An Encounter with Tibetan Buddhist Poet and Hermit Jetsun Milarepa
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
An Encounter with Tibetan Buddhist
Poet and Hermit Jetsun Milarepa
View from a Cave where Milarepa Lived and Meditated at Nyalam in his Native Tibet
Image by Jerome Ryan from Mountains of Travel
Magnificent clouds roil in the distance as mountain
peaks rise majestically to the horizon. Is there a cosmos beyond the
visible, as those clouds play in iridescent beauty beyond the mountains? Beyond
those unseen forces mapped by science, such as gravity and magnetism, the
systems enabling the stability and dynamism of the physical universe, and, by implication, the possibility of conscious life in such a place as Earth, is there
something more, perhaps beyond the measurement of science but
nevertheless accessible to the mind, even if only to a degree? Does any intelligence enable the order and creativity of the cosmos, particularly evident in the human mind that is able to ask these questions?
Perennial enquiries that would have moved the mind of the contemplating hermit at the level of knowledge of the world available to him in his time, perched high in his cave above his fellow beings in their ceaseless comings and goings, asking the same questions at various levels of interest, questions that frame existence.
Like his other caves of abode, Milarepa's cave at Nyalam is now a site of pilgrimage and international tourism, the world seeking out the places where the seeker for the ultimate hid himself from the distractions of humanity in searching for that beyond the visible cosmos but which enables existence.
The
pilgrims and tourists draw inspiration from an adventurer on the ultimate
quest that unites all humanity, the quest of why, where, who and how, ''why are we
here?'', ''where are we coming from?'', ''where are we going to?'', ''who are we?", ''how should we live?,'' a quest all are embarked on at various degrees of
awareness, a quest to which Milarepa devoted himself with supreme concentration, withdrawing from the business and pleasure of the moment in order to order to measure human potential
against the human condition, as Richard Sullivan describes the life of the monk in his introduction to Lowrie Daly's Benedictine Monasticism ( 1965), through prayer and meditation, seeking to rise ''above the scattered'', piercing into the ultimate reality where all answers are
configured.
Life, for a monk, is shorter than the flutter of an eyelid in comparison to eternity, and this fragment of time flits past in the worship of God, the salvation of his soul, and in humble intercession for the souls of his fellow exiles from felicity.
...
They have foresworn the pleasures and rewards of a world whose values they consider meaningless; and they alone have as a body confronted the terrifying problem of eternity, abandoning everything to help their fellow-men and themselves to meet it.
Worship, then, and prayer are the raison d’être of the Benedictine order; and anything else, even their great achievements as scholars and architects and doctors of the church, is subsidiary. They were, however, for centuries the only guardians of literature, the classics, scholarship and the humanities in a world of [ of ] confusion [ Europe ]...
(From Patrick Leigh Fermor's (with intro by Karen Armstrong), A Time to Keep Silence)
This monastic ideal may be even better appreciated in its resonance with that of contemporary mountain climber Reinhold Messner:
On our battered planet there is scarcely space left in which we can forget our industrial society and, undisturbed, put to the test our innate powers and abilities. In us all the longing remains for the primitive condition in which we can match ourselves against Nature, have the chance to have it out with her and thereby discover ourselves.
(From Reinhold Messner, The Crystal Horizon: Everest-The First Solo Ascent, 1989, 40 )
Messner celebrates his discovery of an ideal environment for such explorations in Tibet:
...in the plane… High above the clouds I tell Jurgen how I saw Tibet for the first time. I was standing on the summit of [ mount ] Manaslu [ in Nepal ] and gazed down on the country of my longing. In spite of my exhaustion [ having climbed the world's eight-highest mountain ] a wave of excitement rose in me.
Beneath me a sea of rocks spread out far and wide, high tablelands and snow mountains. An unending, unspoiled landscape over which clouds moved in grotesque formations. My whole being became so deeply immersed in them, it was hard to tear myself away... From then on I have been waiting for a new opportunity to enjoy them more intensively...
( From The Crystal Horizon, 63)
[ The Buddhist ] joy in solitude found its finest expression in Tibetan poetry. The high ranges of the Himalayas [ the world's highest mountains ] have always been the abode of hermits.
Nowhere in the world is there such variety and magnificence of scenery, from wooded meadows to awesome rushing cataracts, from vast bleak plains to the eternal snows of the mountains, and nowhere in the world can solitude so press upon the wanderer, or loneliness grant him such freedom. The songs created upon these peaks are sung today, their sweet, sad tunes express the peace and sorrows of the solitary search and the Tibetans' love for their harsh and beautiful land.
