Here we are at Pollonurawa. The sun is beating down and the car stereo is blasting out; " jingle bells, jingle bells..!" I had forgotten to mention that one interesting feature of my pilgrimage to Sri Lanka was that most of the cars that I travelled in were tuned to Classic Gold on their car radio. This meant that the interesting sights of this wonderful country were inevitably accompanied by the pop music of the fifties and sixties. To my delight I reailsed that I knew most of the words to the songs and remembered that such tunes had been the background theme music to my chilhood where either the radio or the television was playing all the time.
However, since I returned the awful strains of " tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree" seem to play over and over in my head. This is serious brainwashing and my only hope is that some catchy dirge from Hymns A&M might replace it!
Fortunately for me, Tania had grown tired of classic Gold when we visited Pollonaruwa, so she asked the driver to put on a CD and he chose a Christmas compilation! We drove up to the first temple complex to the sounds of "Silent Night", and now here we were: " dashing through the snow on a one horse open sleigh" while it was 32 degrees centigrade outside the car.
The other factor to my exploration which was disconcerting was that when I tried to take a photograph at the first temple complex, my camera did not work and I realised it had flat batteries. I also realised that for the first time on the holiday I had not brought any spares with me. I was disappointed at first but then thought that maybe it was a good thing because instead of looking through a camera lense at the wonderful statues, I could look with " the eyes of my heart".
I was now set only going straight to Gal Vihara where Thomas Merton had stood. My hostess asked if I would like to go here or there because Pollonaruwa is a vast, ruined complex from the third century AD with many stupas and public buildings. Its development coincided with the construction of the Minneriya tank that I talked about in a previous blog which led to an increase in wealth through agriculture. The whole site is a showpiece of Sinhalese culture whose vast ground plan and artefacts are portrayed very clearly in the good (ac'd!), modern musuem, nearby, which we visited afterwards.
Ad so we drove to an avenue of trees and a large empty lake to where the vast statues could be seen dominating a rock face in the distance. The layout has changed since Thomas Merton visited this place in the sixties. There are now two vast metal canopies over the statues and there are altars before them. I am not sure whether the canopies are there to protect the statues or the humans from the sun. In the case of the latter, they did not succeed. I had to leave my shoes some distance from the area where the statues are now cordoned off. It was agony walking across the burning sand and I could find only a tiny sliver of shade, pressed hard against the altar where I could be comfortable enough to gaze on the first statue. I thought about how rash lovers might say to their beloved: " I would walk across burning coals to you" and wondering if they knew what that really meant.
I looked up at the seated Buddha before me and was immediately struck by the rich sensuality of the statue's face. The delicate flare of the nostrils, the beauty of the heavy lidded eyes, gently and lightly closed, the sensuous lips of the closed mouth and the ears, open and long. It was as if its creator had tried to convey the fullness of each sense through its organ on the face. It seemed to me that each sense was fully occupied in becoming itself but also flowing into the energy centre. I know little about Chakras but I know they have an important role to pay in spirituality because they make it embodied and grounded. As an incarnational faith, it seems to me that Christianity does not pay enough attention to our body. Thomas Merton says on p.91 of his Asian Journal:
" ..the sixth point above the mandala's five points. The mandala is constructed only to be dissolved... No six without the five. The six make "eternal life." Note that when the body is regarded as a mandala, the five chakras ( sex, navel, heart, throat, head) are completed by the sixth "above the head".
It was clear that this statue was made to show the energy flow from each of the chakras. even the pattern on the stone flowed too, in a gracious rhythm down the seated Buddha to his lap. The Kundalini energy centre at the base of the spine, the coiled serpent of sexuaity, was covered by the Buddha's hands and folded legs. Here was the pace where all sensuality was offered and all eroticism given up in love through the long slow process of surrender through meditation.
Looking at this wonderful, beautiful statue of the young Buddha, brimming over with life and desire taught me much about the early strivings of prayer. It showed me how we are constantly trying to tame our wayward senses and desires, erroneously and that perhaps the answer is to allow them to be who they are but channelled into the pursuit of compassionate love- into the very heart of the source of all love. What we Christians would call the Sacred Heart, or the heart of God.
Here, before me, was a man, the Buddha, striving to live in that silent conversation between the Beloved One and its beloved ( To paraphrase Una's Way of Love). All his sensuality was being poured into the place of divine compassion and joy.
I find that recalling this moment has taken far more of me than I anticipated and so I will have to wait until later to write about the other statues in Gal Vahara. However, I think this is a good place to pause before we move on to enlightenment..
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