1. religion and spirituality
2. buddhism

The Shadow That
Never Leaves Us
Robert L. Fisher
2014
Bali
nce upon a time, Indian culture was spread over a much wider
territory than it is today. It extended into Pakistan and Afghanistan
(as evidenced by the Bamyan Buddhas until the Taliban dynamited
them) and most of Central Asia, right up to the borders of China.
Tibet was an extension of India to the northeast, and to the southeast, as their
names suggest, Indonesian (Greek for Indian Islands) and Indo-China). From
Burma to Thailand and Laos, to Indonesia and Cambodia, and even to
Mindanao in the south of The Philippines were to be found Sanskrit
inscriptions. In all these areas the prevailing religion was Hinduism,
O
2
followed by the many schools of Buddhism. Even today mainland Southeast
Asia is Buddhist, and one island, Bali, has remained Hindu in an Islamic
archipelago. Still today Indonesians have Sanskrit names and their arts ―
dance, shadow puppets, wood carving, textiles and music ― are distinctly
Indian.
Den Pasar is where most tourists land, and in fact most tourists, many
of them Australian, stay there to enjoy the beaches and night life. But for me
Den Pasar was a place to leave as fast I could find transportation to Ubud, a
small town in the mountains of Bali where the native arts were preserved,
and ironically, kept alive by tourism.
If it were not for the tourists very likely the rows of little ateliers of
wood carvers and makers of musical instruments would not long survive.
In those days Ubud was very small and visited only by those tourists
who had an interest in seeing genuine Balinese culture. I stayed at a familyrun “hotel” that consisted of a series of rooms with thatched rooves arranged
along the sides of a large courtyard. In the tropics everything is done more or
less outside. There are no windows. The kitchen was in plain view with
children and chickens running about the women chopping vegetables and
cooking rice. Even later, when I visited a batik factory, I saw a set of flimsy,
open-sided sheds in which women, many of them smoking cigarettes
perfumed with cinnamon, chatted and took frequent breaks as they ironed
patterns onto cotton fabrics.
I still recall it today, that smell of cinnamon and cloves in the
cigarettes, and in the money, everywhere.
Bali is eight degrees below the equator, so every day is twelve hours
of sun and twelve hours of night, and the night comes on very suddenly. As
it grew darker and darker, floating in from somewhere on the steep terraces
of the rice paddies came the eerie sounds of gamelan music ― the little
gongs hit with hammers and above it all the wavering high pitch of bamboo
flutes. I could never pinpoint in that utter rural blackness the origin of the
music. It gave me shivers.
One day I visited a dance class for the local girls. It was not a fulldress rehearsal, so the girls, about twelve to fourteen, even younger, wore
tight, long batik skirts and white cotton blouses. Their long black hair was
tied up. The dancing teacher was an elderly woman, brown as a betel nut,
with skin tight and leathery on her face and arms from decades in the
tropical sun. I thought even then if only I could be that lithe in my seventies.
She danced with the young girls and used a thin cane to touch their bodies
and guide or correct their movements, just as I had seen in India. It was
evident that the girls had already learned a number of the mudras, or hand
3
and eye gestures, that symbolize emotions ― surprise, fear, joy, sadness ―
another inheritance from India.
N another courtyard I saw a complex dance in beautiful costumes, some
of the more frightening ones reminding me of the dances in Tibet,
telling episodes from the great Hindu epics such as the Rāmāyaṇa or the
great battle between the King of the Spirits, Barong, and the evil witch
Queen Rangda. Barong has a leonine appearance, with the huge eyes and
fangs of Balinese iconography. In a great battle
between the forces of Good and Evil, Rangda
uses her black magic to induce the Barong’s
soldiers to kill themselves. We see young men
trying to stab themselves in the chest with their
kris, wavy long knives, pushing so hard that the
blades bend, but Barong casts a counter-spell
that makes their skin impenetrable. It is quite a
sight, the shining blades buckling in the sunlight.
I had heard that in ancient times the dancers
entered a trance that made them invulnerable to
the knife points. In the end, the Barong is
victorious over the forces of disease, famine,
sterility and death.
The terraces of rice paddies are an
engineering marvel. Somehow these level spaces were carved out of the
hillsides with simple tools, then hollowed out and surrounded by mud walls,
and finally flooded. The farmers stand knee-deep in these little ponds
inserting the rice seedlings into the mud. With all the rain and humidity the
countryside is a deep emerald green.
I
4
And it was from some of the farmhouses, hidden from view, that
issued that mysterious music. The fact that farmers were making this music
shows that it has been successfully preserved.
What I found most touching was seeing the metalophones and gongs
played with ordinary carpenter’s hammers. Very much unlike in this fancy
gamelan in a museum in Java:
5
The Balinese dancers, with their gold costumes and headdresses,
moved slowly and sinuously in the light of kerosene lanterns that gave a
dramatic, otherworldly glow and burnished the gold. Their makeup
emphasized their eyes that often moved to the corners as their constantly
curving fingers and elongated nails formed gestures. It was almost as if they
were wearing the light. Almost as if they were wearing the music.