The cotton-clad Mila ( 1040-1123 A.D. ) was one of the first of the great wandering poet-saints of Tibet. His poetry is filled with a love of nature, and he constantly sings of his happiness as he walks alone in the high hills.
...
this mountain land is a joyful place
a land of meadows and bright flowers
the trees dance in the forest
a place where monkeys play
where birds sing all manner of song
and bees whirl & hover
day and night a rainbow flashes
summer and winter a sweet rain falls
spring and autumn a mist rolls in
and in such solitude as this
the cottonclad Mila finds his joy
...
I am a yogin who wanders on the glacier peaks
reaching out to the spreading horizon
( From Stephan Beyer, The Buddhist Experience, Wadsworth, 1974, 75-76, quoting The Biography of Cotton Clad Mila, ed by Sangsrgyas rgyal-mtshan)
Abstract
An imaginative verbal and visual journey into the world of Tibetan Buddhist poet and hermit Jetsun Milarepa, vicariously sharing the inspiration of the mountainous spaces he inhabited in his effort to pierce into the ultimate mystery of existence through solitary meditation.
Images of the specific landscapes he lived and moved in, and others of the Tibetan landscape, evoke his visual and sensorial universe and its suggestive power in relation to his quest, images accompanied by commentary from various sources, by myself, from Milarepa's poetry, and other texts on the inspirational power of nature, particularly mountains, the natural formations that define the Tibetan landscape as the highest region on Earth. The image commentary is placed, indented, under each image.
The testimonies of contemporary mountaineers and nature writers Reinhold Messner and Robin McFarland recur in these commentaries, dramatizing the correlation between nature and thought, the exalted force of mountain solitudes and the human mind, also evoked by Milarepa's poetry.
The entire text explores the relationship of
Milarepa's quest in the 11th century to human existence across space and time, beginning with my own contemplative bond with him.
The absence of page numbers in some of the references is due to their being unavailable in some of the digital texts used. All links employed were active as of January 2022 when the essay composition was still in process.
Contents
Image and Text: View from a Cave where Milarepa Lived and
Meditated at Nyalam in his Native Tibet
Abstract
Rising Before Dawn
Image and Text: Image of Milarepa in Meditation in a Cave
Sharing Milarepa's World
Image and Text: A View from One of Milarepa's Caves of Abode and
Meditation
Service to Humanity
Image and Text: Gyirong Valley, South-West Tibet Near Milarepa's Cave at Nyalam
From Imagination to the Ultimate
Image and Text: A View from Another of Milarepa's Caves of Abode and Meditation
Methods of Quest for the Ultimate
Image and Text: Mountains, Sky and Valley in Tibetan Landscape
What is Religious Genius?
Image and Text: Mountain, Sky and Lake in Tibetan Landscape
Correlating Milarepa with Multi-Cultural Streams
Image and Text: Mountains, Sky, Lake and Bird in Tibetan Landscape
A Quest for Synthesis
Image and Text: Mount Everest Close Up from Tingri at Sunrise
Thanks to the Reader
Image and Text: Mountains, Lake and Dynamic Sky in Tibetan Landscape
Paradoxes of Thought and Expression
Image and Text: Glorious Peak in Tibet
Salutations to the Reader
Image and Text: Tibetan Monks in a Glorious Landscape and Skyscape
Donation Request
Rising Before Dawn
The hours before daybreak.
Twittering of birds floating in through the window with the cool night air. I
had risen from sleep refreshed, but my mind exercised by particular challenges
of living.
As my thoughts often work, though, they soon switched from the concrete to the abstract, from the material to the ideational, from the basics of living to the heights of it's questions, from the rigours of it's challenges to the depths of it's meaning.
A man in meditation in a cave in a region of absolute cold, a sheet of snow falling like a curtain at the entrance, hiding the figure within from view. A coruscation of power, however, pulsates from the interior where the lone figure seats, warming the air around him like an intense flame.
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Totally unkempt, startling to those who stumbled upon him,
but fierce in concentrated quest for the point where mind and cosmos intersect
and the rationale of existence may be found.
''Why is there something,
rather than nothing?'' the same quest was formulated in
mediaeval European philosophy. ''What is the logic of the coming and
going, the ceaseless activity, the stability and flux that constitutes
existence?'' the Buddhist formulation may be presented, as first provoked of the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, in being shocked by old age and death,
inevitabilities that seemed to make nonsense of the dynamism and creativity of
life.
