Chapter 3 - The Monastery of Yi-Gah Chö-Ling

In order to understand the significance of events in our lives, in fact, in order to perceive the strange patterns of our destiny (which according to Buddhist conviction are the outcome of our own Karma, our own former deeds), which condition our present thoughts and actions, we have to look back from time to time and trace the origin and the course of the main threads of the complicated fabric which we call life.

Sometimes a glance, a few casual words, fragments of a melody floating through the quiet air of a summer evening, a book that accidentally comes into our hands, a poem or a memory-laden fragrance, may bring about the impulse which changes and determines our whole life.

While writing this, the delicate resinous scent of Tibetan incense is wafted through the shrine-room of my little hermitage and immediately calls up the memory of the place where for the first time I became acquainted with this particular variety. I see myself seated in the dimly lit hall of a Tibetan temple, surrounded by a pantheon of fantastic figures, some of them peaceful and benevolent, some wild and frightening, and others enigmatic and mysterious; but all full of life and colour, though emanating from the depth of dark shadows.

I had taken refuge in this temple during a terrible blizzard which for days on end covered the roads with snow and ice. The suddenness and violence of the storm were something which even the local people had not experienced in their lifetime, and for me, who had come straight from Ceylon, clad only in the yellow robes of a Theravāda monk and a light woollen shawl, the contrast was such that I seemed to live in a weird dream. The monastery itself, situated on a mountain-spur jutting out high above the deep valleys which surround the Darjeeling range, seemed to be tossed about in a cauldron of boiling clouds, rising up from invisible dark valleys, lit up only by continual lightning, while other clouds seemed to be sweeping down from the icy ranges of the Central Himalayas from which they were rebounding, thus adding to the confusion of the elements. The uninterrupted rumble of thunder, the deafening noise of hail on the root and the howling of the storm filled the air.

The abbot kindly invited me to stay with him in his own room, supplied me with blankets and food, and made me as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. His little room, however, was so overheated, and filled with the smoke of incense and deodar-needles which he sprinkled upon the charcoal fire as offerings during his devotions and long recitations, that I felt almost suffocated and was unable to sleep. The next day he therefore allowed me to settle down in a corner of the big temple as soon as it was possible to cross the courtyard which separated it from the main building of the monastery.

How did I get from the placid life of Ceylon's tropical paradise into this pandemonium of an Himalayan blizzard and the strange surroundings of a Tibetan monastery? Tibet had never figured in my plans or stirred my imagination. To me Ceylon had seemed the fulfillment of all my dreams; and in the certainty of living there to the end of my days I had built myself a hermitage in the heart of the island, midway between Kandy and Nuwara-Eliya in a country of eternal spring, which was neither touched by the heat of the summer nor by the cold of the winter, and where trees and flowers blossomed all through the year.

But one day I received an invitation to take part in an international Buddhist Conference at Darjeeling as a delegate from Ceylon and to preside over the literary section of this conference. After some initial hesitation I suddenly made up my mind, encouraged by the idea that here was an opportunity to uphold the purity of the Buddha's teaching, as preserved in Ceylon, and to spread its message in a country where the Buddha-Dharma had degenerated into a system of demon-worship and weird beliefs.

And here I was in the middle of this weird world of Lamaism, neither knowing the language of the country nor the meaning of those countless images and symbols which surrounded me in the frescoes and statues of this temple, except when they represented the universally known figures of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

And yet when the day came on which the skies and the roads were open again and nothing stood in the way of my returning to the comforts of Darjeeling and the soft loveliness of Ceylon, I was no more interested in making use of these opportunities. Some inexplicable force seemed to keep me back, and the longer I stayed on in this magic world into which I had dropped by a strange concatenation of circumstances, the more I felt that a hitherto unknown form of reality was revealed to me and that I was on the threshold of a new life.

