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"There
are moments during the process of imaginative creation when
seemingly diverse fantasies start to beat in time and then
swell into a single resonance. A great chord is struck and
held for a while. Both participants and listeners seem
overcome with the primordial, archetypal purity of the
sound. Everything then becomes a signifier for this great
imaginative chord. At this moment the sacred place is truly
born; its imaginative history begins. It then has its own
coherence and logic ... We have come a long way from the
vague Romantic generalizations so common earlier in the
century."
***
"Whilst the term Aryan had first arisen in the eighteenth
century through the discovery of a linguistic relationship
between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, by the 1850s it had
outgrown its philological origins. It became associated with
the idea of an 'original race' who formed the light-bearing
vanguard of true civilization. Darwin's evolutionary theory
gave the Aryan fantasy a much-needed scientific framework
which also dovetailed beautifully with imperial demands."
***
"What
fine baseless fabrics might not a cosmographer build on this
situation, who, from a peat or an oyster-shell can determine
the different changes which volcanoes, inundations and
earthquakes have produced on the face of this globe."
***
"I
took one more long took at the boundless prospect. There is
no loftier country on the globe than that embraced by this
view, and no more howling wilderness. Were it buried in
everlasting snows, or burnt by a tropical sun, it might
still be as utterly sterile; but with such sterility I had
long been familiar. Here the colorings are those of the
fiery desert or volcanic island, while the climate is that
of the poles."
***
"I
find it extremely difficult to describe in an adequate
manner the extreme desolation of the most barren parts of
Tibet, where no luxuriant forest or bright green herbage
softens the nakedness of the mountains, but everywhere the
same precipices, heaps of rocks, and barren monotonous
desert meets the eye. The prospect before me was certainly
most wonderful. I had nowhere before seen a country so
utterly waste."
***
"How
wonderful the order and perfection of the inorganic universe
as compared with the misery and confusion of the organic!
There is some refuge for the spirit in the order and beauty
of this unfeeling inorganic nature."
***
"It
was, he wrote, a region 'where nothing dies since nothing
lives there.'"
***
"Far
as the eye could reach, the unknown, unnamed mountains of
Tibet indented the bright horizon with their spears and
horns."
***
"It
struck me forcibly before I left Zanskar that there must be
some unknown relationship between the people of that
province and the Scottish Highlanders. The sound of their
varieties of language, the brooches which fasten their
plaids, the varieties of tartan, even the features of the
people, strongly reminded me of the Scotch Highlanders."
***
"The
pine is trained to need nothing, and to endure everything.
It is resolvedly whole, self-contained, desiring nothing but
rightness, content with restricted completion."
***
"'What
am I?' he asked. And in reply he quoted the Buddhist hymn,
'all is transitory, all is misery, all is void, all is
without substance'."
***
"'So
cold was the wind that a young eagle fell dead a few yards
from my tent.' Of 3,500 yaks assembled by the British army
in 1904, only 150 survived the crossing into Tibet. Hedin,
on one of his Tibetan explorations, grimly referred to the
lengthening 'death-register' of animals. Littledale reported
that 'not a day passed but several animals had to be shot or
abandoned. It is a gruesome subject which I will not pursue
further'. Grenard sorrowfully told a similar tale: 'Our road
was marked by the carcasses of our horses.' 'In the end,' he
continued, 'all our beasts died, with the exception of two
camels. The neighbourhood of the camp became a charnel-house
infested with crows and even more horrible huge vultures.'
Frostbite killed several soldiers in 1904 as the British
crossed the Jeylap-la. Bonvalot had to bury one of his
Muslim companions in the frozen ground. Grenard's leader,
Dutreuil de Rhins, was killed by Tibetans in 1891. Even more
tragic was Dr. Susie Rijnhart, who lost both her small son
and her husband whilst trying to reach Lhasa. Grenard, as
always, expressed the melancholy of such losses: ' All these
miseries, added and multiplied together, gave me the
impression that I was sinking into a dark and silent depth
from which there is no returning!'"
***
"The
palace of the Dalai-Lama is 367 feet in height, and has
above 10,000 apartments, being the largest cloister in the
world. Its cupolas are gilded in the best style; the
interior swarms with friars, is full of idols and pagodas,
and may be looked upon as the greatest stronghold of
paganism."
***
"The
similarly proportioned gloomy portals of Egyptian fanes
naturally invite comparison; but the Tibetan temples lack
the sublimity of those; and the uncomfortable creeping
sensation produced by the many sleepless eyes of Boodh's
numerous incarnations is very different from the awe with
which we contemplate the outspread wings of the Egyptian
symbol, and feel as in the presence of him who says, 'I am
Osiris the Great: no man hath dared to lift my veil'."
***
"Lamas
as a group were invariably described as crafty and devious
in their ability to manipulate the ordinary people of Tibet
and the Himalayan region. It was even reasoned that the
Chinese Emperor paid homage to the Dalai Lama and his
religion only in order to exploit the Lama's capacity to
manipulate and control the previously aggressive Mongolian
tribes."
***
"No
wonder that the people of that country are extremely afraid
of disobeying the orders of the Government ... crucifying,
ripping open the body, pressing and cutting out the eyes,
are by no means the worst of these punishments."