''I wanted to climb high again
in order to see
deep inside myself''
Milarepa may be seen as declaring with Reinhold Messner. In climbing the world's highest mountains, with minimal technological aids, and at times alone, without means of communicating with the world, Messner subjected himself to rigours suggestive of those of Milarepa meditating in absolute privation in mountain solitudes.
How may the depth of self knowledge Messner sought through mountain climbing be akin to that cultivated by Milarepa through meditation in mountain retreats?
The reflections of Nena Holguin, Messner's companion on part of his solo ascent of Everest, suggests some of the answer:
Without connection with the world below, to climb alone up there must remain a deeper experience. To gaze at the surrounding mountains and horizons is not all; to reach the summit through one's own will is more important; to stand up there and to look inwards; to understand and to accept all that is beautiful and hateful in our make-up; to see ourselves as the people we are and not the illusion which we make of ourselves.
( From The Crystal Horizon )
Sharing Milarepa's World
I see him from inside my warm
bedroom in Lagos. I love to imagine myself with him in that cave, one with Milarepa in his quest for ultimate truth. Naked, yet warmed through his command
of the discipline of generating heat from his own body.
Why need clothes when you are always alone except for your invisible guides and occasional visitors who stumble upon you? Without clothes, you keep warm, so why not ignore another of those refinements unnecessary when life is reduced to it's absolute essentials?
Jetsun Milarepa, Tibetan Buddhist poet hermit. He and I united in spirit between his 11th century and my own present, sealed to each other beyond space and time.
A View from One of Milarepa's Caves of Abode and Meditation
The insubstantial nature of clouds, their sense of opening
into the endless zone of the sky, suggests for Buddhist thought the mind flying across the unbounded space of awareness of the essence of existence.
The sky is a primary Buddhist image of both the insubstantiality
of being and its opening into something beyond it, beyond grasp by the thinking
mind, reachable only through awareness empty of the limitations of thought
as the empty sky is empty of forms.
In their transience, their coming and going, even of the most ancient mountains, created through millennia of geological time and eroding across further millenia in which lush valleys may become desert, does anything, talk less the human being of miniscule lifespan, have any abiding substance in itself? Is it not dependent on something else beyond it, something stable that ensures its existence even as it comes and goes?
The motion of clouds, their turbulence and beauty, their translucence as they are pierced by sunlight, become evocative of the dynamism of existence and of the mind seeking to pierce this dynamism to its ultimate meaning.
The seeker for ultimate reality, investing years, perhaps a lifetime, in contemplative disciplines, perhaps within intense self denial of material and social comforts, as Milarepa did, would identify with Messner's formulation:
Men [ people] simply cannot resist exercising and stretching to their fullest extent the faculties and aptitudes with which they each happen to be specially endowed.
…
And more than this, he secretly owns within himself an exceedingly high standard - the highest standard - of what he wants to attain along his own particular line, and he is never really content in his mind and at peace with himself when he is not stretching himself out to the full towards this high pinnacle.
(From The Crystal Horizon)
Ex-nun, scholar and philosopher of religion, Karen Armstrong, makes a similar point in relation to the life focused exclusively on contemplation, particularly as reflected in the withdrawal from the world in the spiritual quest represented by monasticism:
Monasticism tells us something important about the structure of our humanity. Almost every single one of the major world traditions has developed some form of coenobitic life. Just as some people—at all times and in all cultures—have felt impelled to become dancers, poets, or musicians, others are irresistibly drawn to a life of silence and prayer.
They have an unusual talent, by no means granted to all the faithful, for meditation, and they will never be satisfied unless they are able to develop and practice it assiduously. The athlete and the dancer reveal the potential of the human body; they willingly subject themselves to a painful, rigorous, and exhausting discipline, giving up many comforts and pleasures in order to learn their craft. Because of this dedication, they are able to perform physical feats that are beyond the reach of an untrained person. In the same way, the contemplative gladly submits to an equally demanding regimen and, once he or she has become adept, manifests the full potential of the human spirit.
( From Introduction to Patrick Leigh Fermur's A Time to Keep Silence )
"Wishing well being on fellow beings with such intensity that one's mental processes transcend thought," Milarepa's description of a central aspect of his spiritual and philosophical path, the Kargyutpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, as he is quoted in Evans-Wentz' edited Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa.
