Seeing the Loreto College next to the hotel, I went to inquire about saying Mass. Mother Damian nearly swooned, then pulled herself together and sent me down to the Loreto Convent. There is no chapel at the college, it’s a government school. I said Mass in the big, 19th-century English-type convent-school chapel: a few nuns on one side, a few little girls in uniform, hastily rounded up, on the other. It was about 10:15. Then coffee and talk with the sisters, who are mostly old, all in the regular habit. No experimenting with other clothes here! Two daughters of the Queen of Bhutan are in the convent school here and one of them has information about an interesting back-scratching fire demon that is in Bhutan. I have not met any of the students yet. I’m waiting to hear from the people at the Tibetan Center.
November 14, 1968
A friend took us to the Tibetan Refugee Center today and it seemed, relatively, a happy and busy place. This afternoon, Jimpa, a Tibetan monk who is teaching with the Jesuits, will come to talk about interpreting. Fr. Sherburne,62 also.
“The self is not different from the states nor identical with them; there is no self without the states nor is it to be considered nonexistent.”
[Nagarjuna]
CONVERSATIONS
Madam my action
Thankyo.
A little to one side
(Be my traum)
I am your Enrico
Don’ you remembram?
Thankyo!
M-m-m-a-m.
Should we wait?
Madam it is my turn
I am your Enro.
(M-m-u-m-rico.)
Do you forgat? Is Muttons?
I am your Traum
A little to one side
Thankyo.
“Not too diplomatic!”
Madam Mein Traum
Ready in a moment.
A little to one side
Thankyo
(M-action!)
You are my lifetime Pigeon
I am your dream of flight
Madam: my action
(To stop is a better mistake.)
Thankyo
(Sent from Enrico)
(Interception by T. Muttons)
“Reflective consciousness is necessarily the consciousness of the false.”
“The essence of the Madhyamika attitude…consists in not allowing oneself to be entangled in views and theories, but just to observe the nature of things without standpoints.”
(Murti, p. 213)
In Madhyamika, dialectical critique does not clear the way for something else such as Kant’s Practical Reason, or the guarantee of God by faith. It is at once freedom and tathata—realization—not of God, in God. Negation and realization become one in the liberation from conceptual “answers about.”
(Murti, p. 213)
“The Madhyamika method is to deconceptualize the mind and to disburden it of all notions, empirical as well as a priori. The dialectic is not an avenue for the acquisition of information, but a catharsis; it is primarily a path of purification of the intellect.”
“It is the abolition of all restrictions which conceptual patterns necessarily impose. It is not nihilism, which is itself a standpoint asserting that nothing is. The dialectic is rejection of all views including the nihilistic,”
(Murti, p. 112)
Our friend’s jeep has pleasantly flowered covers over the seat cushions. She met us at the Loreto Convent, out in the sun on the wide terrace after Mass in the cold church. Nuns in black veils and some with shawls and mittens. A diamond jubilarian who sweetly complained that she “couldn’t contemplate” she put her head in the sacristy door to tell me this before Mass. I said Mass in the spacious sanctuary, served by a middle-aged Nepalese called Peter. There were faint answers to the prayers from a few nuns and Indian women. I did not preach. After Mass, breakfast was plentiful. I was surrounded by nuns plying me with questions: Have the Trappists changed their rules? Their Office? Do they have recreation now? Do they have games? Do they speak? Five little girls filed in to look at me to reassure themselves that I could speak. I said I was still able to speak.
Before Mass, I had leafed through a book on Grenoble and the Alps of Dauphine in the convent parlor—curious to remember how I wanted to go there as a child. Nice mountains but a dull little city. The same points of interest, including the curious “ciborium” in the cathedral which I could never understand. Pictures of the Grand Chartreuse. That place is still able to stir me! La Salette, an ugly church. Maybe after all I shall go there: if I go to those Alps at all it will be because of La Salette.
Tibetan students who waylay you on the road above the Tibetan school and ask your address, inviting you to become their pen pal. I assure them I have more than enough pen pals already. Lusty chanting in the school after dawn when Kanchenjunga is full of light. I walked and said Lauds under the cryptomeria trees on Observatory Hill, and the chanting came up strong and clear from below. A man was doing vigorous exercises by the shelter that overlooks the valley. He had a mean white dog that pissed and scratched in the marigolds and then came over to me with the kind of electric tension and barely audible growl that a dog has when he is not afraid to bite. I continued my promenade in the direction of the hotel. The man was shimmying in the sun.
At the Tibetan Refugee Center there was a young nun with shaved head and a sweet smile who, I learned, went to work in the local carpet factory. She posed for a picture with three others who looked like old men. Also polite, bedraggled monks, in lay clothes, marked with all the signs of a hard frustrated life, working in a carpet factory. One is the dyemaker. He showed me his kettle for boiling green leaves and the weed he used.
Little kids in the crèche, some sweetly smiling and making the “namaste” gesture, others crying loudly. Babies bundled up in cribs, one silently lying with its arms in the shape of across, staring at the ceiling. In the distance a long line of little children went walking away in the warm sun, guided by teachers.