I never realised it as strongly as on this occasion that the absence of the spoken word, the silent communion with things and people, which was forced upon me due to the lack of a common language, can bring about a deeper awareness and a directness of experience which generally is drowned by the incessant chatter under which human beings hide their fear of meeting each other in the nakedness of their natural being. (I say `generally' because in the East a form of silent communion is still known under the concept of darshan, which denotes the meeting and contemplating a person in silence, merely partaking of the person's presence, without the necessity of making conversation. Thus, religious leaders or other spiritually advanced people are expected to `give darshan to their devotees or disciples. To `have darshan of a saint is the equivalent of receiving his blessings.)

As I said before, I had been given the privilege of being allowed to live in a corner of the temple: a big square hall, presided over by the gigantic statue of Buddha Maitréya, whose head would have lost itself in the darkness of the temple's upper regions had it not received the daylight coming through an opening of the raised central part of the roof, which was supported by tall red-lacquered pillars with richly carved and gilded brackets. During the night Maitréya's golden face reflected the mellow light of the Eternal Lamp, which stood in the centre of the hall before a marble table with offerings, consisting of rows of water-bowls, small butter-lamps, bowls with rice, and conical ritual cakes (torma).

The floor to the right and to the left of this altar-like offering-table was occupied by long rows of low, carpeted seats and equally low and narrow, box-like tables (chogtse), stretching from the open space near the entrance towards the back wall of the temple, against which the giant figure of Maitréya was seated (in European fashion), flanked by other Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and the statues of the founder of the temple and of the thirteenth Dalai Lama. The remainder of the back wall, as well as a substantial part of the two side walls, were covered with a collection of sacred books (Kanjur and Tanjur), each volume wrapped in red and yellow cloth, resting in wooden pigeonholes, surmounted by beautifully carved and painted panels.

The walls, as far as their surface was visible to the eye even above the tall wooden bookstands and behind the statues were covered with frescoes, alive with the denizens of all the realms of existence: human, superhuman and non-human, divine and demonic, awe-inspiring and reassuring, Fierce and compassionate ones. There were many-armed monsters embracing each other in sexual union, surrounded by flames and smoke, and close to them enhaloed saints, serenely resting on lotus-flower, with devotees at their feet. There were fairies of tender beauty and fierce goddesses in ecstatic dance, adorned with skulls and garlands of human heads, while ascetics were absorbed in meditation and scholars are teaching their disciples. In between appeared wooded hills and snow-clad mountains, trees and waterfalls, clouds and deep blue space and celestial bodies, while manifold birds and beasts and flowering trees animated the landscapes. At the bottom of all, the waters of the ocean with their treasures of pearls, jewels, and corals, as well as the serpent-spirits, the guardians of these treasures, became visible.

The whole universe seemed to be assembled in this temple, whose walls opened, as it were, into the depths of unheard-of dimensions. And in the midst of this thousandeyed, form-filled universe, overbrimming with life and possibilities of conscious experience, I lived in a state of wonder, contemplating and absorbing an infinite variety of impressions without trying to define or reason out their meaning---accepting them, as one accepts the landscapes of a foreign country through which one travels.

Had I had somebody to explain to me the details of these my surroundings, my attention would probably have been diverted towards iconographical and historical facts, and this intellectual preoccupation would have robbed me of the direct impact and the spontaneous reaction which these mysterious images exerted upon me. Here I was not confronted only with the outgrowths of individual human imagination but with the accumulated visions of untold generations, visions based on inner experience and on a spiritual reality over which my intellect had neither power nor judgement.

And slowly this reality took possession of me, penetrating and superimposing itself upon my conception and evaluation of the material world and bringing about a subtle transformation in my conscious attitude towards it. I realised that religious truths and spiritual life are more a matter of transcending our habitual consciousness than of changing our opinions or building our convictions on the strength of intellectual arguments and syllogisms, of the laws of reason, which will never lead us beyond the circle of what is already known in the form of ready-made concepts: the cut-and-dried bricks with which we have constructed the present world of `material reality' and common sense. These have always been the greatest obstacles of creative vision and of the exploration of further dimensions of consciousness and deeper realms of reality. Spiritual life is based on inner awareness and experience, which no amount of thinking could create, thinking and reasoning merely being a process of digestion or mental assimilation which follows but does not precede the above-mentioned faculties.