Even in the intimately solitary quest for the ultimate meaning of existence, the primary goal is to benefit others by benefiting oneself. Free yourself from the prison of ignorance of the essence of living and then liberate others.
"Can two chained people unchain each other?," so may be depicted the Bodhisattva vow of Buddhism which Milarepa practiced.
"As long as space abides, as long as the world abides, so long shall I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world," declares Śāntideva of the same vow in his immortal Bodhicaryāvatāra.
Gyirong Valley, South-West
Tibet Near Milarepa's Cave at Nyalam
Image from ''Gyirong Valley'' at Great Tibet Tour
Between wonder and mystery, the journey unfolds, mountains of possibility in skies opening to infinity, the seeker questing for an ultimate wisdom, the Great Mother Prajnaparamita, as understood in Tibetan Buddhism, ''the road goes ever on and on, out from the door where it began, many paths to tread, through shadows to the edge of night, until the stars are all alight,'' Tolkien in his The Lord of the Rings, resonant with the contemplative journey navigating mind as cosmos, cosmos as mind.
''This is a place where flowers bloom,
And many kinds of trees dance and sway;
The birds here sing their tuneful melodies,
And monkeys gambol in the woods.
It is pleasant and delightful to stay here alone.
Truly this is a quiet and peaceful place.
With my Guru [ imagined ] above my head [ transmitting blessings] , it is joyful here to meditate;
It is pleasant here to enjoy the Inner Heat [generated through meditation, enabling living in the solitude of cold mountains] ;
It is happy here to practice the Illusory Body [the illusion of believing that phenomena have an independent, self subsistent existence],
The spontaneous liberation from all worldly desires.
Happy is the melting away of the dream of confusion;
Joyous is absorption in the Great Illumination;
Happy is the sight of the dark Blindness leaving;
Joyful it is to become Buddha Himself [ the founder of Buddhism, the
the primary exemplar on the Buddhist path]
....
It is happy to realize completely
The true nature of Bardo [ existence below the ultimate ]
and to remain
In the transcendental realm of the Great Bliss.
Your Father finds so much happiness and pleasure
In enjoying his invaluable blessings-
The joy of eating luscious fruits grown on the mountain,
And drinking sweet cool water from the springs.
…
Look up to the face of Buddha!
If your compassion ever grows,
You will have no enemy!
My sons, you should regard others as dearer than
yourself.
( From The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, translated and annotated by Garma Chang, Shambhala, 1962, 291-292)
From Imagination to the Ultimate
Is there an ultimate truth? If so, what form or shapes could it take?
"Who are we?," "Why are we here?," "Where are we coming from?," "Where are we going to?," "How best may we live?," questions answered through images distilling our experience and aspirations, images that reflect each other, reverberating into infinity, Akinwumi Ogundiran’s description of the Orisa tradition, from a journey of countless hours spent watching and listening to devotees of the religion of Olodumare and Eshu, a journey exploring movement between the forces that define existence and the progress of those people from their life amongst rocks at the beginning of their community, to living as creators of great cities, to dispersals among others across oceans, yet the same rhythms persisting, resonating with Milarepa on the sublime images of his faith, from the lofty Vajra Dhara, elevated beyond space and time yet benign with compassion on those trapped within time and space, to the Buddhas of Space and Time, guides to the ultimacies beyond time and space, as constructs meant to aid the mind in its progress towards that beyond images, beyond thought, enabling all. A crackling in the fecund void. Silence as womb, the space where Milarepa and I meet in the nexus of mind.
A View from Another of Milarepa's Caves of Abode and Meditation
Shyakung / Milarepa Cave in Manang
"Shyakung in Bhraga-Manang, where Tibet's yogi saint and poet Jetsun Milarepa
spent 3 years, while meditating during his Himalayan journey in the11th century."
Still and description of cave from YouTube film posted by Tashi R. Ghale
Those beautifully jagged peaks, framed by the loftily distant blue of translucent skies, resonate with Andrew Wilson's reflections on the Himalayas:
At night, amid these vast mountains, surrounded
by icy peaks, shining starlike and innumerable as the hosts of heaven, and
looking up to the great orbs flaming in the unfathomable abysses of space, one
realises the immensity of physical existence in an overpowering and almost
painful manner. What am I? What are all these Tibetans [ the humans in whose country these peaks are] compared with the long
line of gigantic mountains? And what are the mountains and the whole solar system
as compared with any group of great fixed stars?