6
T night, at night in Indonesia, everything is mysterious, everything
is a portal to an unseen world. I have never experienced this
anywhere else in the world. I went to a shadow puppet play that
began in the early evening. The characters in the story, again taken
from episodes in the many Indian epics, were carved into hard, flat pieces of
water buffalo hide. These wayang kulit figures were affixed to sticks and
placed against a white sheet, behind which were the ever-present kerosene
lanterns. The audience saw the ornate profiles of the familiar characters, who
spoke in high, stylized voices supplied by the puppet master. Behind the
sheet I saw a man sitting cross-legged, holding several wayang kulit figures
while doing any number of male and female voices. The lanterns hissed,
dogs wandered
around and
children popped
up here and
there in the
whitest light I
have ever seen.
A
Java
7
nd then there is Java, a long skinny island, even then the most
populous island in the world (its population today is almost exactly
double of when I was there), home to Jakarta, the capital and
typical sprawling Third-World megalopolis of ten million. Java is
the heart of Indonesia, rich in history and it is the Javanese, constituting half
the population of Indonesia, who dominate the nation. Jakarta was a place I
wanted to avoid, the kind of place where at the airport your luggage
disappears, but magically reappears when you pay a “tip”.
But I flew from Den Pasar to Jogyakarta, a short flight on a small
plane where the passengers were served a sandwich in a white cardboard
A
8
box. The stewardess walked down the aisle dragging a green garbage bag
into which she threw the empty boxes.
I remember the flat farmland from which arose a volcano, Mount
Merapi, about 10,000 ft or 3,000m, almost a symbol of the realities of
Indonesian landscape, indeed of many Pacific islands whose populations live
on top of these vents from which molten lava could erupt at any moment. In
Indonesia I always felt this archipelago and its people were just the western
extreme of that far-flung, thinly peopled chain of mountain tops peeking out
of the ocean whose eastern extreme was Hawai’i.
Jogyakarta is home to the classical Javanese dance, the dance of the
court and therefore more refined and elegant, more sober and restrained than
the dance of Bali.
9
The magnificent ninth-century Buddhist stupa (monument) of
Borobudur is only about 40 km northwest of Jogyakarta. In ancient times
both of Buddhism’s major divisions, Hinayana and Mahayana, not only
lived side by side, but at any given time monks from both of these “vehicles”
shared monasteries. Their differences were and have remained merely ones
of emphasis, with no hint of the heresies that have plagued Christianity and
Islam. Nowadays Southeast Asia is almost exclusively Hinayana, while
Northern Asia follows the Mahayana. But Borobudur is a Mahayana site.
It rains most days, but the sun comes out quickly and dries up most
traces of the precipatation. The day I visited Borobudur it had just stopped
raining and the monument, as large as a small town, was still wet, darkening
10
the stones. In each of the many bell-shaped stupas is a statue of a seated
Buddha. It is hard to imagine that this thousand-year-old monument was,
despite its grand scale, once covered in volcanic ash and overgrown with
jungle, almost completely erased from popular knowledge. It was first the
British, under Raffles, and later the Dutch who took a keen interest in
Borobudur, cleared it of its debris and jungle, and carefully restored it. Even
as I roamed about its passages and statues this huge monument was being
repaired by UNESCO. Each stone was given a unique number, and then
stacked by cranes in great piles, to be reassembled later. (It was again
covered in ash by the volcanic eruption of Mount Merapi in 2010, but has
now been restored.)
Another glory of Borobudur is its stone reliefs that depict scenes from
Buddhist sutras and everyday life in Java of the seventh century, including a
ship with outriggers, of the type familiar to most people from the Hawai’ians.
Also portrayed in the reliefs are the stories of the Buddha’s past lives, his
birth as a prince, and the law of karma.
Tens of thousands of man-hours ― grading the mound, building a
drainage system, maneuvering enormous blocks of stone, carving many
hundreds of bas-reliefs and hundreds more of statues, all this devotion and
zeal ― very nearly lost to volcanism and the jungle. It reminded me of
11
Basho’s haiku when he visited a battlefield, still strewn with the armor of
brave warriors and generals:
How piteous!
Under the helmet
a cricket.
Thailand
12
Y next stop was Bangkok, another Third-World megalopolis,
now fourteen million, with the distinction of hopeless gridlock.
More than once I abandoned my taxi and just walked ― it was
faster. The temples and palaces of Bangkok are a fairyland
gleaming in bright sun. People believe they can gain merit towards a better
rebirth by gilding temples with gold leaf. As a result, many stupas and
temples are dazzling, while yet others are richly decorated with pieces of cut
glass of various colors, sparkling in the brilliant light.
Walking around in tropical heat and humidity is enervating, and the
inescapable din of traffic and hawkers is maddening. My only refuge was to
visit restaurant patios in hotels or in quiet courtyards, where I would order
fresh papaya or other fruit. The colors and textures and aromas of the fruit,
many of which I had never seen before, were endless. The fruits were more
refreshing than any drink.
