We stayed on the whole autumn, watching the snow advance down Mount Olympus. Life was cold and unprofitable, but easy: life was a montage of fish, coffee and wine, all things to glory in. But coffee grounds now! Wine dregs! Fish guts and fish! – suddenly the smell of any of them made my belly erupt…Of course: I was pregnant. I moaned and lay down in the sand a lot, unable to work. Our only hot water was what we could boil in a stockpot on the stove. We took a plastic tub into the toilets (our brand-new stand-up toilets with white enamel foot-plates) and sponged our shuddering flesh. Storms swilled sea water over our mosaic floors and stripped the yellow poplars, dragging them loose until we had to rope them like the fishing boats and run out at every high wind (the Kapetanios’s family came as well) and hold a tree down each. Shivering, we grilled chestnuts and plucked the tangled little mountain birds that hunters brought in proudly for Chris to make stifado of, with little onions left whole, and red mountain wine; waxy potatoes, mountain ones, sliced and fried as translucent as apples.
Conceived there at the foot of Olympus, our child was. He was snowbound in the village at Christmas and in mid-winter Athens he had his quickening. We flew to Amman and Singapore, and on to Melbourne for his birth in June.
Stars, no moon. Sea silence. A cricket. Thud of a quince falling.
FRIDAY: This place is not far from the Lemonthyme and Cradle Mountain. Reaching here took most of yesterday – the blue flight across Bass Strait was the least of it. The road wound round gorges and crags to this valley of green meadow and green slope, ringed with mountains of tall straight gum trees through which the lake shines up. The lake is a dammed river, the corpses of drowned trees are still standing in it; now and again one tilts and falls. They and the mountains and the sky are reflected.
The grass is high summer grass, but green not dry like at home. Be careful of snakes, they say – one was seen yesterday on the lake shore – any twist of the hot wind in the grass could be a snake.
One of the women has brought a pet paddymelon in a shoulderbag, found with its dead mother on the roadside when a baby. Grey and frail, it hunches on the hearth, nosing her: stone-blind with cataract, it has white bead eyes like those of a baked fish.
They have a log fire and two old kerosene lamps where we eat (at two long low benches, seated on cushions, or on settles each side of the fire); a pine-lined loft above the kitchen is the dormitory, wall-to-wall foam mattresses, men on the right of the partition, women on the left, like in a Greek church. Blowflies zoom up in the dimness, in a smell of apples.
The gompa is a hexagon of pine logs – for the six syllables of Om Mani Padme Hum, and the six realms of the Wheel of Life – with an eastern window of stained glass, a roof of wooden shingles, a round oven-like fireplace and a door leading into an annexe where a monk can live. (P, the French monk, is sleeping there, having given up his hut above the lake to a mother and her child.) Twelve great roof beams radiate from the central pillar, six with a gold dividing curtain, pulled open. Bookshelves, cushions and rugs, photographs of lamas, little Buddha images. The lama’s throne is canopied in red, orange and gold.
A white stupa has been built not far from the gompa, in memory, I’m told, of the baby daughter of a one-time resident, drowned here in the early years of the farm. It has the shape of a flared white skirt, a round little head with a conical party-hat. Inside is a brass Buddha behind glass, and a tablet with the mantra Om Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Soha engraved below it, the mantra in which the Heart Sutra culminates: (‘Gone, gone beyond, gone utterly beyond: enlightenment’).
The Rinpoche and his wife – this is partly their honeymoon – are in residence in the green farmhouse on the slope. Some of the retreaters know him. Mostly they know each other, having come here year after year.
A work party tramped into the bush after lunch and came back bearing a mast-long tree trunk: under G’s orders, the rainbow windsock he brings every year was attached and the mast set up. The gompa has white banners outside with the mantras of Chenrezig and Green Tara: Om Mani Padme Hum. Om Tare Tuttare Ture Soha.
Tonight, a great bonfire of dead wood burned under the clear sky milky with stars – excited children and dogs tearing round it were spattered with sparks.
SATURDAY: The grass is white with frost – the little white stupa is lost in it, as it must be in winter in the snow. Black logs are still smoking in the dregs of the bonfire. The program of meditations and teachings begins, and later, heavy rain.
The parents of the dead girl are here, with two little children. White puffball heads.
SUNDAY: More rain, heavier still. We sit in shawls under the ringing shingles of the gompa and then, like so many soggy bears, crowd into the farmhouse and steam by the fire.
MONDAY: Each night at nine a discussion is held round the fire in the gompa. Often the talkers are at cross-purposes and irritate everyone. It seems a waste of time, except there’s no choice. It’s the discussion – or sleep. Children are asleep in the loft, so no reading by torch or candlelight. There’s no light to read by anywhere (a real hardship, this, though I make up for it when I can in the free time during the day, sitting in my sleeping-bag with the Dhammapada and Conze’s commentary on the Heart Sutra). From time to time a little scorpion runs out of the logs on to the floor, looking huge, shadowed on the fire-reflecting boards: the people nearest to it scramble to their feet until someone gathers it on a newspaper and tosses it out in the dark rain.
Every night we splash through the torchlit grass and huddle by the embers of the fire under our loft. Someone will put another log on. On the Precepts nights – hunger, cold – the woman with the paddymelon, who has studied yoga in India, will take a lamp out to the kitchen and brew us tsai, milky tea flavoured with cardamom pods, stick cinnamon, cloves and honey: vast, the shadow of her body moving through the steam over the black pan.
