MY LEGS ACHE from the long hours of sitting cross-legged. Before lunch the yoga teacher has been taking us all – several children too – through exercises to combat this, in the gompa those first days of rain, and now out on the grass. I’ve started looking forward fiercely to this hour of stretch-and-sweat in the noon sun. We lie on rugs, stripping off layers of clothing. The young man next to me stripped naked today and glistened like a brown snake fluidly from pose to pose, until he lay still in the Plough, on his back with his legs swung over and his feet touching the grass behind his head: damp-skinned, black-haired, his soft genitalia dusky.
The Rinpoche’s wife has left – gone back to her job in Canada; he goes back next week.
P, the French monk, leads the afternoon meditation. Halfway through he rings the bell for walking, then we sit again. The walking meditation is a preternaturally slow prowl clockwise round the walls, past the fireplace, the throne, the window, the door…A shuffling of slow socks round and round.
Out of the gompa P is voluble, a great talker and laugher, eager to communicate the Dharma at all times. While some of the retreaters enjoy it, others are antagonised by this amount of fervour. Above all, he is driven to expound Shunyata – Emptiness. Some child tipped a soup bowl over on the table at lunch and whoever was nearest leaped up to avoid a lapful, with an ‘Oh, ssshit –’
‘– Ssshunyata!’ interposed G deftly and got his laugh – P’s the loudest.
I listen, I take notes and read them. Much of it is abstruse and recondite, the terminology confusing and, I suspect, inaccurate – Sanscrit into Tibetan into English…Samsara, Shunyata, the Three Bodies, the Five Aggregates, the Four Noble Truths. I find the thread only to lose it, and find it again in a sudden image, aware as I must be all the time that, as Shelley said, ‘The deep truth is imageless’.
(Peter Handke’s narrator on Emptiness:
The word was equivalent to the invocation of the Muse at the beginning of an epic. It provoked not a shudder but lightness and joy, and presented itself as a law: As it is now, so shall it be. In terms of image, it was a shallow river crossing.
Peter Handke: Across)
The Path is the Practice. Not theory. Practice.
Gary Snyder again:
Practice simply is one intensification of what is natural and around us all of the time. Practice is to life as poetry is to spoken language. So as poetry is the practice of language, ‘practice’ is the practice of life. But from the enlightened standpoint, all of language is poetry, all of life is practice. At any time when the attention is there fully, all of the Bodhisattva’s acts are being done.
SATURDAY: All morning newcomers kept pulling up in the gravel, here for the Amitayus Initiation, which bestows health and long life.
For hours the Rinpoche chanted what sounded like Aboriginal chants, preparing in the gompa while we sat in the sun among the ginkgo saplings or walked in the bush picking flowers for an offering. He ran between two lines of us and, waiting with a jug, poured water into our hands with which to purify our hands and mouths before entering the gompa (shoes gaped far and wide in the sun – no more do we cower, cramming them in under the dripping step). The ceremony was long, the visualisations of the Buddha elaborate and difficult to hold. Finally one by one we went before the Rinpoche and bowed while he chanted and touched each forehead with the vase of the nectar of bliss. Nectar (milk) was passed round in a bowl for a finger to be dipped in and sucked; then came a ‘pill’ each; laughing, he said here a blackberry would have to do. We each went forward and bowed, offering whatever we had brought – a bunch of ragwort, a white prayer-scarf, a jewel – and received a red thread to tie round our necks and wear day and night from now on, till it frays off.
After a lot of frenzied group-work on a little generator, the Rinpoche’s slide show went ahead in the gompa: he showed us his family, nomads who breed yaks in the crags of Eastern Tibet, near where the Mekong rises. (The Mekong in the Land of Snows!) Even the children ride tough mountain ponies there, he said. He misses that; he has been promised a horse to ride tomorrow. He had slides of Sera Monastery also. He had been greeted with joy, after his many years of exile.
SUNDAY: Today every neck has a red thread round it. At the door of the bathhouse I met L coming out, smiling, her wet eyes slit against the sun, a towel wrapped round her: her blond neck looked delicately ringbarked by her thread, the knot in it a drop of blood.
On this last morning, the Rinpoche compared the detached mind observing itself to a sun with no clouds; a slow fish in water; a bird leaving no footprints in the air.
We were getting to Emptiness. (Two days ago someone asked, When are we getting to Emptiness? Patience first! he was answered.) We were at the non-self of the person: ‘I’ is not my form, feeling, perception, mental formation, consciousness…‘I’, the meditator, am empty: who is looking for the ‘I’? Now someone asked: If there is no ‘I’ in me or in others, if all being is empty, why are we striving to achieve Compassion? Emptiness is real, he was answered, and Suffering is also real. Nor are others ‘Other’…
‘It amounts to this,’ G said at the end. ‘We came all this way – for Nothing!’
We all laughed. ‘Yes, yes!’ said the Rinpoche, ‘but – who’s “we”?’