( From Andrew Wilson, The Abode of Snow, 1876, Quoted by Robin McFarlane in Mountains of Mind)
By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us
with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our
excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability
and the importance of our schemes.
( From Mountains of Mind)
Methods of Quest for the Ultimate
One leg in each world.
I no longer search for this ultimacy with the almost desperate longing I once did. I was not physically with my guru in the Tibetan cave, but as as he did in his cave, I have often meditated alone in a forest in Benin-City on the same quest, in a space ablaze with a presence invisible but palpable, elevated but intimate. I have not escaped from society but regular withdrawal into my own interiority is my way of life.
These realities meet me wherever I am. To each his own.
"The path has crossed the river, the river has crossed the path, which is the elder?
What is Religious Genius?
This essay was written under the inspiration of the question, " what is religious genius?" provoked by John Burnaby's summation of the Christian mystic and philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo in his essay on Augustine in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1971, "The secret of [ Augustine's ] influence is to be found, not so much in the brilliance and profundity of his intellect, the magic of his style or the validity of his constructions, as in the unique power of his religious genius."
"What could that mean?" I wondered. ''It must refer to the embodiment of religious sensitivity, dramatising profound commitment to values beyond the immediacies of existence, embracing the most fundamental meanings of being,'' I concluded. ''Do I know any examples of such sensitivities?,'' I reflected.
Among the many such I have come across, I have long been inspired by Milarepa, and have recently been deeply moved by the thinkers Akinwumi Ogundiran and Toyin Falola on Yoruba thought and Nimi Wariboko on creativity in terms of the image of a void, seemingly empty but alive with bottomless potential the human being may draw upon.
Mountains,
Sky and Lake in Tibetan Landscape
From Tibet Wallpapers
''Dew pour lightly, pour lightly
Dew pour heavily, pour heavily,
Dew pour heavily so that you may pour lightly.
Thus Ifa was consulted for Olofin Otete
Who would pour myriads of existences down upon the Earth.''
From Yoruba Ifa poem ''Ayajo Asuwada,'' quoted in Akinsola Akiwowo's ''Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry,'' International Sociology, 1986)
Correlating Milarepa with Multi-Cultural Streams
How could I integrate Wariboko on voidness in Principles of Excellence, Ogundiran on Yoruba Orisa cosmology in The Yoruba : A New History and Falola on the orisa, the deity Eshu, from his edited Eshu :Yoruba God, Power and Imaginative Frontiers and "Ritual Archives," with Milarepa's life and thought? Could these conjunctions facilitate unveiling the essences of religious sensitivity, grounded in specific spiritualities but going beyond them?
The essay above is a response to that question. Ogundiran is explicitly referenced. I describe the image theory of Milarepa's school in terms of Ogundiran's theory of myth making in Orisa cosmology. Falola is evoked through reference to the expression "one leg in both worlds'', the material and the spiritual, as is understood of Eshu, although Falola's name is not mentioned, while the Wariboko evocation emerges in the reference to the void, although his own name too is not stated, both names being left out on account of my intuitive response to the poetic rhythm of the piece. Their inspiration remains resonant and will continually be reflected upon, possibly emerging in new synergies.
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Mountains, Sky, Lake and Bird in Tibetan Landscape
From Tibet Wallpapers
The small and the vast. The bird, the lake, the mountains and the sky. The vitality of life within the grandeur of the cosmos.
"Sen Rikyū, in his garden at Sakai, obstructed the open view of the sea so that only when guests stooped at the stone basin to perform ablutions prior to entering the cha-shitsu [ house for ceremonial tea drinking in Japanese architecture ] did they catch an unexpected glimpse through the trees of shimmering sea, thus suddenly being made to realize the relation of the dipperful of water lifted from the basin to the vast expanse of sea and of themselves to the universe."
From "Japanese Garden," Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Can humans touch cosmic mind, if such a mind exists? Is immersion in such a mind possible, even if only briefly, as mystics claim?
"The cosmic mind does not contain the particulars of human knowledge and experience but is an exalted level of evaluation," states Harvey Spencer Lewis in the Rosicrucian Manual of the Rosicrucian school AMORC.
The picture above of the bird alighting on a lake within the vastness of water, mountain and skyscape, incidentally evokes classic images of the human quest to locate oneself and the human species within the cosmic drama, and for some, to touch the source of all in a primal fecundity imaged by the generative powers of water, its often mysterious depths and visual brilliance suggesting something compelling and yet beyond full grasp.