M
13
The Hill Tribes
14
ut it is best not to dally in Bangkok and so I headed to the far
northwest corner of Thailand, the infamous opium-producing
Golden Triangle, near the borders of Burma and Laos. This is where
Chiang Mai is located, and where my first teacher of Sanskrit lived,
Udom Warotamasikkadit, then a professor at the university. Unfortunately I
was not able to find him, even with local help. But another reason for fleeing
Bangkok was to visit the various hill tribes living in the mountains near
Chiang Mai.
Getting there was not a comfortable journey. The “roads” were mere
ruts in the hillsides between patches of jungle. The Land Rover bucked and
B
15
swayed so violently I thought the fillings in my teeth were about to be
knocked loose. In time, however, I reached the first of a series of villages.
The houses were built on stilts, apparently to avoid being flooded in diluvial
rains, and also to provide a storage area or a pig sty. A jolly French tourist
and I stood watching the pigs rooting for food, and I said to him that they
reminded me of Obélix, who whenever he felt “a little faint” would eat a
boar. He laughed and said he had been thinking exactly the same thing. The
children in the village loved this Frenchmen, who had them all sing La
Marseillaise with almost no accent whatsoever. What a comical sight, these
children in their headdresses and exotic ornaments singing this patriotic song
as if General De Gaulle were on a state visit. If you gave the children a few
bat they would gladly entertain you with their
own native songs.
In some villages the women, even the
young ones, wore around their throats a stack of
silver rings that had the effect of stretching the
length of their necks, presumably to make them
more attractive. I always felt sorry for traditional
peoples that deformed their bodies in some way,
for example some American Indians put a board
behind an infant’s head to make it flat, and even I
saw elderly women with earrings so heavy that
16
the holes in their earlobes were distended down to their shoulders. Seeing
them is a good counterargument to cultural relativism.
Nepal
17
he little Royal Nepal Airlines turboprop lifted us over the mountains
T
18
and jungles of mysterious, hidden Burma, which in those days was closed to
the outside world. Below us flowed the Salween River and the Irrawady, and
beneath us lay the exotic city of Mandalay “where the dawn comes up like
thunder”, then across the easternmost state of India, Assam, and finally into
Nepal where our plane slowly spiraled around the steep mountains, which
were covered with terraced farms and became greener as we descended,
until we abruptly dived down to a short runway that ended at a cliff. I
blessed the skill of the pilots.
When our plane had neared the Himalayas the stewardess asked me if
I would like to go to the cockpit and talk to the pilots, something utterly
unthinkable today. It was a thrilling experience to see what the pilots saw:
the panorama of sky and mountain, and below the windshield the dials and
gauges of dozens of instruments whose needles registered altitude, air speed,
fuel level, all the vital signs of our aircraft. The captain pointed out Mt
Everest and some other peaks, giving their names in Nepali.
In those days Kathmandu was an informal place, where you could get
a visa at the airport for a small fee, and select any one of a dozen touts who
were extolling the virtues of their little hotels. I was traveling at the time
with a huge suitcase, and yet no customs official anywhere had ever paid it
the slightest attention. The hotel turned out to be right in the very center of
Kathmandu, a rather dusty and rundown town in a valley surrounded by tall
peaks. A little boy grabbed the huge suitcase and insisted on carrying it up
the rickety stairs to my room on the second floor. I could not believe how he
put it on his back like a Sherpa and scooted up the stairs. He was so proud of
himself, standing in front of the door with a brilliant smile.
The ruling house of Nepal is of Bengali, and therefore Hindu, origin,
and the population is overwhelmingly (80%) Hindu. Nevertheless, the
Buddha was born in Nepal, in what is now a UNESCO world heritage site,
in the town of Lumbini, a good six-hour drive from Katmandu. Yet I felt I
was in a predominantly Buddhist country, judging by the temples and monks
and prayer flags I saw, and the world famous stupas, which must be among
the most photographed monuments on Earth. This particular sect of
Hinduism does not follow the principle of ahimsa ‘nonviolence’ to all living
creatures; therefore, water buffalo are slaughtered by a river. A butcher saw
me photographing the scene and helpfully lifted up a severed buffalo’s head
so I could take a picture of it. He was smiling broadly. But I lowered the
camera and looked away.
19
The hotel was very near to Durbar Square, which contains a number
of Hindu temples, including one to Vishnu. The architecture is all in wooden
beams fitted together, with balconies and elaborately carved windows
covered with lattices. One day I was admiring the carving on the windows of
a narrow back street, when suddenly a latticed window was flung open and a
pretty young woman in a sari appeared on the little balcony. I immediately
reached for my camera, hoping to get this shot before she moved inside
again. Just as I raised my camera to adjust the focus this lovely young
woman placed a finger on the side of her nose and blew snot down into the
alley.