The Rinpoche held a children’s ceremony this afternoon. They meditated for one minute, then had question time. He knew their names. Finally each one was called to the altar and given a candle to light from the altar candles and place on the more and more crowded little table in front of the other one with the Buddha images, the seven bowls, the red torma cake that looks like a pile of Greek tarama on a bowl of raw rice, the incense sticks in rice.
The Spanish baby lama who has just been recognised as the reincarnation, the tulku, of Lama Yeshe lights candles, the Rinpoche says, gives prayer-scarves, puts his hands on heads in blessing and sometimes pulls the hair. He can light incense and do prostrations. Sometimes he jumps around and knocks things over. When they showed him Lama Yeshe’s stupa, which contains his ashes, he hugged it most lovingly; he responds warmly to old friends of Lama Yeshe’s. Sometimes he objects to putting on his robes – he wants to go naked.
All the same, the Rinpoche said, perhaps it’s sad for him to have been recognised so young and set apart and trained so rigorously. He himself was a child tulku.
At the monastery school – he laughed – a child is chosen ‘Bodhisattva of the week’…(We all laughed too. Of course, this is charming. But wrong motivation – like children persuaded by Roman Catholic nuns to go without sweets and to feel virtuous for having mortified the flesh.)
The parents of the dead girl have two living daughters, one just walking. They all went to the stupa today. The girls twined their arms around it in the sunlight, their hair a white dazzle.
The Rinpoche came down to the farmhouse in jeans and tee-shirt in the early evening for his ride. The fat mare that grazes in the hollow was brought up and saddled and he trotted and cantered around and around the paddock. So did P tentatively, his plum-red robes trailing; so did G, recklessly, and was thrown in the long grass as if dumped by a wave – not hurt, he said.
Hardly anyone is left here now. The last of us leave tomorrow. A woman is playing guitar by the fire downstairs and singing.
MONDAY: We three interstate remnants who are left went to P’s guru puja early this morning. After breakfast I offered to help him move his things back from the gompa room to the A-frame hut in the bush. The narrow window beside his bed – beside his pillow – looks out on the lake of white trees. He showed me his mala of 108 beads, every one a tiny skull carved out of yak bone. We promised to keep in touch.
The plane, delayed for hours by a thunderstorm, plunged and wallowed like a boat across Bass Strait while the passengers screamed, and laughed, gulping beer from cans. There are worse deaths, I thought; most deaths are worse. But it wouldn’t have looked good for Amitayus. I made a chaotic re-entry into my old life, there under the battered slate roof in Faraday Street, with a bit of help from my friend. I couldn’t wait to get back to the coast.
Once here, walking gratefully down the metal staircase again and hearing the sea breathe and smelling its salt skin: I realised then how much I missed having it beside me – its taken-for-granted everpresence – while I was in the valley. The lake only looks like the sea; its smell is that of inland water, and its voice.
The grapevine at Faraday Street is huddled yellowing in its corner, but here, in a great shaggy tangle of jasmine all along the fence and over on to the trees next door, the grapevine is green, brown, yellow, crimson – the leaves spread larger than webbed hands.
Now that I’m back I think I might put aside work on ‘Red Fishes’ for a story set at the retreat. The lake, the gompa, above all the lotus window – the physical setting in its silent stillness to be emblematic, a mandala. The main character will be a monk, a European but not P – a very different man, detached, solemn and remote. He will encounter and be disturbed by an irreverent young couple. The encounter = the story.
With a letter and a book of my stories that he’d asked for, I sent to P in his hut a copy of Rilke’s ‘Buddha in der Glorie’ and the haiku I wrote in the gompa.
by a lake of dead white trees.
Wheeling flies sing Om.
Is there a jewel
in the lotus? A crystal
clear drop of water.
Mist, trees round the lake,
corpses of drowned trees mirrored
are gone, wind-gathered.
I dyed my eggs for Easter. I still do this each year. Some cracked in the boiling water and will be veined inside, a branching of crimson over the white skin. They dried a rich dark tamarillo red, glossy once I polished them with oil.
J’s father died before dawn on Anzac day. She was in the armchair beside him at the hospital, as she had promised him she would be.
She came down here on Friday, at sunset. We walked down the metal steps and along to the lighthouse, slowly, because she had trouble breathing. We stopped to rest. On the cliff above Yellowtail Rock we sat circled by mosquitoes. Her hand shook, holding her cigarette. She stayed nine days and nights at the hospital, not sleeping properly for all that time. She has nightmares when she does get to sleep.
The morning of the funeral (Wednesday) began overcast and ended in thick rain. J in her black clothes went up and read from Isaiah, though not the earthy King James Version in my grandfather’s Crimea Lodge copy. (The Bible my mother made me accept as my fourteenth birthday present I got rid of long ago, lost it, threw it away.)
And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.
And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations.
He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces…
Outside the church afterwards family and friends stood bunched up, at a loss, released into sudden awkward talk. By the time the cars reached the cemetery it was drumming rain, and mist hung in the shaggy gum trees. We waited for nearly an hour until a priest arrived – there had been some slip-up – and bustled through the service. The grave was oozing and puddling mud. A desolation.