On Saturday, the second-last day – it feels like weeks away – the Rinpoche will hold an Amitayus Buddha Initiation. Amitayus is the red Buddha in the tankas and of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where on the fourth day after the death he appears from the red western realm, the Blissful, seated on a peacock throne, bearing the Lotus: the Buddha of long life, the Amitabha or Amida Buddha of the Pure Land in one sect of Japanese Buddhism. (In the National Gallery in Canberra they have a gold-lacquered wooden standing Amida Buddha of the thirteenth century, his long fingers curled into two loops, like the long-lobed ears under the black nest of hair. Edges of the folds of his robe show dark through the gilt. His eyes are closed in ecstatic contemplation.)
Traditionally, initiations have not been offered to the public in this way, but bestowed by the guru when he judged each student to be ready. Purists might regret the relaxation, the new accessibility, but the Dalai Lama himself has given the lead, many times: in 1981 he held a mass Kalachakra Initiation for fifteen hundred Westerners in Wisconsin, the first outside Asia. In this extremity brought about by invasion, massacre, desecration, is it to be wondered at that the lamas in exile, like so many burnt gum trees left standing after the bushfires, are sending out strange new leaves straight from the burnt trunk? Since these leaves alone are the tree’s hope of staying alive.
Buddhism is bound to take new forms eventually in the West, as in the East (Theravada, Zen). Whatever is alive must change, the essential Dharma remaining unchanged, immortal diamond. (‘Some things don’t change,’ Phra Khantipalo, the tall, cadaverous English monk from Wat Buddha Dhamma, said at the summer school: ‘Take Impermanence: Impermanence hasn’t changed.’) It can be hard at first not to feel alienated – or at least alien – in the face of the rigid formal structures the old Tibetan masters teach, rituals, sadhanas, laid down and frozen for centuries in the ice and iron-hard rock of the Himalayas. Gary Snyder commented on this in an interview with Peter Barry Chowka in The Real Work. I liked what he said so much that I copied it down in the back of my notebook:
Chowka: A decade ago, or even earlier, you prophesied a great development of interest in Bud
dhism in the West. In 1967 you said, ‘The “truth” in Buddhism is not dependent in any sense on Indian or Chinese culture’…
Snyder: What I felt at that time and what I think all of us feel is that we’re talking about the Dharma without any particular cultural trapping. If a teaching comes from a given place, it’s a matter of courtesy and also necessity to accept it in the form that it’s brought. Things take forms of their own; we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.
TUESDAY: The gong (a blackened old gas cylinder) rings before sunrise for the first meditation. This is the first of the two days of Precepts: no speaking (except to the children, when necessary), and only one meal (lunch) for the day. I stumble downhill to the lavatory, wash at the tap and walk round and round the gompa and the stupa in the clear light before creaking the door open on darkness and going in to sit. I deny myself the blackberries I have been in the habit of picking and eating as I go at this moment of the day, and sink under a wave of misery. (What’s that remark Emerson makes – that ‘wisdom and berries grow on the same bush, but only one could ever be plucked at one time…’)
Rain and bird-claws touch the shingles. Shrouded figures in blankets, drifts of incense smoke and fire smoke.
To be crowded in here from the rain is squalor and cold misery. Babies’ shit-clodded nappies have to be changed in the dining room, while the children slop soup, sniff, and turn around: Oh, yuk! they shout. Oh shit! Nappies and baby clothes are soaking in the troughs when we take our bowls to wash them. The air is heavy with smoke. Flies fill the farmhouse, drop into the milk, which has no beaded cover as in the simplest farmhouse it used to. (They fish out dogpaddling flies with a spoon, liberate them outside and go on serving the milk.) The generator has failed, and so has the fluorescent tube set up in the kitchen, so meals for fifty people have to be prepared by the glow of one blackening kerosene lamp. It might be my restaurant training that revolts: few others seem to mind. (And no one gets sick.)
The children have an organised play group twice a day, taken by professionals; they do paintings. At other times M tells them stories by the fire, and they can play games outside when the rain stops. They have a tent with a trampoline.
Every day is sunny now. I have lost count of the days; what does it matter here what day it is? We are all clean, our clothes are washed. We sit under the eaves to eat, or on stumps in the grass (there are ‘inchmen’ about, giant lumbering bull ants).
In the gompa the candlelight flows across the polished wood of the floor, cushions are islands. The six butter-gold curtains are drawn back. The marble Buddha in the crosscurrents of cloudy sunlight and candlelight, firelight, is luminous white, dark-throated.
A child opening the door throws a knife of sunlight in, creeps to his mother’s side, sits open-mouthed for a while before curling up against her and sleeping; she spreads a tartan rug over him.
The window is square, with a leadlight diamond pattern, lozenges of colour, and in the centre a white lotus in blue glass: a faceted clear glass bead hangs on a red thread at the centre of the lotus. Beyond, sunlit trees in mist.
The Rinpoche’s wife sits attentive. Her neck is a dark stem, the cord of her hair reaches the floor.
Blowflies circle the wheel of spokes under the shingle ceiling, settle, hum loudly away. Ommm.
APRIL
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.
A Body of Water Page 5