It is thought that the pagoda originated from stupas, domed
monuments that usually contain a relic, for example the one in Sri Lanka
said to hold one of the Buddha’s teeth . From Nepal it spread with Buddhist
missionaries to China and Southeast Asia. One of the most striking features
of Kathmandu is its proliferation of pagodas in the center of the city. They
give Kathmandu a characteristic atmosphere, a feeling that we are on the
edge of Tibet.
20
About 11 km northeast of Kathmandu is a very large stupa (or chörten
in Tibetan), dating from the 6th
century AD. It is the eyes that
are its most striking feature,
mysterious eyes that seem to
follow the onlooker. Each of
the four sides of the tower has
its own set of eyes. Pilgrims
circumambulate the stupa in a
clockwise direction, and as
they walk they give a turn to
the many prayer wheels that
circle the base. With each turn
of the wheel the prayers
written on folded papers inside the cylinder are thought to be said. Each turn
of the wheel earns the pilgrim merit towards a more favorable birth in his
next life. The principle governs the handheld prayer wheels twirled by
monks and pilgrims. Everywhere you see flags on which are printed prayers,
and with each flap of the flag in the wind the prayer is considered to have
been said.
21
22
One morning at about four o’clock I joined in the darkness a handful
of tourists and we were put in a small convoy of Land Rovers. We started
off for a ridge where we could watch the sun rise in the Himalayas. It was
freezing and pitch-black except for the bouncing beams of our headlights.
The road was nothing more than a rutted trail and soon became very steep.
In places our forward gears were not low enough to take us up an incline,
and the driver was forced to drive up in reverse, the lowest gear. Eventually
we arrived at a flat space and directly in front of us we could make out the
outlines of the Himalayas as night gave way to dawn.
I will never forget that first glow of coppery light on the peaks, which
grew deeper and brighter with the passing minutes. Soon the snow-covered
mountains glowed in ever brighter shades of gold, and then burst into
dazzling white as the sun came over the horizon.
It was one of those moments in life when you are struck speechless
with awe, like when people first see the Grand Canyon.
23
India
ven by February of that year when I was visiting India, the heat was
like an oven. I had arrived in Delhi and was eager to leave yet
another polluted Third-World megalopolis (now 11 million, but
metro Delhi is almost 22 million), with all its noise and traffic chaos.
E
24
I immediately headed for Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, about 200 km south
of Delhi.
The tour guide was an elderly man who looked like a yogi or sadhu
with his grey beard and long hair, but actually he was a shameless marpione
who never lost an opportunity to brush up against a young woman in some
inappropriate way, which he thought was immensely clever. I asked an
American woman about it, and she just laughed it off. You can tell this was a
long time ago.
Nothing prepares you for the fine beauty of the Taj Mahal. When I
first viewed it from the far end of a long, narrow reflecting pool, I was
stunned by its huge dome as delicate as an eggshell. How could this be made
of stone, I wondered, how could it be so light and perfect? What was
supporting its great weight? The dome floated in the wavering air and
dazzled the eyes with its gleaming white marble.
The beauty of the Taj Mahal is enhanced by the fact that it is a
mausoleum built to express the grief of a Mogul emperor for the loss in 1631
of his Persian third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, during the birth of their son.
Construction of the Taj Mahal began the following year and was finished in
1648, and the garden five years after that.
The sarcophagi of Emperor Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal are on plinths
surrounded by an octagonal screen (jali) of perforated marble. The octagon
is a motif of the Taj Mahal, its
shape, the tiles and their
ornaments of stars.
Everywhere there is Arabic
calligraphy, in the cursive thuluth
style, invented in Shiraz in the
eleventh century, used frequently
for verses from the Koran in the
decoration of mosques. The name
of the style means “third”, from
the principle that one-third of each
letter must have a certain slope. What
is extraordinary here is that this
beautiful calligraphy is an inlay of
japer or black marble into a white
marble background, an amazing feat of
stonecutting and calligraphy.
The acoustics of this huge empty
building favor long echoes. This
25
characteristic was used by the famous Irish flautist, James Galway, who
played several works of classical music in the Taj Mahal.
As I explored the gorgeous geometric designs, so intricate and tasteful,
of walls arching up to the great dome, I saw a hornets’ nest, adhering
inconspicuously to the tiles in the shadows.
Under her dome of paper
Lies the queen in her last home.
The buzz of her subjects
Adds to the echoes of grief.
rom Delhi I flew to Calcutta, whose poverty and corruption I fled,
and boarded a bus up a precarious mountain road to Darjeeling in the
Himalayas. Often parallel to the road was a narrow gauge railway,
F
26
built in 1879, to serve Darjeeling, a hill town built by the British for civil
servants and their families wanting to escape the heat of Calcutta and the
lowlands. The British also brought in tea bushes from China and established
plantations. The “Toy Train” carries passengers and goods up 7000 ft (2000
m) to Darjeeling.
When I started to take a photo of the train an Indian soldier told me it
was prohibited. It is very likely one of the most photographed trains in the
world even then, but perhaps the government was worried about China, with
whom the Indians had fought a war along this border with Tibet in 1962.