"Ultimately and most importantly, mountains quicken our sense of wonder. The true blessing of mountains is not that they provide a challenge or a contest, something to be overcome and dominated (although this is how many people have approached them). It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels – whether it is the dark swirls which water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss which form on the lee sides of boulders and trees.
Being in the mountains reignites our astonishment at the simplest transactions
of the physical world: a snowflake a millionth of an ounce in weight falling on
to one’s outstretched palm, water patiently carving a runnel in a face of
granite, the apparently motiveless shift of a stone in a scree-filled gully. To
put a hand down and feel the ridges and scores in a rock where a glacier has passed,
to hear how a hillside comes alive with moving water after a rain shower, to
see late summer light filling miles of landscape like an inexhaustible liquid – none of these is a
trivial experience. Mountains return to us
the priceless capacity for wonder which can so insensibly be leached away by
modern existence, and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday
lives.
(From Mountains of Mind)
A Quest for Synthesis
I seek the correlation of various bodies of knowledge beceause of the thrill of learning and the aspiration to be like God.To embody the unity of all possibilities. An impossible dream but one which ensures that I am always hungry for knowledge, a raging fire consuming me in its white hot flame, a luminescence within which I have to remind myself that I am human, and knowledge, no matter how intimate in its penetration into and companionship with ideas, cannot replace humanity.
In this context, a significant degree of conventional social structurings, the values we struggle for as our way of passing time in our journeys from the unknown to the unknown or which we are driven to live by through the compulsion of biology or society, fall away as rags.
To what degree are we alive to the mystery that is our existence, seeking to understand this mystery, as different from being told what to believe or how to live, by society or biology?
Mount Everest Close Up from Tingri at Sunrise
Image by Jerome Ryan from Mountains of Travel
''To the Tibetans and Nepalis it was (and still is) unfathomable why a mountain as magnificent as Chomolungma (the Tibetan name for Everest, meaning Mother Goddess of the World) or Sagarmatha (the Nepali name for Everest, meaning Forehead of the Ocean, or Goddess of the Sky) should be named after a human being [George Everest].
...
I was a twelve-year-old in my grandparents’ house in the Scottish Highlands when I first came across one of the great stories of mountaineering: The Fight for Everest, an account of the 1924 British expedition during which George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared near the summit of Everest:
There was a sudden clearing of the atmosphere above me, and I saw the whole summit ridge and final peak of Everest unveiled. I noticed far away on a snow slope leading up to what seemed to me to be the last step but one from the base of the final pyramid, a tiny object moving and approaching the rock step. A second object followed, and then the first climbed to the top of the step. As I stood intently watching this dramatic appearance, the scene became enveloped in cloud …
Over and over I read that passage, and I wanted nothing more than to be one of those two tiny dots, fighting for survival in the thin air.
That was it – I was sold on adventure.''
(From Mountains of Mind)
Thanks to the Reader
Thanks for sharing with me one of my companions on this quest to understand the ultimate meaning of it all, to the degree that it can be understood, Jetsun Milarepa, Buddhist poet hermit, exemplifying both the hunger and the loneliness of searching for meanings that are often not central to how humanity lives, a picture of Milarepa interwoven with the ideas of other luminosities about these quests for ultimate reality.
Ogundiran and Falola on Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology, Wariboko on the restless void of creativity, Sullivan, Fermor and Armstrong on contemplative withdrawal from the world, Messner and McFarlane on the wonders of mountaineering, Sen Rikyū on intimations of cosmic unity in Japanese gardening, and more, contemporary African, European and Asian thinkers from varied temporal zones correlated with the 11th century Asian master, African, European and Asian architectures of thought in dialogue, in synthesis with Wariboko's ideas on the fecundity of space imaginatively understood, evoking resonances across cultures.
May the ultimate reality be seen as the unity of all possible perspectives, grounded in the infinity that makes such awareness possible, adapting Ulli Beier on Olodumare in Yoruba cosmology in The Return of the Gods and Dion Fortune on Ain Soph in Jewish and Hermetic Kabbalah in The Tree of Life, as these ideas reverberate in solidarity with other conceptions from other contexts?
Mountains, Lake and Dynamic Sky in Tibetan Landscape
From Tibet Wallpapers
''[Conrad] Gesner was one of the first thinkers to propose
the idea that the world of mountains was a world entirely apart: an upper realm
in which physical laws operated differently and where conventional, lowland
ideas of time and space were turned topsy-turvy.
