the glorious mural express (臥遊)

-- a breakfast date at 3,500 meters

There exists a great arch dotted with Buddhist cave temples that stretches from Ajanta reaching all the way across the Taklamakan Desert-- deep into the heart of China.

It is miraculous really. From influences derived from the West, Buddhist art was born. And within 5 centuries, dozens of cave temples covered in murals of impossible beauty were to be created across thousands and thousands of miles along the Silk Road-- all the way to Japan.

I told him: we really should start a railway company and put down tracks to connect all the temples so that pilgrims can ride with us on the glorious mural express. Well, actually, he wanted to do breakfast on the roof of the world. But logistics were against us, so he suggested I pretend having a conversation with him. And this, Dear Readers, is what I imagined telling him:

It must be a little blue narrow gauge train with a red engine and red caboose. "Just like the one we rode to Shimla," I say. Not just anyone shall be allowed on the train either-- for like Mecca, our train will be a place reserved only for believers.

I imagine he smiles and answers with an idea of his own: "We'll have to have a line that branches off at Delhi to travel straight up to Ladakh." He also loves Ladakh and remembers how much the murals of Alchi moved me. 

This from my journal from way back when:

At almost 12,000 feet, there are very few trees and everything is the same dusty shade of the mountains. Another Central Asian marketplace, the Leh Bazaar is jammed packed with stalls selling vegetables, live animals, jewelry, Tibetan arts and crafts and clothing. Walking around the bazaar, you just cannot believe how many different races of people found their way to this extremely remote Tibetan place on the Tibetan Plateau. Light-eyed Kashmiris, light-skinned Central Asians, dark haired Indians and Tibetans in their furs, tall hats and turquiose all walked the streets, shopping and enjoying the warm summer weather. Of course, in this remote region, downtown Leh might as well be downtown Manhattan.

Manhattan, indeed. And just a few kilometers outside of the town of Leh is the Monastary of Alchi, which has paintings that have almost stained my mind with their colors. As I have written in these pages before, sometimes when I close my eyes before sleeping at night, I see the colors of the murals at Alchi-- and surrounded by these colors, I dream of taking a long trip from Ajanta to Dunhuang and then all the way across to Horyuji-- on the glorious mural express.

**

I spent some time last year translating two documents about two other cave temple sites along the Silk Road: Bezeklik and Kizil. As I looked at photos from the sites, I become dazed like a pilgrim-- nearly blinded by the beauty of the Flaming Mountains and and the seering noonday sun of the desert, I imagine stepping into a darkened cave temple, and there I find myself in another dimension-- a place of pilgramage.

This from my translation:

The architecture follows an iconographic programme, functioning as the stage for the carrying out of a Buddhist pilgrimage. device for this procedure. Entering  the cave, the pilgrim   first contemplates the past lives of the Buddha as he or she passes along murals depicting scenes from these past lives. The pilgrim would next circumambulate the corridor moving in a clockwise fashion. Along the back walls, the pilgrim would view scenes Sakyamuni’s nirvana scene and in order to contemplate his or her own existence...

Like falling in love; like mountains of the mind;indeed, like all pilgramages-- this is an imaginary possession achieved via the colloboration between physical form and human imagination; a dream journey that occurs at precisely that disjuncture between the real and the imagined. Pilgramage. I wonder if this is not yet another essential human practice on the decline (an endangered species?) Pilgramage being of particular significance since it is both practiced collectively together with others and serves to connect inner and outer understanding.

And then-- this morning-- appropos of everything...

...the mysterious and sexy Csomo de Koros emails to point me to his new website:

Nekorpa. 

And right at the top of the page are the words of the Dalai Lama:

A pilgrimage through wild, open lands provides visions that help shape the proper attitude and inner awareness for religious practice.

I have written again and again of feeling myself in a flimsy boat (Palinurus at the helm) being tossed about on the open sea. And so I re-listen to the TED Talk lecture with Matthieu Ricard, on his book the Habits of Happiness. In the lecture, Ricard talks about the Buddhist idea of a pebble being tossed about on the waves on the ocean. Most of us exist in such a state that like a pebble being tossed about in the water, our state of mind is so dependent on outside forces that we are happy when things are going well and then crash when bad things happens. The Buddhists tell us to combat this doomed way of being, we need to cultivate our inner serenity, inner freedom, and confidence through what Ricard calls mind training (ie meditation). For it is mind that "translates" all our outer experiences into inner meaning, he says. As a translator myself, this image of mind "translating" experiences into meaning speaks to me very strongly. Ricard urges us to think about how illusory our control inevitably is over outer circumstances. And indeed we meet people all the time who have everything in the world and yet remain unhappy.

In the end, I think just as Ricard says, it all comes down to working to cultivate practices and habits which will enrich us by forming and strengthening what is an underlying ethical-aesthetic sensibility-- for it is that which will help us to flourish and feel serenity. Ricard talks of meditation while the Dalai Lama speaks above about the "shaping power" of pilgramage. The Dalai Lama's words above recall the project of the Confucian Rites as proper comportment through the cultivation of ethico-aesthetic sensibility, don't you think? I know I am not the only one who wonders what is at stake for the human race when collective practices which have long served to connect inner and outer understanding via the human heart are lost forever (Are we really destined to become McPeople like I fear?).

In the spirit of Csomo's new project, I too want to imagine that the Mural Express will have a special line that travels West to Bamyan, which stands as the ultimate symbol of that which is lost forever. It was in mines located not faraway from Bamyan, too, where the ultramarine pigment was mined used to achieve the dazzling blues of Kizil in the painting just above. Cellini's famous blue. Interconnectiveness, indeed.

For more on on blue, see my post Gandhara.

And for more on how this relates to Heidegger and moods, see the Moody Triptich
Part One: In the Mood with Heidegger
Part Two: In the Mood (online)
Part Three: In the Mood (Peony Plays the Piccolo)