There is a considerable Tibetan refugee community in Darjeeling.
Most of the population are Gurkhas, of Nepali origin, who have since
the 1850s had a proud military history with the British, serving as elite
troops and famous for their knives. They served in the Falklands War and
were a familiar sight in Hong Kong when it was a British colony.
There are British-style private schools in Darjeeling, so that school
children in neat uniforms are a common sight, except that they, both boys
and girls, often carry their school bags on their back by placing the strap
across their foreheads, in the manner of Sherpas.
I
spoke
to a priest who taught at a private Catholic school, and it turned out he not
only knew the Jesuit boss of the project I was working on in Toronto, but
also had at one time lived on my street. Mathematically, the likelihood of
these coincidences must have been minute.
27
The first full moon of May is the festival of Vesak (from Sanskrit
Vaishakha, the month April/May), the Buddha’s birthday. The parade
includes many Tibetan monks with their extravagant hats, earsplitting
trumpets, gongs and cymbals, but what charmed me were the little children
dressed in the dark red Tibetan monks’ robes and other children carrying
miniature tools and symbols of
various workers and artisans ―
hoes, saws, rakes and so on. They
seemed too many to be orphans,
but possibly they were refugee
children, with unfortunately a
higher number of orphans than in
the general population.
Œri Lanka
28
eylon has reverted to its ancient name of Lanka, but now prefixed
with the Sanskrit word for beautiful. By a circuitous route the
Arabic name for the island serendib (from Sanskrit Sinhala-dvipa,
where dvipa is ‘island’), inspired Horace Walpole in the 18th century
to coin the word ‘serendipity’ after he had read a Persian story called The
Three Princes of Serendib. Ceylon, for the curious, comes from the
Portuguese who got it from the Tamils.
Œri Lanka today is a sad country, devastated by a horrific civil war
with deep ethnic and religious wounds which the nation has not healed. It is
also disillusioning for me personally because Sinhalese Buddhist monks
were major fomenters of the hate and violence directed at the Hindu Tamils
(about 13% of the population). When I saw a bit of it myself I was shocked
C
29
that men who had devoted their lives to a philosophy as gentle and pacific as
Buddhism could be so incendiary in their hatred.
The beautiful island I saw, that merited the origin of the very word
serendipity, just a few months after I left erupted into a murderous civil war.
Kandy, like Darjeeling, was popular with the British as a hill town to
escape the heat and humidity of Colombo, but unlike Darjeeling, Kandy was
the capital of an ancient kingdom and had a long and glorious history. For
this reason Kandy was chosen as the custodian of perhaps the most precious
relic in Buddhism, one of the Buddha’s teeth. The relic is housed in a special
temple that is part of the royal palace complex.
The octagonal building in the front of the building was added in the 18th
century, and is now an oriental library. The library was attacked twice, in
1989 and 1998, by Tamil rebels. The main entrance was completely
destroyed by a bomb blast, also in 1998, but has been rebuilt.
The relic itself is kept in a special sanctuary flanked by elephant tusks.
30
Hong Kong
And
Macau
31
n those days passenger jets were forbidden to fly over Vietnam or China,
thus a flight from Calcutta to Hong Kong flew over Indonesia and then
around the southern extremity of Vietnam and up the South China Sea, a
detour that must have doubled the distance. But what awaited us was a
thrill of a lifetime: a landing at Hong Kong’s old airport, Kai Tak, that was
literally next to Kowloon’s high rises and the harbor. A pilot had little time
to decide if the landing were going well, for just across the harbor were the
skyscrapers of Central District, the old, original island of Hong Kong
(Fragrant Harbor). From the window of the plane I saw rooftops and high
rise apartment buildings
and then suddenly a
little clear space literally
downtown, a short taxi
ride away.
As it happened I
lived just right under the
I
32
glide path of the planes, and their nearness never failed to thrill me. On
foggy days you could see the mist streaming over the wings. The noise was
unbearable and it recurred every few minutes. A crash would have killed
many thousands of people.
I lived in Hong Kong on three occasions, and after about a month I
was ready to lose my mind. The rudeness of people, the pushing and shoving,
their loud voices and aggressiveness, the overcrowding every where you go,
and the noise ― only the rich can escape the noise.
The first couple of weeks it was exciting, this city that never slept, this
city bursting with entrepreneurial energy (but almost no cultural energy at
all). At the foot of the main street of Kowloon, Nathan Rd, was the ferry
terminal. From here you could watch war ships, and even once a nuclear
submarine, the most lethal death machine I had ever seen, freighters from all
over the world, ferry boats going to all the islands that make up this
archipelago, and still some old Chinese junks with rattan sails (but there
many more in Macau). Also next to the ferry terminal was a wonderful
bookstore, with books in English you could not find anywhere else. I spent
hours there looking for hidden treasures. I was just happy to watch the
ferries beetling across the harbor, a fine, deep harbor it is, too.
he trip to the then-Portuguese colony of Macau took one hour by
hydrofoil, or overnight in a ship. Macao had always been described
as seedy, the kind of place where you might come across outcasts
from Europe and America, con men, losers, people on the lam, and
of course gamblers, since gambling was legal in the colony. Gambling must
have been a mainstay of the colonial budget.
