To a Mountain in Tibet(14)
Only one element in these secret disciplines is half familiar to me. Forty years ago an old friend, the traveller Freya Stark, had given me a mandala of symmetrically disposed Buddhas on a golden field. She had bought this in Nepal, drawn to its strangeness. To me its cloud-enthroned Buddhas resembled autocratic babies mysteriously afloat; but once perhaps they had accompanied the meditation of a monk or hermit as his private window on salvation.
Classically such mandalas portray a deity seated at the heart of a densely walled palace. The picture acts like a sac-red domain, impermeable to the illusory world outside. Adepts often use the mandala to focus on the deity with whom they strive to identify. Jung thought it a healing archetype of the unconscious. Other adepts use it more lightly as an aide-memoir. Still others systematically imagine their mandala to be centred on Mount Meru or Kailas, the spine of the world, and their own bodies aligned with the mountain too, drawing down power from above.
In the temple porch the abbot points out a muralled mandala whose archetype was designed in legend by the Buddha himself. ‘This is the original, the Wheel of Becoming. You see it is turned by the god of death, Yama. And in the centre…people falling.’
I stare up. Around the axis of this great spoked disc, an arc of humans is climbing toward nirvana or catapulting down to hell. At their core, isolated on the wheel’s hub, I make out the tableau of a serpent, a cockerel and a pig biting each other’s tails.
‘These are the poisons at the world’s heart,’ the abbot says. ‘The snake-one is anger, the pig-one is ignorance, the cock is desire. You see…’
I see that in the rest of the wheel all mortality is going about its business: conversing, acquiring, making love. Only the Buddha stands outside the circle, pointing to the moon in sign of liberation. But his nirvana, of course, cannot be depicted; even the hell at the wheel’s base looks schematic and unlikely; and the lives of those trapped on this earthly roundabout appear innocent, sometimes a little comic. If the artist was trying to suggest suffering, he seems to have lost heart. The animals that represent brutishness stand tranquil as if in paradise, and the gods–who will come to grief in time–are enjoying themselves in the interim.
I ask the abbot what monk or layman painted this schema. (The role of the painter in Tibetan life is as disputed as most else.)
‘Painting is a tradition among our monks,’ he says. ‘An old man who fled with the Dalai Lama taught it here, but went away to meditate in a cave near Kermi, and died there. He had already taught a disciple, but that monk left for Simikot’–he smiles forgivingly–‘and went into business. But he in turn had taught two others…’
‘And who painted the Wheel of Becoming?’
‘I’m not sure.’ The abbot’s clear brows knit for a second, then he laughs. ‘But I think it was the businessman.’
On the track beyond the monastery I come upon two memorial towers in rough stone. I peer through the narrow openings into their core, cluttered with pebbles and dust. Here relatives place a little rice or even a fleck of gold, or insert paper mantras to Drolma, the goddess of compassion. Deep inside I see the tiny cones moulded out of clay and a pounded fragment of bone from whoever is remembered here.
In these valleys, where bodies are burned or fed to vultures, the vanishment of the dead seems utter. Only the rare turret or stupa of some revered lama makes a gesture at remembrance. But when I ask a group of passing monks about the towers–when were they built, who do they commemorate?–they do not know. And why would they care, who have been taught the transience of things?
As they walk on, I wonder at them, their lightness, their lack of need. They might already have passed through a painless, premature death. They have shed what others shed in dying. They will leave nothing material behind them to be divided, claimed or loved. Their dispossession strikes me as at once freedom, and a poignant depletion. Their buoyant laughter follows me up the valley, but I do not quite envy them. I only wonder with a muffled pang what it would be in the West to step outside the chain of bequeathal and inheritance, as they do, until human artefacts mean nothing at all.
My feet slow on the trail. But my memories come too hard for quiet thought. With the death of a last parent, material things–old correspondence, a dilapidated house, a pair of slippers–emerge like orphans to enshrine the dead. My mother threw away nothing. Her drawers spilt out letters, diaries, documents, photos, fifty, seventy, eighty years old, with the stacked correspondence of my father, my dead sister, my nurse, even my nurse’s mother. For months the papers lie piled, waiting. They grow huge with delayed sadness. How to decide what is to survive, what is to perish? The value of things no longer belongs to cost or beauty, but only to memory. The chipped and faded teacup is more precious than the silver tray that nobody used. And the letters bring confusion. Sometimes what was written for a day echoes in your head as if for ever. Every one discarded sounds a tiny knell of loss. The past drops away into the waste-paper basket and oblivion, and in this monstrous disburdening, grief returns you to a kind of childish dependence. You sift and preserve (for whom?) and cling to trivia. You have become the guardian of their past, even its recreator.
I had planned to burn my parents’ love letters, then find I cannot. Instead I start to read, guiltily, fearfully, as if testing water. I have an idea that they should survive, placed in some archive, perhaps to flow at last unmoored into history. I tie them with new rubber bands–the old ones have corroded over the envelopes–and stack them away, I do not know for what. This, I suppose, is how once-private things endure: not by intention, but because their extinction is unbearable. So I dither between keeping and destroying–both seem like betrayal–and I store the letters, in all their devotion, their longing and sometimes loneliness, until another time.