|
The Himalayas: Wanderers from the West
BY W. K. JACKSON
(continued)
So Sister Yeshe went to the world’s highest mountains to learn Tibetan and study philosophy. Her drive: “I find the West spiritually poverty-stricken. I feel my mission is to make monastic life available in the West.”
One thousand three hundred years ago, a woman named Yeshe Tsogyal was forced into a marriage with Tibet’s king despite her wishes to be a spiritual practitioner. When the king invited the revered Indian saint Padmasambhava to Tibet, Yeshe Tsogyal was given to the guru as a consort. She practiced dharma with intense dedication and became one of Padmasambhava’s chief disciples. A testament that women (“who have often been marginalized in Buddhism,” says Sister Yeshe) can also attain Enlightenment, Yeshe Tsogyal’s life, even as a disciple, was fraught with difficulty. Once, she was gang-raped by bandits, but her high level of spirituality allowed her to turn the rape – one of man’s lowest impulses – into a wonderful teaching opportunity during which she actually gave blessings to her one-time attackers.
More than a millennium later, an Australian nun took upon herself the designation of Yeshe, and, like her namesake before her, found the strength to turn a seemingly unbearable situation (her father’s death) into the springboard event to her attainment of peace. And like Yeshe Tsogyal, Sister Yeshe practiced in the world for a time, then went to the hills.
* * *
I am not a Buddhist.
But being in the hills, talking with Paul and Sister Yeshe and Phil and Constanzo and Maxim (some of whom the reader is, of course, yet to meet), I am reminded that mountains embody a spirituality not only for Tibetan Buddhists but also for Christians, and especially for members of my own church – the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons).
Abraham was commanded – as a test that symbolized the sacrifice of God’s own Son – to offer up his son Isaac as a sacrifice on a mountain, in the end prevented from doing so by an angel who appeared to him there. The Lord of Hosts commanded Moses, on the sacred, dusty slopes of Mount Sinai, to “put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground”. Later God’s law was delivered to Israel from atop the mountain. Almost two thousand years later, Jesus Christ himself suffered in prayer, bleeding from every pore, on a mount: The Mount of Olives. The next day the Savior was lifted up and crucified, giving his life for all mankind on another hill: Golgotha.
To Latter-day Saints, particularly, mountains hold a singular sacredness. At times when poverty or emergency make the building of a temple impossible, God has allowed the holiest of ordinances to be performed on a mountain. In the Book of Mormon, scripture that we use in conjunction with the Bible, the young prophet Nephi hears the voice of the Lord tell him: “Arise, and get thee into the mountain.” Nephi is obedient to the call and receives visions and instruction that would shape a civilization - from atop the mountain. Earlier, he was “caught away by the Spirit of the Lord into an exceedingly high mountain” from where he received revelations rivaling the apostle John’s own Revelation. Other prophets in that book are also guided directly by the Lord from atop mountains.
That great Old Testament seer Isaiah prophesied that in the latter days “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the tops of the mountains”; when Brigham Young and his ragged group of pioneers entered the Salt Lake valley in 1847, flanked by the Rocky Mountains, that modern-day Moses drove his walking stick into the moisture-less earth and proclaimed, “Here we will build the temple of our God.” The “mountain of the Lord’s house” is, to me and nearly twelve million other Latter-day Saints, a phrase that stands for the temple, which, in the words of one of our apostles, is “the most holy of any place of worship on earth.”
* * *
Deep in the heart of Calcutta there is a place where old men and women, indigent and physically unable to take care of themselves, go to die together.
At one time the place was a hotel for Hindu pilgrims visiting the nearby temple of Kali, but now new sorts of pilgrims can be found here: the kind that are setting off for that most holy of pilgrimages – death – and the kind drawing on the power of compassion to aid the dying in their journey. The main room is lined with hospital-like beds, about a hundred in total, and partitioned so that the beds on one side are filled with aged, penniless, failing women and the beds on the other are occupied by aged, penniless, failing men. This is the late Mother Theresa’s Home for the Dying Destitute, and among the volunteers working there - bathing, dressing, feeding, massaging, and otherwise interacting with India’s poorest, most pitiable souls - could once be found a young man from Sheffield, England. For almost three months, the 23-year-old fed his patients at eight o’clock in the morning, then bathed them despite some protest (“obviously it’s necessary, so they can have some dignity,” he says). Many had to be carried to the bath, then carried back. He put clean clothes on them, administered medicine to them, fed them lunch, gave them basic physical therapy.
“These are people whose thighs fit inside your thumb and index finger,” he said.
And though “time flies when you’re there”, in the end Phil Beecroft needed space, some time to think about what he had just experienced, and a place to ponder. Where to go? Like the driven before him and the driven to come, the answer seemed obvious: to the mountains.
Phil has been a postman, a factory worker, a waiter – “just dead-end jobs, I suppose you could say,” he says) – and studied sculpting for three years at university. But from the age of 14, when he found himself intrigued by books on Tibet and India, the boy from Sheffield wanted to travel.
“The romance of the nomad lifestyle” appealed to Phil, who didn’t want to struggle as a professional sculptor and decided that he would save up and travel for two or three years.
“I started my job knowing that I would quit,” Phil said. “It was just a matter of time.”
The avid reader-turned-intrepid traveler was still drawn to India and Tibet, but the enticement of exotic adventure had been somewhat replaced by the trademark instinct of the driven, so Phil left to search. “Spiritual traditions that have developed over thousands of years” and “mystics” and “great people”, “balance” and “exploration” and “an impulse, but I can’t say what it is” – these all played a part in driving Phil to purchase a one-way ticket to Delhi and, finally, to board that plane.
|
|