Nevertheless, I liked Macau because it was quiet, sleepy, unambitious,
and had preserved Portuguese architecture. In fact its emblem is the façade
T
33
of an early 17th-century Catholic church that was destroyed by a fire in the
19th century.
The streets of Macau were narrow, like those in the center of Lisbon,
and had that colonial feel of old parts of Brazilian cities. The signs were
mostly in Portuguese, such as Escola de condução. Macau was very poor
compared to Hong Kong, but it was much more easygoing.
The greatest Portuguese poet, Luis de Camõens, author of the national
epic Os Lusíadas, was for a time working in Macao. He worked on his epic
that sang the praise of the age of Portuguese exploration in a grotto, which is
now a park named after him. There is a statue of him with a long quote from
his epic poem.
34
He was on his way to
Goa when he was
shipwrecked off the Mekong.
He managed to swim ashore
holding his manuscript aloft
and dry.
He made it back to
Portugal where he died in
1580 at the age of 56.
I never cared much for
his long epic, but I very much
liked his little poem in which
he mourned the death of his
lover, who was lost in the
shipwreck he had survived.
He was in Goa when he wrote
this poem. His life had been
very hard: he lost an eye in a
battle with the Moors; he had
been imprisoned for debts on
more than one occasion; he
had lived an adventurer’s life. Even after he got back to Portugal and
published his masterpiece, he only received a small pension from the King,
and eight years later he was dead.
35
36
China
undred Bamboo Park in Chengdu, Sichuan, really does have at
least a hundred varieties of bamboo, but it also contains a well
from which a poetess, Xue Tao (768–831) drew the water she
needed for making her own paper. Women poets were valued in
traditional China and moved in the highest literary circles.
H
37
One day on the bank of a river she saw women rowing a boat among the
lotus flowers:
Before the wind one leaf runs over lotuses.
News is reported that at the new autumn the fish is caught again.
Rabbits are running, crows are flying swiftly and people’s talk is quiet.
Everywhere in the brook there are red sleeves and the sound of the
Beginning of a boat song.
The red sleeves may also refer to the red petals of the lotuses.
One of the two greatest Tang Dynasty poets, one of the two greatest
Chinese poets ever and one of my favorites, is Du Fu, whose thatched hut
was said to be in what is now the western outskirts of Chengdu. The four
years (759 – 764) he spent in this thatched cottage were his most productive.
His life was very difficult. He lived during the time of the An Lushan
rebellion, a civil war as destructive as the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, and
was forced to flee for his life and that of his family constantly. He was a
government official and therefore a target. He was brought up with the
Confucian ideal that an educated man should serve the Emperor, but this
38
sense of duty always conflicted with his drive to write poetry. He did
eventually retire, but even then it was impossible to find peace and security.
He’s a hard poet to translate because his poems are filled with
references to Chinese history and literature, in the same way that John
Donne’s poetry refers to Petrarch, Dante, the Roman poets, the philosophy
and music of the Renaissance. I’m sure that both Du Fu and John Donne
must have smiled when they wrote certain lines, thinking of the pleasure
their readers would have in recognizing the allusions to the classics and
history.
Here is a poem he wrote in his thatched cottage:
Our thatch house where land ends,
We leave the brushwood gate always open.
Dragons and fish settle into evening waters.
Moon and stars drifting above autumn peaks,
Dew gathers clarity, then thaws. High clouds
Thin away ― none return. Women man windTossed boats anchored here: young, ashamed,
That river life is battering their warm beauty.
(Translation by David Hinton.)
Du Fu was close friends with an older poet, Li Po, whom everyone
agrees is the other greatest Chinese poet. He was a hedonist, a mystic, a
heavy drinker, a wanderer, and like Ovid, became mixed up in Imperial
politics that led to his exile in a remote, swampy part of China, similar to
Ovid’s Tomis on the Black Sea. Ovid died in exile, but Li Po was granted
amnesty and returned to civilization. Although born in Central Asia, his
family moved when he was four years old to Jiangyou, about 170 km
northeast of Chengdu. Although Li Po was considerably older than Du Fu
and his opposite in every way, they were good friends who corresponded
regularly and wrote poems to each other. Here is one such poem by Du Fu,
entitled ‘Dreaming of Li Po’:
Death at least gives separation repose.
Without death, its grief only sharpens.
You drift malarial southlands beyond
39
Yangtze distances, and I hear nothing,
Exiled friend. Knowing I think of you
Always now, you visit my dreams, my
Heart frightened it is no living spirit
I dream. Fathomless miles ― you come
So far from bright azure-green maples
Night shrouds passes when you return,
And tangled as you are in nets of law,
With what bird’s wings could you fly?
Flooding my room to the last roof beam,
The moon sinks. You linger in its light,
But the waters deepen into long swells,
Dark dragons: take good care, old friend.