***
"In
1904 The Times's special correspondent, Perceval Landon,
accompanying the British expedition fighting its way to
Lhasa, paused to visit the Nyen-de-kyi-buk monastery. After
tea with the abbot, Landon asked permission to see one of
the immured monks for which the monastery was famous. These
monks had taken a vow to live in darkness, each walled up
and entombed within a small cell just large enough for him
to sit in meditation. Some monks entered this rock-hewn home
for six months, others for three years and ninety-three
days, and many for life. Landon followed the abbot into a
small courtyard and watched, 'with cold apprehension',
whilst three sharp taps were administered to a stone slab
that covered the entrance to one of these cells:
'At first the stone seemed to be stuck, or else the
anchorite behind was too weak to move it. Then very slowly
and uncertainly it was pushed back and a black chasm
revealed. There was a pause of thirty seconds, during which
imagination ran riot, but I do not think that any other
thing could have been as intensely pathetic as that which we
actually saw. A hand, muffled in a tightly-wound piece of
dirty cloth, for all the world like the stump of an arm, was
painfully thrust up, and very weakly it felt along the slab.
After a fruitless fumbling the hand slowly quivered back
again into the darkness. A few moments later there was again
one ineffectual effort, and then the stone slab moved
noiselessly again across the opening. A physical chill
struck through me to the marrow. The awful pathos of that
painful movement struggled in me with an intense shame that
we had intruded ourselves upon a private misery'."
***
"Indeed, just to be 'above the clouds' placed Tibet into the
'once upon a time', the 'land far away, of fairy-stories.
Like the giant's castle at the top of the beanstalk, or the
palace of the gods atop Mount Olympus, Tibet was 'above the
clouds', ethereal, not of this world, a land of dreams.
Even the border war between Britain and Tibet in 1888 was
hardly taken seriously. 'It has one characteristic',
commented The Spectator, 'which takes it out of the range of
common conflicts. It has been waged above the clouds and not
remote from the line of eternal snow.' In 1904 The Spectator
again could not quite treat the capture of Lhasa by British
troops as a serious event: 'It is more like the adventure
which children love as "Jack and the Beanstalk', than any
ever recorded by grave historians.'"
***
"The Tibetans were
renowned for misleading Western travelers and
giving wrong directions. 'It is almost impossible to get the correct names
of places or lakes in Tibet, as every Tibetan lies on every occasion on
which
he does not see a good valid reason for telling the truth,' wrote an exasperated Bower. Elsewhere, he exclaimed: 'it is terribly hard work trying to
get
geographical information out of Tibetans, and when in exceptional cases,
as does occasionally happen, a vein of truth runs through their statements, it is so fine as to be almost impossible to discover'."
***
"Grenard
wryly mentioned finding 'a box containing six cakes of
scented soap, which were the only specimens of soap that
could be discovered within the radius of Lhasa in the month
of January 1894 and which their purchaser was delighted to
sell to us after having them for forty years in his shop'."
***
"The
Tibetans seemed to inhabit a pre-Copernican world. The
flat-earth theory had long been a source of amusement in the
West, a sign of medieval ignorance and stubbornness, if not
lunacy. Younghusband reported a conversation with the head
abbot of the Tashi Lumpo monastery, near Shigatse. He was,
wrote Younghusband, 'a courteous, kindly man', 'a charming
old gentleman'. However, he firmly interjected when
Younghusband 'let slip some observation that the earth was
round'. Younghhusband continued: '[he] assured me that when
I had lived longer in Tibet, I should find that it was not
round, but flat, and not circular, but triangular, like the
bone of a shoulder of mutton.'"
***
"Gold
is, of course, a major symbol for the goal of psychic
transformation. For the alchemist it represented both the
aspiration and the completion of the opus, the spiritual
journey. As Jung writes, gold is a symbol of eternity, of
paradise, and hence of the psychological centre. In relation
to gold, he quotes an alchemical text: 'Visit the centre of
the earth. There you will find the global fire.' Wilson
echoed these sentiments when he wrote: 'It is no wonder,
then, that a Chinese proverb speaks of Tibet as being at
once the most elevated and the richest country in the world.
If the richest mineral treasures in the world lie there,
there is abundant reason why strangers should be kept out of
it and why it should be kept sacred for the Yellow religion.
The great cluster of mountains called the Thibetan Kailas
well deserves to be called the centre of the world. It is,
at least the greatest centre of elevation."
***
"The
Potala palace was not just a receptacle for pagan gold and
Tibetan superstition; it would also soon become that place
on the whole globe where the greatest accumulation of
imaginative gold, the aspirations of Western travelers,
could be found. Gold speaks of salvation, paradise,
boundless wealth, the centre of the world, the meeting point
of earth and heaven."
***
"Landon compared the romantic fantasies conjured up by 'the
Golden Roofs of Potala' with those of Rome in 'the
opium-sodden imagination of De Quincey'."
***
"The
continued closure of this land was therefore essential and
Wilson, whilst protesting against it, was unconsciously
defending this policy: if the real 'secret' about the
'wealth' of Tibet ever leaked out, the place would surely be
overrun and hence made worthless."
-- The
Myth of Shangri-La, by Peter Bishop |