‘Up there’, Nature was not like herself at all. The elements metamorphosed into one another, disregarding their natural states and interactions, and complicating the human relationship with matter. The hierarchy of the elements was reordered – the hot sun had no purchase on the ice, which remained defiantly solid before it.
‘Up there’, the transparent wind became visible: once filled with ice crystals or snow flakes, its billows and contours were given dramatic visual expression. The air, too, was clearer, and thinner; and the blue of the sky an entirely different hue and texture, more like tinted porcelain, from the overcast serge of a lowland sky.
As I gazed across the valley at the light flattening the scene, and at the rows of waterfalls, I thought of Gesner’s letter. Of a truth the highest parts of the loftiest peaks seem to be above the laws that rule our world below, as if they belonged to another sphere. He was right. The mountains are another world.
Nowhere but in the mountains do you become so aware of the incorrigible plurality of light, of its ability to alter its texture rapidly and completely. Even the light of the desert doesn’t rival mountain light for velocity of change. Light in the mountains can be harsh and volatile: the dazzle and flicker of a snowstorm in sunshine, for instance, like a flutter of blades; or the ostentatious splendour – the extravagant son et lumière show – of a thunderstorm.
On a bright day snow and ice-fields glow with a magnesium intensity, a white light so concentrated that you cannot look directly at it for long without the risk of searing your cornea. At dusk, light can take on a matt, atomized quality, as though it were composed of vast and visible photons.
Mountain light can also be architectural: the spires and pillars of luminescence which certain cloud configurations build, or the fan vaulting effect created when the sun shines from below and behind a jagged rock ridge.
It can be visionary, as when you climb above the clouds and the light strikes off the fields of ice beneath you, and it seems as though there are brilliant white kingdoms stretching as far as the eye can see. There is the Midas light, the rich yellow light which spills lengthways across the mountains, turning everything it touches to gold.
And there is the light which falls at the end of a mountain day, and unifies the landscape with a single texture. This light possesses a gentle clarity, and brings with it implications of tranquility, integrity, immanence.
Trekking through Tibet en route to Everest in 1921, George Mallory experienced this light. By day he found Tibet to be an unsightly country of rough gravel plains and abrupt, jagged hillsides. For Mallory, the angles and textures of the landscape were all wrong; its appearance grated on his eye. But, ‘in the evening light’, he wrote back to his wife, Ruth, ‘this country can be beautiful, snow mountains and all: the harshness becomes subdued, shadows soften the hillsides; there is a blending of lines and folds until the last light, so that one comes to bless the absolute bareness, feeling that here is a pure beauty of form, a kind of ultimate harmony’. ''
( From Mountains of Mind )
Paradoxes of Thought and Expression
Ọ̀rọ̀, thought and expression, roams the universe naked, its radiance forbidden to the naked gaze lest the perceiver is unable to manage the intensity of this capacity shared with the creator of the universe. It thus must be approached through the indirection of imaginative expression, the most penetrating mode of communication, horses of discourse vital for the unravelling of meaning, its rediscovery as it is recurrently lost in the complexity of human activity, goes an orientation developed in Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language ( 2014). The sensitivity to the delights and power, the creativity and tensions of the quest to know and express, taking seekers from speech to silence, from syllables to the voidness of no speech, where communication is wordless, is central to homo sapiens as the one who knows and who can reflect on his knowing.
Glorious Peak in Tibet
From Tibet Wallpapers
A Visit to a Himalayan Hermit
''...she saw in her mind’s eye a terrain of enormous dimensions, plains that seemed to lie in baking sun forever and ever, and beyond them the rising foothills and then the mountains themselves. The greatest mountains on earth.
She visualized herself as an eagle flying closer, and as she approached the range her vision became more restricted in scope, but in detail more and more explicit.
At last she stood upon the mountain side and saw around her a proliferation of beautiful plant life, from the enormous bushes richly decked with clusters of waxy purple flowers to the tiniest ferns and mosses.
She lifted her gaze and beyond the mountain where she stood she saw, rising to the blue immensity of the sky itself, a giant peak of virginal crystal, the sunlight glancing off the sharp facets of its sides, the rock she knew to be below the ice and snow darkly silent and brooding.
She stood very still and watched the eagle whose body she had borrowed lift off
and fly to a craggy place a long way to the east.