The Chinese believed that people appearing in dreams were the spirits
of these people that had left their bodies during sleep, but if the person were
far away it would mean the person had died, hence Du Fu’s concern.
Northwest of Chengdu is an ancient irrigation system and Mt
Chingcheng, in ancient times a center for Taoism, with monasteries on
its several peaks. Although I did not know it at the time, this mountain is
part of what would become the Giant Panda Reserve. I knew pandas existed
somewhere in the mountains of Sichuan’s border with Tibet next door, but
no one ever spoke of them. China had other priorities at the time, principally
healing from the decade of the self-inflicted destruction of education,
industry and cultural heritage in the so-called Cultural Revolution.
The picture of this Taoist temple on Mt Chingcheng shows a freshly
40
painted, renovated, well-cared-for example of national heritage. When I saw
it, it was a faded blue, neglected and forlorn survivor of the mass destruction
of the temples by the Red Guards. Sometimes I wonder what the now elderly
Red Guards think about the mayhem they wrought.
But what I remember vividly is a rustic detail. As in the Soviet Union
with churches, so with temples in Mao’s China, where they were used as
storerooms. Hanging on either side of the dull gold characters over the
entrance announcing the name of the temple were ears of corn, set out to dry
in the autumn sun. The ears were tied together with their husks.
About 200 km south of Chengdu is Le Shan, where three rivers
converge, and where the Great Buddha was built into the hillside. It is 71m
high, and a person is barely taller than one of its toes. Its carved hair is curly,
reflecting the Gandharan style in which Greek features of sculpture were
41
introduced to India by Alexander the Great. Construction began in the Tang
Dynasty, in 713, when Li Po was twelve and Du Fu was one year old.
Japan
42
oyasan is a mysterious place. It is a group of eight mountain peaks
about an hour and a half by train south of Osaka. It is the
headquarters of the Shingon Buddhist sect, a sect related to the
tantric Buddhism of Tibet, rich in magic and esoteric practices. An
example is their devotion to Vairocana, a celestial Buddha who is the
embodiment of Emptiness:
K
Now, I, Vairocana Buddha am sitting atop a lotus pedestal; on a
thousand flowers surrounding me are a thousand Sakyamuni Buddhas.
Each flower supports a hundred million worlds; in each world a
Sakyamuni Buddha appears. All are seated beneath a Bodhi-tree, all
43
simultaneously attain Buddhahood. All these innumerable Buddhas
have Vairocana as their original body.
The atmosphere is distinctly spooky, enhanced by the frequent fog and snow
and the dense cedar forest. I was there for two days, staying overnight in a
lodging at a monastery. In the morning I opened the sliding door and saw a
Zen-style garden of
gravel and rocks. A
brown-and-white finch
was singing a little tune
as she flitted from
branch to branch. At six
I joined the monks, just
three of them, in their
service. They chanted
from a sutra, in deep,
rumbling voices like the
44
ones you hear in films about Tibet. The head monk chanted different verses,
rang bells, burnt incense, poured water and performed complicated hand signs
(mudras). The room was dark but for candle light, still, and redolent with joss.
The statue of the Buddha was black, his usual beatific smile almost a snarl,
and in his hand a sword to slay ignorance.
Later I went to a nearby cemetery, which covered an entire mountain.
Many of the monuments were covered in lichen and pitted by decades of frosts
and thaws. One very
large monument caught
my eye because of its
inscriptions in Burmese
and a matching pagoda.
The
Japanese
inscription
said
it
commemorated soldiers
fallen in Burma during
the War. I remembered
Errol Flynn in Objective
Burma. I thought of the
dozens of movies I saw
as a kid, in which
ordinary Americans fought an implacable, cruel foe in the jungles of Southeast
Asia. It was real then, everyone had relatives who had been in the War, like
my uncle with the samurai sword next to the fireplace. He told me that each
small diamond in the hilt stood for a man killed with this blade.
Up the path not far away was a monument built like an alcove. Inside,
next to the Buddha’s statue, were colorful kites and an Olive Oyl mask. On the
outside hung a bib on
which was stitched “I’m
a Toys ‘Я’ Us Kid”.
These little statues are
heartbreaking, for they
represent children who
have died before their
parents, including the
stillborn and the aborted.
The statues honor Jizo
(Sanskrit
Ksitigarba
‘Earth
Womb’),
a
Bodhisattva who has
45
sworn a vow to protect children in limbo. It is believed these children cannot
attain the afterlife because they have not acquired enough merit. Jizo hides
them from demons in his robes and reads them sutras that enable them to cross
over the river into the afterlife. He is the most beloved Bodhisattva in Japan.
There were thousands of these statuettes.
