The Great Circle

by Rollan McCleary

ABOUT

A mandala is a great circle whose most perfect examples in world art derive from Tibet. But though mandalas are acknowledged symbols of spiritual and psychic wholeness, God is not necessarily at their centre. In Tibet God is never at the centre because Buddhism knows only the Buddha who teaches the gods. How ‘atheistic’ is Buddhism and with it Asia, or do they own suppressed notions of God? And is Buddhism, a major player in the emerging religious and New Age paradigm, quite what it appears?

On a return trip to the Asia where he once lived for many years, the author looks again at Asian spirituality. He also re-reads with surprising results a distinctive and classic form of God consciousness, though by contemporary standards a problematic one, namely the Psalms of David. Between issues raised by Asian art and biblical poetry, the author is driven beyond these to radical questions concerning the whole idea of truth and exclusivity in religion, and critically examines modern voices of mysticism and interfaith theory from Thomas Merton to the Dalai Lama. In what some call ‘the Asian century’ this is a book that ranges widely across history and between East and West offering unexpected insights.

A prince’s mansion scarcely seems the right place to begin the sort of quest I am embarking upon. This will be about God consciousness in East and West and includes everything from the nature of religious art and meditation to the meaning of the Psalms and the challenge of contemporary developments in religion. But this is a book of surprises, and what follows will be seen to fit a pattern, though it was not at all the pattern I originally envisaged.

I had fully intended to begin dramatically at somewhere nearer to heaven than most places on earth are, namely at the Everest Base Camp which I was due to visit in the course of a tour of Tibet. However, an hour before I was to pay my booking fee I received the message that for late June and most of July Tibet would be closed to foreigners – presumably because Chinese authorities feared the equivalent of an Arab Spring in the Land of Snows. As my touristic aim was primarily to study art rather than admire mountains however imposing, and as I was vaguely concerned about the health risks of high altitude vacationing if one was not in top physical condition, the blow to plans (truly fatal since I could only travel at the dates proposed) was not as troubling as it might have been.

Not to be completely outdone, I decided I would exchange my tour for one that would take me to Beijing and on to somewhere several hours away to the north east by slow train through mountains, a place still scarcely known to or visited by foreigners, namely Chengde. (It is so little visited that, apart from a worried and lost looking Danish family, I never met or saw a single Westerner the whole time I was there). But Qing dynasty emperors retired to Chengde for the summer and hunting expeditions, and in days when Tibet and its religion were more favoured than they now are, lamaseries and even a replica of Lhasa’s Potala Palace got erected there. I might still be able to have some experiences at the level of art.

There is an academic Tibetology whose origins lie in the work of the very detailed and surprisingly anthropological writings of the Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri (1684-1733) trained upon a hardly known region And then there’s the travellers’ tales and the romance and increasingly Hollywood “Tibet chic”.

Tibet remains almost everyone’s Shangri La. As the Roof of the World and the Land of Snows, long one of the remotest, most hard to reach places on earth outside the arctic regions, it has been easy to say or imagine almost anything about it. Every fantasy is helped by the fact that amid soaring mountains, mysterious lakes and frozen wastelands the nation also has a few sufficiently temperate valley oases to fit Hiltonesque images. But since there were always few if any commercial reasons to penetrate the region, interest in Tibet has mostly been the province, when not of Christian missionaries (its first western discoverers), of Theosophists, post-war Neo-Buddhists, intrepid climbers and explorers plus the occasional poet like the theosophical Yeats, who never went there but wrote Meru and how,

And Yeats means (I think) amid rumination on civilisation, the night of Buddhist emptiness at the end of civilisations yet to dawn.

There is a question mark over whether Theosophy’s founder Mme Blavatsky, who more than anyone romanticized Tibet as home of ultimate mysteries and set the trend for Tibetan Mahatmas or “Masters” (based in Shigatse), ever visited the region. The Koot Hoomi letters hoax are not proof positive that she never reached there (or never heard from a few spirits even if their habitation was not the Himalayas). There is some evidence Blavatsky did visit Tibet,but whether she managed to or not, her claims were definitive in the next generation for the indomitable Alexandra David-Neel who stopped at nothing to obtain knowledge from lamas including three years meditating in a cave.

The influence of academic Tibetololy is minor against the romantic exploration and questing which have never stopped. A recent example is Colin Thubron’s To a Mountain in Tibet (2011). It records a semi-pilgrimage or voyage of self-exploration to the fabled Kailesh, mythically Yeats’ Mt Meru, the world axis for Buddhists and Hindus alike. Ultimately nothing much is personally discovered, and if any locals ask this failed Anglican what Christians think about this or that he is without answers; but the journey proves colourful if extremely taxing. The author even learns some ill equipped or ageing pilgrims have died (though they would think with accumulation of merit!) circumambulating at 5500m (18,200 ft) the same mandala mountain he struggles around and survives. Survived as did Desideri who, without making the pilgrim’s circumambulation, was the first westerner ever to set eyes on Kailesh. But neither Desideri nor Thubron saw what adds to mysteries of the region, the reported Maharishi.

When it comes to the Psalms, the question is should they even matter to you.... or me? Isn’t poetry of the late Bronze or Early Iron age (depending on your dating system) just a little too archaic to speak to us today beyond the occasional line? Don’t we feel a certain revulsion towards the unabashed, uncensored expressions of anger, or perhaps some bewilderment before the sudden, unfamiliar, if not unrealistic alterations of mood within or between psalms? Personally, I always liked the Anglican chants which seemed, elegantly and half insolently through the lips of beruffled choirboys, to cover the imperfections and oddities of the Psalter - like Psalm 60’s, “Moab is my washpot: over Edom I cast my shoe” - no matter how far from the emotional field of the original they strayed. But that was the point. The music almost dissolved the original meaning along with its emotion.

Whatever the musical accompaniment of the original psalms may have been, and I shall be mentioning some modern research on that, it is doubtful that in recent centuries the collection has been adequately set to music of any kind outside the occasional, accidentally effective rendering like Hubert Parry’s “I was glad” (Ps 122) which makes a stirring introit for coronations. The conflicted emotional nature of some psalms is such one feels that their messages await a more operatic, or at least more modern treatment in the style of Jesus’ Gethsemane plea song, “I only want to say” in Jesus Christ Superstar.

Listening to standard psalm chants for the purposes of this inquiry, I realized how little the sung words have touched me in the past and still today – religiously as opposed to aesthetically, that is. Especially Gregorian chant permits one to brood on eternity and/or history and at that level it can be spiritual, but I find no meaningful connection between it and the specific words and sentiments. Gregorian can evoke distant skies, but no smoking altars, burning deserts, swirling torrents or any De Profundis effects. The mentioned Anglican chant is fine, almost chic for at least didactic psalms like Ps 1 and 119, or any psalms expressing an obvious peaceful sentiment, but not for the rest. As a compromise I decide Russian chant has more “soul”, is more organic as against the efficient, almost machinal tones of western psalmody. There simply has to be something more Jewish and/or operatic to convey the sense. But then, more importantly and to be radical about this, how well can we anyway deal with the words?