Women singing at work in the carpet factory. Spinners. Weavers. Dye mixers. In other shops: leatherworkers, carpenters, woodworkers, cooks. One cook was proudly stirring a stew of curry and potatoes in a huge black kettle. I bought a heavy, woolly, shaggy coat, something to wear while reading in the cold hotel. I have it on now. It is good and warm.
In the afternoon I visited with Fr. Stanford63 at St. Joseph’s School in North Point. Noise, kids, tea, wide grassless playgrounds, gardens, hyper-Gothic buildings, a big Victorian courtyard, crests, blazers, scarves, and all sorts of exhortations (sursum corda [Lift up your hearts]) to “the boys.” Some were neat wide-eyed little kids, including a shy one from Bhutan, the only one I spoke to, and others with mod hairdos and perfect swaggers. Some of them looked like little bastards. Very much the Jesuit School! We got out as fast as we could. A Canadian Brother drove me back in a jeep through the cold town, the jeep loaded with students hitchhiking in to the movies.
November 15,1968
It is the Feast of the Dedication of the Church of Gethsemani. I said Lauds of the feast on the side of Observatory Hill again, with the Tibetan kids chanting. And men came by, Tibetans, chanting softly to themselves. And a woman with a prayer wheel and a sweet little chant of her own. And an Indian jogging. And an old beggarwoman with no face left, one eye to see with, nose and mouth burned away, chanting, too, her tongue moving inside the hole in the scar tissue that served her for a mouth.
Conze comments on the fact that communication between East and West has not so far done much for philosophy. “So far European and particularly British philosophers have reacted by becoming more provincial than ever before.”
(Conze [Buddhist Thought in India (London, 1962)),p. 9)
“…the Madhyamika does not deny the real; he only denies doctrines about the real. For him, the real as transcendent to thought can be reached only by the denial of the determinations which systems of philosophy ascribe to it…His denial of the views of the real is not denial of the real, and he makes the denial of views—the dialecti
c itself—the means for realizing the real.”
(Murti, p. 218)
Drove with Fr. Vincent Curmi64 to the Mim Tea Estate—a marvelous drive. It is one of the places I had heard of indirectly long before corning to India because Gene Smith had spent some time in the little Tibetan gompa near there and the gompa to some extent is supported by the Tea Estate. I hope to make a little retreat at Mim at the beginning of next week, there is a guest cottage there. The drive was marvelous. Past Ghoom, and doubling back into the mountains, one goes down for several miles through jungle and cryptomeria trees on a very steep slope and finally comes out on the plantation, clinging to the slopes, with a magnificent view of Kanchenjunga—and of the hills gutted by landslides across the valley. Down in the bottom there is a place where a village was entirely destroyed. A thousand feet below Mim Tea Estate, a man in the valley shot a leopard. Why? Who was it harming? Goats perhaps. Or was it just going to lower and warmer places?
After we had some tea and saw the tea factory (good smell!) we climbed back into the hills to the gompa. A narrow path led among some cottages, then up into the trees and over to another spur. A very small, very poor little building, in a good spot, with a rusty corrugated iron roof. I don’t know how they get thirty people into it, except that they are mostly kids. Drugpa Thugsey Rinpoche, the abbot, who was recommended to me by Sonam Kazi, was absent. The others spoke Nepali but did not have much to say. Most of the monks, kids, and students, are Nepalese. I went into the oratory which is dark and poor and not very heavily ornamented. But one got a sense of reality and spiritual power in there. We stopped briefly for tea in the rinpoche’s cell. It was very poor, with none of the usual decorations, only a picture of Nehru, an old calendar, etc. Again, a sense that something very real went on here, in spite of the poverty and squalor. There are people who come all the way from France to consult this rinpoche, including doctors.
November 16, 1968
We started out early on a cold morning, about 7:45, in our friend’s jeep with Jimpa Rinpoche and a big picturesque Tibetan type as guide to find other rinpoches. Also, Fr. Sherburne and Harold Talbott. I was feeling the cold as we hurried up the road toward Ghoom. I’ve had a bad throat; it seems to be aggravated by the coal smoke that fills the air. We went looking first for Chatral Rinpoche at his hermitage above Ghoom. Two chortens, a small temple, some huts. In the temple there is a statue of Padma Sambhava which is decorated with Deki Lhalungpa’s jewels. But I did not see it. Chatral Rinpoche was not there. We were told he was at an ani gompa, a nunnery, down the road, supervising the painting of a fresco in the oratory. So off we went toward Bagdogra and with some difficulty found the tiny nunnery—two or three cottages just down behind the parapet off the road—and there was Chatral, the greatest rinpoche I have met so far and a very impressive person.