She felt the mountain silently about her, and its power was greater than the puny stone circles her people built.
This rock seemed conscious. She felt as though it were examining her. She
was afraid of the force she felt, the unusual strength of the thoughts that came
into her mind.
The air, the watching plants, the invisible rays from the mountain itself seemed to be working on her, purifying her, clarifying her mind until she could see everything, not only the things around, but everything in great and perfect detail from every angle simultaneously.
Vision upon vision of incredible intricacy arose for her and she saw the beauty of her earth contained like a leaf in amber, its own beauty far outdone by the beauty of that which contained it and was everywhere around it.
Even the crystal giant above her she could see now was just one peak in a series of peaks, each shimmering with a richer and more brilliant light.
She felt her heart would burst, unable to contain so much visionary splendour,
so many feelings crowding into her of understanding and awareness. She wanted
to cry ... for help, to escape from this throbbing, powerful place. If
what she had been taught about earth currents [ currents of energy in
the earth able to empower the human mind ] was correct, this place must be the
centre of them all. Her people were right to send her to these mountains to
test herself against them.
The vast energies that had formed them were still within them and she knew that now and for as long as they stood they would be a challenge worthy of any man’s acceptance. Some would test themselves bodily against the rock faces and the ice and ultimately against the peak of peaks. Others would stay in meditation and in silence absorbing the spiritual energies to the limit of their endurance and capacity.
Feeling herself almost at that point she began to tremble, and as though in answer to her unspoken plea for help she noticed that a man had joined her. He came crawling out of a hole in the rock face of the mountain and stood before her blinking owlishly in the light. He was the thinnest man she had ever seen, a skeleton with a fine white pall of skin drawn over his bones, but his eyes were alive and dynamic. She remembered now she had seen just such a ragged, ancient, bony man amongst the grand Lords of the Sun.
‘Yes,’ he said smiling, and when he smiled his hideous skull face became beautiful. ‘Yes, we have met before.’ She felt better now that she was no longer alone. She knew also she had succeeded in her task, because he was the man she had been sent to meet.
...
He lifted his hand to make her silent, and then carefully chose a flat stone and sat upon it cross-legged, going almost immediately into a kind of trance.
She watched him for a while, puzzled and ill at ease, at a loss to know what to do next.
At last she felt the need to sit beside him, cross-legged too, and so she did. She
stared at the scenery around her, wondering at its beauty and its remoteness
from any other living human being...
...
They sat in silence for a long time and Kyra had never experienced before such profundity and clarity of understanding.
She would have liked to stay forever, but something was pulling her away.
As though he sensed it, he looked at her and the strange, silent spell that had
been on her and in which she had understood so much was broken.
He stood up, bowed slightly to her, and returned to his cave.
She saw that the afternoon must have progressed a great deal since she arrived, and a long purple shadow from the immense peak was lying across the land almost to the horizon. Everything in its path had a strange softness as though it were dissolving.
She too stood up and forced herself to shut her eyes and remember who she was and where she had left her body. She longed to open her eyes again, to stay in this powerful, beautiful place but she knew she was not ready to leave forever her husband and her daughter, no matter how much beauty and understanding were offered in their place.
With this thought she was home, and she opened her eyes to the encircling stones of the northern inner sanctum of the Temple of the Sun.''
( From Moyra Caldecott, The Temple of the Sun, Mushroom eBooks, 2006)
Salutations to the Reader
Thanks for coming with me on this journey to meet an embodiment of great ideas who has long lit my path, my companion across the distance of centuries, in dialogue with more recent voices I have encountered, participating in the great conversation across time and space as humanity tries to make sense of its place in the dynamism of the cosmos.
Tibetan Monks in a Glorious Landscape and Skyscape
From One Big Photo
''Mountains also reshape our understandings of ourselves, of our own interior landscapes. The remoteness of the mountain world – its harshnesses and its beauties – can provide us with a valuable perspective down on to the most familiar and best charted regions of our lives. It can subtly reorient us and readjust the points from which we take our bearings. In their vastness and in their intricacy, mountains stretch out the individual mind and compress it simultaneously: they make it aware of its own immeasurable acreage and reach and, at the same time, of its own smallness.''
( From Mountains of Mind )
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
From Yoruba Ifa poem ''Ayajo Asuwada,'' quoted in Akinsola Akiwowo's ''Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry,'' International Sociology, 1986, 343-358, 350)
