Quick Blast Of Buddhism

[sabaijai]

Quick blast of Buddhism

by John Naish

A troupe of Tibetan monks is packing our theatres. Why are secular Britons so drawn to dharma?

Modern Britain does not normally consider religion to be much of a spectator event. The funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, apart, we seem resolutely averse to the idea of sitting watching Christian celebrants at work. Nevertheless, I’m in a capacity crowd of white middle-class types at a Nottingham theatre, avidly watching two hours of sacred rituals for entertainment. The difference is that these are traditional Tibetan rituals, performed by Tibetan monks.

Has Buddhism become the exception to our religious rule? Or is their following just another example of our modern pick’n’mix attitude to spirituality? The spectacle in itself is certainly growing in popularity. The monks of Tashi-Lhunpo monastery, whose four-month tour of Britain is filling venues with the curious, the dilettantish and the devout, are frankly far more entertaining than your average Anglican clergy. The evening rips open with gut-shaking blasts on long horns and proceeds through a psychedelic whirl of chanting, dancing, drums, cymbals and processions.

“We first came to Britain in 2000. Now we are back and seeing more and more people in the audience,” says the monks’ leader, Kelkang Rinpoche. “We are not here to convert people but to show our culture. Whatever your belief, you can leave with the same belief.” Rinpoche joined the monastery at the age of 6, having been recognised as a reincarnation of a revered Tibetan Buddhist teacher. He is, like many Tibetans, big-boned and muscular. He sits looking settled and happy in his soul. He and his fellow monks giggle a lot.

Rimpoche learnt his impressive English in idiosyncratically Buddhist style: his impecunious monastery could support only a three-year course, so Rimpoche studied it for three years. Then he began again, reincarnated as a first-year. His fluency is a boon when answering potentially difficult questions from curious Brits. “Many of them ask what the differences are between Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. I say it’s like going from anywhere in Britain to London; the journeys are different but the destination is the same.”

In fact, the monks’ next stop is Brighton, where next week they will perform one show and spend four days painstakingly creating an intricate mandala out of millions of grains of sand on the floor of the city’s Unitarian church, as part of the Brighton Festival of World Sacred Music. “We love performing in churches. It is just like being in a temple. It is spiritual and better for us. The only difference is that your churches have lots more chairs,” says Rinpoche. “The Tibetan Buddhist mandalas have various functions. One of them is for medicine, dedicated to helping the health of those all around.” Mandalas are intricate geometric circular patterns of bright colours that represent a microcosm of all the powers at work in the universe. They are also mesmerically detailed. But at the end of the four days, when the mandala is completed, it is ceremonially swept away.

“We never keep it because it is impermanent. All things are impermanent,” says Rinpoche. “It is one of the great lessons of non-attachment. Western people often don’t understand that the whole point of the mandala is its destruction. To us, it is just like music; it passes.” In fact, it feels an affront to our Western attitude towards art, where everything should be preserved.

It’s not the only affront that the mandalas have caused. The monks have created the symbols at Anglican cathedrals in Lichfield and Salisbury, though not everyone at Salisbury welcomed it. John Fergusson, a Christian missionary and member of Salisbury Diocese, argued: “On this mandala there appears to be a throne with snakes on it surrounded by eight deities. That is getting pretty close to idolatry. The Bible is clear in its instructions not to get involved in idolatry. The promotion of another means of salvation will confuse people.” But the cathedral’s canon chancellor, Edward Probert, was unabashed, saying: “Based on confidence in our own faith, we are more than happy to promote greater understanding of other faith traditions.”

The Tashi-Lhunpo monks are keen to use the tour to create bridges, says Rinpoche. “One of our events is a public conversation with a group of Benedictine monks.” But in our mix’n’match world, Buddhism appeals most to secular Britons. At the end of a fortnight riven by debate over Muslim dress, it may be useful to note that Buddhism could well be Britain’s fastest growing religion. In Glasgow in the 2001 census, for example, the number of converts defining themselves as Buddhist soared by 28.5 per cent in a decade. The Muslim population rose by just 0.7 per cent. The census also reveals that Buddhism lags behind Judaism in England by only 0.2 per cent. And in Westminster 1 per cent of the population considers itself Buddhist. These census figures exclude those who consider themselves to be both Buddhists and Christians, Jews, or anything else.

Perhaps the faith is yin to our yang: something in our shopping-obsessed souls yearns for the idea of non-attachment to material things. Amid all our busyness, we seek the stillness of meditation. Buddhism offers us a mysticism that seems denied by traditional British religion and the apparent certainties of science. It helps, too, that Buddhism’s focus on our relationship with nature fits nicely with the green agenda.

Religious Buddhist practice involves dedication, long meditation and life-changing rigour. But for those who can’t be bothered with that, Buddhism has also become a designer label, an intrinsically “good thing”: the lotus position is used on posters to sell everything from scented candles to underfloor heating. Western consumerism has neatly subverted Buddhism’s central tenet, the denial of the ego. In British Budd-lite, we aren’t expected to renounce our selves, but can use our “spirituality” to prove that we are less egotistical than the next guy. When Westlife’s Kian Egan and his actress girlfriend Jodil Albert announced their conversion last year, their focus seemed more on interior decor than interior life. “I wanted to do something to the flat and a friend introduced me to Buddhism,” says Albert. “I got Kian to buy a Buddha statue and we’ve made our spare room look really mystical with it.”

The Tashi-Lhunpo monks’ own reality is hardly all saffron and dancesteps. The community is clinging to existence in Mysore, Southern India, after escaping into exile from Chineseoccupied Tibet. Its spiritual head, the 11th reincarnation of the Panchen Llama, was incarcerated by the Chinese in 1999 at the age of 10 and has been held ever since. And what the monks perform on stage for us for five minutes can go on for five hours or more in the monastery.

My favourite part of the monks’ British performance is a ritual about denial of fleshly existence, which is traditionally held in graveyards and uses trumpets made from human legbones and drums from human skulls. A frisson of discomfort rippled through the audience as the monks raised their instruments to play. True Buddhism, it seems, is bloodier, deeper and stranger than our joss sticks and soapstone statuettes.

Source: The Times