Chatral looked like a vigorous old peasant in a Bhutanese jacket tied at the neck with thongs and a red woolen cap on his head. He had a week’s growth of beard, bright eyes, a strong voice, and was very articulate, much more communicative than I expected. We had a fine talk and all through it Jimpa, the interpreter, laughed and said several times, “These are hermit questions…. This is another hermit question.” We started talking about dzogchen and Nyingmapa meditation and “direct realization” and soon saw that we agreed very well. We must have talked for two hours or more, covering all sorts of ground, mostly around about the idea of dzogchen, but also taking in some points of Christian doctrine compared with Buddhist: dharmakaya—the Risen Christ, suffering, compassion for all creatures, motives for “helping others”—but all leading back to dzogchen, the ultimate emptiness, the unity of sunyata and karuna, going “beyond the dharmakaya” and “beyond God” to the ultimate perfect emptiness. He said he had meditated in solitude for thirty years or more and had not attained to perfect emptiness and I said I hadn’t either.
The unspoken or half-spoken message of the talk was our complete understanding of each other as people who were somehow on the edge of great realization and knew it and were trying, somehow or other, to go out and get lost in it—and that it was a grace for us to meet one another. I wish I could see more of Chatral. He burst out and called me a rangjung Sangay (which apparently means a “natural Buddha”) and said he had been named a Sangay dorje.65 He wrote “rangjung Sangay for me in Tibetan and said that when I entered the “great kingdom” and “the palace,” then America and all that was in it would seem like nothing. He told me, seriously, that perhaps he and I would attain to complete Buddhahood in our next lives, perhaps even in this life, and the parting note was a kind of compact that we would both do our best to make it in this life. I was profoundly moved, because he is so obviously a great man, the true practitioner of dzogchen, the best of the Nyingmapa lamas, marked by complete simplicity and freedom. He was surprised at getting on so well with a Christian and at one point laughed and said, “There must be something wrong here!” If I were going to settle down with a Tibetan guru, I think Chatral would be the one I’d choose. But I don’t know yet if that is what I’ll be able to do—or whether I need to.
After that we drove on down to the Sakyapa monastery on the hillside right by the village of Ghoom. It has a nice, fresh painted temple. Monks were vigorously chopping wood on the terrace outside, under the flapping prayer flag, and we sat inside with the rinpoche whose name I forget—he is a friend of Jimpa’s—a very Chinese-looking man with a long whispy beard. We talked a bit, though somewhat evasively, of mantras and mudras, and I told him about LSD. At this he said that realization had to come from discipline and not from pills. (He hadn’t heard of psychedelic drugs.) Then we talked of meditation. Once again there was the usual reaction of pleased surprise at learning that meditation existed in the West, and he said, “You in the West have great potentiality for creation, but also for destruction.” He gave us all scarves, photos were taken, and we visited the temple, which is quite beautiful inside.
When I got back to Darjeeling I had a very sore throat, so I sat in the sun on the hotel terrace most of the afternoon reading Murti. Then said Office in my room, as the chill of evening crept up the mountain. In the dusk I went out to get some throat lozenges and an inhaler and some brandy, which I have not yet opened. I kept waking up all night but the cold broke and this morning I felt better. I was plied with good American medicines by the Jesuits and their pills seemed fairly effective!
November 17, 1968
On being tired of Kanchenjunga. On the mountain being mercifully hidden by clouds. On sneaking a look at the mountain anyway before Mass. I walked the length of St. Joseph’s College to sneak a look at the mountain, then turned away back to church. It was a long Mass, a concelebration with Fr. Curmi, an hour and ten minutes in Nepali, which meant of course that I just mumbled along in English during the Canon. But there was good singing—Nepalese music with drums and small bell-like cymbals. The women sitting in the pews in front were recollected and devout; the men were at the back. It was very moving. We went afterward to St. Joseph’s for breakfast with the Jesuits. The librarian, an old Belgian with a neat white goatee, told me, “We have twenty-two of your books in the library.” After we left the Jesuits a cold mist began blowing up out of the valleys—not comforting for my cold.
On being tired of blue domes. On objecting to pleasure domes. “Dear Mr. Khan, I take exception to that new dome. The one in Xanadu.66 On being tired of icebergs 30,000 feet high.”
The view of Natu-Ia-Pass, where the Chinese stand armed and ready, from the toilet of room 14 at the Windamere Hotel Private Limited. View of Tibet from a toilet. Tired of mountains and pleasure domes. On having a cold in the pleasure domes. Having to use a Vicks inhaler in Xanadu. On being overcharged by the druggist (chemist) for the Vicks inhaler. On being given Dristan Nasal Mist by a Jesuit.
By the blue dome of Raj Bhavan, outside the fences of course, I add my own small contribution of green phlegm to the gods of spit on the street. Note the bloody sputum of contemplatives and/or betel chewers.
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Objection to the blue clouds of soft coal smoke rising from Darjeeling to aggravate my allergy.
On meeting the Czechs on Mall Road, near the part that is being repaired. Looking down, identifying the Tibetan Refugee Center from high above.
Little Tibetan children carrying bunches of marigolds. An Indian rides on a pony led by a boy. No reins. He holds a baby in his arms. He rides smiling past the mountain which has to be taken for granted. Today is Sunday also at Gethsemani, half around the world from here. No Sunday conference. No conferences for a long time. But I must talk to the Jesuits at St. Joseph’s Friday and the Jesuits at Kurseong Sunday—to tell them that all that happens in the American Church is not exactly as presented in Time—such is the request.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 33