Looking up Isaiah in my mother’s father’s Bible, I dislodged a negative that she must have put there for safekeeping, between the black endpapers: of me in my pram in the garden at the old house.
At last – ‘Epitaphios’ is accepted.
The story about the monk is starting to take shape: ‘A Drop of Water’ is its name – from my haiku about the jewel in the lotus in the gompa window. A viable story, yes, I feel it in my bones: it will end my two-year drought.
The knowledge that Eastern doctrines propose to us is not transmissible in formulas or reasonings. Truth is an experience and each one must attempt it on his own. Doctrine shows us the way, but no one can travel it for us. That is why meditation techniques are so important. Learning is not the accumulation of knowledge, but the attuning of body and spirit. Meditation does not teach us anything, except to forget everything we have been taught and to renounce all knowledge. After these trials, we know less but we are lighter; we can begin our journey and face the vertiginous and empty look of truth. Many centuries before Hegel affirmed the final equivalence between absolute nothing and complete being, the Upanishads had defined states of emptiness as instants of communion with being: ‘The highest state is reached when the five instruments of knowing remain quiet and joined together in the mind and the mind does not move.’ [Katha Upanishad]…The ultimate identity between man and the world, consciousness and being, being and existence, is man’s most ancient belief and the root of science and religion, magic and poetry. All our endeavours are aimed at finding the old path, the forgotten way of communication between both worlds. Our search tends to rediscover or to verify the universal correspondence of opposites, reflection of their original identity. Inspired by this principle, the Tantric systems conceive the body as a metaphor or image of the cosmos. Sense centers are knots of energy, confluences of stellar, sanguineous, nervous currents. Each one of the postures of embracing bodies is the sign of a zodiac ruled by the triple rhythm of sap, blood, and light…
Octavio Paz: The Bow and the Lyre (My italics)
The human body is the best picture of the human soul. Ludwig Wittgenstein
I listened again to the tape of my parents’ voices, that D brought me when she visited last year, having kept it since we sent it to her in Athens in the late sixties. (D and I had grown up in the same street, in and out of each other’s houses: little girls in the sun in prams, on swings, on top of a pumpkin crop. Our mothers had been best friends until hers died young, of leukemia, just before this trip to Europe. She and I were writing to each other then, her letters to describe her travels, mine to enclose progressive attempts at a translation of the Axion Esti the untranslatable great poem…) We had each recorded a stilted little message, Mum and Dad, Chris and I, and filled up the tape with Theodorakis songs gone tinny and quavery now, but they were contraband treasure in those days of the Junta and D was overjoyed. But the voices! Mum and Dad introduced themselves as Auntie Til and Uncle Colin, then carefully read what they had written down. I remember the day clearly, the four of us sitting in the lamplight, Dad delicately handling spools of tape. (No one else was allowed.) But to my amazement and pain, nothing about their voices was familiar to me.
Since then, playing it over and over, I have thought, yes, I recognise them. Yes, of course. A trick of the mind? – like ‘remembering’ incidents of one’s early childhood that have become often-repeated family myths? I played the tape to Taki, and to H. Yet Mum died only nine years ago; Dad, fourteen. Fading, unwinding; being unmade.
The poetic experience is a revelation of our original condition. And that revelation is always resolved into a creation: the creation of our selves. The revelation does not uncover something external, but rather the act of uncovering involves the creation of that which is going to be uncovered: our own being. And in this sense it can indeed be said…that the poet creates being. Because being is not something given, but something that is made…
Poetry requires no special talent but rather a kind of spiritual daring, an unbinding that is also an unwinding.
Poetry opens up to us the possibility of being that is intrinsic in every birth; it re-creates man and makes him assume his true condition, which is not the dilemma: life or death, but a totality: life and death in a single instant of incandescence.
After creation, the poet is alone; now it is others, the readers, who are going to create themselves in re-creating the poem. The experience is repeated, but in reverse: the image opens up to the reader and shows him its translucent abyss…
Octavio Paz: The Bow and the Lyre (my italics)
Yes. Splash…
Old pond,
leap-splash –
a frog.
Basho (1644–94)
ON BASHO’S ‘FROG’
Under the cloudy cliff, near the temple door,
Between dusky spring plants on the pond,
A frog jumps in the water, plop!
Startled, the poet drops his brush.
Sengai (1750–1837)
(Frog-splash. The German word gets it all-in-one: Frosch.)
Now the sticky new little leaves on the broken hibiscus are all sooty with aphids.
Mist – a stiffening of density in the air, like an egg beginning to poach – a frill, a lace lifting, a pallor – the earth the yolk inside it, veiled, unveiled as the waters of space move in the sun’s heat, light.
H’s walnuts: shrivelled black purses like prunes, passionfruit – when they split they show the clean brown brain-shells inside.
May Sarton in her Journal of a Solitude: ‘It occurs to me that boredom and panic are the two devils the solitary must combat.’
Today I made three jars of red quince jam.