, draped unrecognisably in golden cloth, gazes from his halo with a smile of exalted absence. The abbot, patient and soft-voiced, guides me along the walls, identifying statues of other Buddhas and teachers, goddesses and multiple bodhisattvas, the blessed ones who postpone their own nirvana for the salvation of the world. In this proliferating pantheon, often elusive to me, the deities may reappear in different aspects or emanations of themselves. Their arms and faces divide and multiply in the dark. Often they turn feral and demonic. They hold up gems and lotuses, rosaries and thunderbolts, and stare into nothing. They are not only gods, but incarnate ideas. Their gestures are a cryptic language. Here divinity is protean and fluid. It manifests in bestial fury, female pity; it wears a smile of compassion and a garland of skulls. The abbot leads me falteringly on. But often I can discern no more than the gilded hand of a body obscured by votive scarves, or the plaster grimace of a demon. Most of the images are so coarsely moulded that I cannot imagine any sanctity or meaning in them.
The doors close behind us, dimming the last light. I am uneasily aware of walking among a revered army whose evolution the Buddha would have condemned. The Buddhism that Tibet first received in the seventh century–more than a thousand years after the death of its founder–was already rich in these alternately beautiful and grotesque offspring. Moreover the faith created its Tibetan bridgehead in the isolated kingdom of Shang-shung, near Mount Kailas, and in those bitter plateaux encountered a swarm of chthonic gods and spirits who violently coloured it. Then, over the coming centuries, the richly evolved Mahayana tradition of northern India infused the whole land, bringing with it a generous field of salvation and a host of variegated Buddhas, bodhisattvas and Hindu deities in disguise.
Of this inclusive pantheon the figures around me are descendants. Here is Chenresig, the Tibetan form of Avalokitesvara, whose incarnation is the Dalai Lama. He is the all-seeing lord of compassion, whose myriad arms burst like a peacock’s tail behind him, each hand pierced with an eye. The abbot points out the god’s offspring, Drolma, the kindly goddess of pity and fertility, and several obscure incarnations of Padmasambhava, Tibet’s patron saint.
In these, and the figures crowding round them, the austere origins of Buddhism are transformed. What was once a rigorous, agnostic philosophy, in which karma persisted through countless generations, has evolved into the promise of swift, esoteric systems of liberation, guiding saviours. It was in Tibet that tantric Buddhism reached its apogee, initiating its devotees into practices that enabled them to bypass the toilsome cycle of worldly reincarnations and enter nirvana in a lifetime’s leap.
His monastery, the abbot says, belongs to the sect of Nyingma, the Ancient Ones, who claim their origins in Tibet’s oldest Buddhism. They are followers, above all, of tantric ritual and contemplation, and at the end the abbot leads me, as if in challenge, to two statues in towering embrace. Here is the white-painted Buddha Vajrasattva–shiny, crude, abstract. In his circling arms clings a sinuous consort, her legs hooked around his waist, their loins intermeshed. This is not sex as humans know it, but a marriage of symbols. They suggest eternal orgasm. Their nudity is glorified by bangles and tiaras. Her mouth is raised to his impersonal lips in an exalted offering of life.
The abbot says: ‘This is the union of nothing and compassion.’
‘Nothing?’
‘The god is nothing. He realises nothingness.’ The abbot is voicing the insistent wisdom of the Mahayana: the assertion that phenomena do not in themselves exist, that all is relative, illusion.
‘And she?’
‘She is compassion. She completes him.’
Such figures of carnal bliss generate many interpretations, and among advanced adepts their visualisation, even their enactment, may achieve a mystic dissolution on the path to Buddhahood. Sometimes compassion is attributed to the man, and wisdom–flashing insight–to the woman. Often she is conceived as his shakti, his embodied energy, entwining the god who created her.
There are married lamas, the abbot says, who follow this sexual path, but not in his monastery. In the past, tantric extremes were often the way of solitary yogis, but in the monasteries the tantra coexists with philosophy and dialectics. However fractured since the golden fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these parallel traditions of logic and lived mysticism endure. On the banked shelves along the temple walls the abbot locates the cloth-enveloped scriptures of the Buddha’s supposed sayings and their commentaries–the Kangyur and the Tengyur–which in old Tibet inspired a vast and subtle literature of metaphysics. Here too are the tantric texts beloved of the abbot’s order. He talks of them with easy affection, while I remain baffled. Who was the primordial Buddha Samantabhadra? What is the Secret Essence Tantra? How to understand the Clear Light of the Great Perfection? They rise from a sacred learning of which barely a fraction has been translated.