At the top of the mountain was the main temple and behind that a
smaller, plainer building, set off with a fence, its doors barred, its wood
unpainted and weathered. There the founder of the Shingon sect, father of
Japanese Buddhism, inventor of the kana (the Japanese writing system),
initiator of public education, sits in deepest meditation, as he has for eleven
centuries. Below, down a gentle slope, devotees toss coins into a slotted bin,
chant their sutras, click their beads, circumambulate the temple precincts, and
wave cleansing clouds of incense onto their faces, burn their ancestor tablets—
busy and earnest as in their secular lives. That building on the hillside, set
apart, shuttered, contains something ineffable, for Kukai is said to be inside,
immune to decay, in deep meditation.
he Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto dates from about 1400, but
was burnt to the ground in 1950 by a novice monk suffering from
paranoid schizophrenia. The Temple was rebuilt based on historic
drawings and plans. Its distinctive quality is the gold leaf that gives the
building its beautiful glow against the green forest and blue pond of the
gardens. The
golden hew
also gives it a
toy-like
appearance.
Zen temples
are usually
austere, but
Kinkaku-ji,
to use its
Japanese
name,
is
more like an
ornament in
this lovely
Muromachi
garden.
T
46
Yukio Mishima wrote a novel very loosely based on the arsonist-monk.
The book is better known for the character of Kashiwagi, a club-footed monk
who wants to destroy beauty where he finds it. His nihilistic interpretations of
Zen koans are infamous.
he Kamakura Great Buddha (Daibutsu) is located about 26 km south
of Yokohama. The history of this Great Buddha is a perfect illustration
of the physical reality of Japan and the fragility of art.
This 13th-century bronze statue, 13m high and weighing 121
tonnes, was built to replace a wooden Buddha of similar size that took tens of
years to make, only to be destroyed, with its hall, in a violent storm. The hall
housing this bronze Buddha was destroyed by a storm in 1334, and rebuilt;
destroyed by a storm in 1369, and rebuilt; and again in 1498 by a tsunami.
After that, the hall was never rebuilt. An earthquake in 1923 destroyed the
base of the statue which was then repaired.
T
47
The daibutsu in Nara, due east of Tokyo, is housed in the magnificent
Todai-ji Temple (ji means ‘temple’) and has survived well. This Buddha is the
same Vairocana Buddha of the Shingon school in Koyasan. The entrance to
the Todai-ji is flanked by two gigantic guardian statues that are frightening in
their expression.
48
A
det
ail
tha
t
always intrigued me about traditional Japanese buildings is the oniwara
ornaments, similar, in the beginning, to gargoyles (oni means ‘demon’).
These are oniwara on the roof of Todai-ji:
49
Just as in the West monasteries, although abstemious and austere
places, produced highly prized alcohol ― Benedictine, Chartreuse, Trappist
beer ― so also in Japan where many monasteries and temples produced
excellent quality sake:
F
uju-san, or Mt Fuji, is a volcano and is appropriately named for an
Ainu fire-goddess. The Ainu were the original inhabitants of these
islands before the Japanese arrived, probably via Korea and Siberia.
Woodblock prints from Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji,
50
especially his Great Wave off Kanagawa, must grace the walls of many
homes around the world, but especially of students’ dorm rooms and
apartments. Mt Fuji is truly the image of Japan.
Only one side of Mt Fuji, the side facing the sea, is the photogenic
snow-clad face that has become iconic. The other side is rather dull and dark.
I have many slides of Mt Fuji that I took one winter, and to this day I
have a great deal of trouble deciding which is the mountain and which is its
reflection in Lake Biwa.
Lake
Biwa is
named for its shape which resembles that of a four-string lute (Chinese pipa).
Sometimes the water is so still and the sky, reflected in the lake, so blue, that
Mt Fuji has an exact mirror image.
51
After the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Japanese military still
refused to surrender. A land invasion of the Japanese main islands would
have meant house-to-house fighting, with horrific casualties on both sides.
Therefore, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a
port in Kyushu, on the southernmost of the main islands. Tokyo had already
been fire-bombed, and with its paper-and-wood houses feeding a fire storm,
the casualties, as it turned out, were higher than the atomic bomb attacks.
Finally, the Emperor overruled the Army and surrendered unconditionally.
52
I visited the Atomic Bomb Museum, from which I learned how much
the concept of face plagues all of Asia, but particularly Japan: I left the
Museum with the message that Japan was the innocent victim of an
atrocious attack. Even to this day Japanese schoolbooks do not mention the
Rape of Nanking or the serial rape of Korean “comfort women”.
At the center of an atomic bomb blast the air, water and materials are
heated to millions of degrees and forced outward by a shockwave. One thing
I will never forget is seeing the actual wooden boards from the side of a
building on which were imprinted the figures of human beings. I have seen
the petrified bodies of people caught unawares by the thermal blast when Mt
Vesuvius erupted. Horrible as that is, the event was two thousand years ago.
This happened in my lifetime and was manmade.
The atoms of their bodies had been vaporized and driven into the
wood. There it was before my eyes: human beings reduced to shadows.
53
The Dharmapada, the oldest Buddhist text that has come down to us, is
closest to the original words of the Buddha. In the first section, The Twin
Verses, the Buddha said:
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on
our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts
with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never
leaves him.
The End
54