'By Jove! what a fine corpse he would make!'
Very brutal of him I thought it was till I had seen more corpses, and then I realised the true artistic insight of the remark.
I suppose it would be no more possible for an ordinary person to do justice to Gyantse as a sightseer than for any one who had had no classical education to visit Rome or Athens in the true academic spirit. Just as the key to those places lies in a knowledge of classical history, mythology, and archæology, so would the true key to Gyantse lie in a knowledge of the history of Buddhism in general, and of the Tibetan variations of Buddhism in particular. The main tenets of Buddhist doctrine, as one may acquire them in a handbook or an occasional magazine article, afford very little clue to Tibetan religious art. Buddha himself one can understand, and one becomes quite to know and admire the gently supercilious, ever-smiling expression that is faithfully caught in every statue and picture of him which one sees. And one can understand the motive in exemplifying the variations of human fortune by pictures of the wheel of life which show types of all the degrees of human happiness and unhappiness—instances of indescribable tortures at one side of the wheel, lesser miseries adjoining it, followed by similar gradations so arranged that as we go round the circle we come at last to fair scenes of ideal human bliss. But the application of the same kind of gradation to deities worshipped, and to the representations of them given in art, is not so easily understood. There is a certain highly symmetrical edifice standing in Gyantse monastery. The centre of it consists of one huge Buddha reaching from the ground to the height of, I should say, one hundred and fifty feet. Round this are built tiers upon tiers of small shrines; each tier contains one less shrine than the tier below it. The shrines are of equal size, so that the general effect of the whole edifice is that of a pyramid. You rise from tier to tier by a narrow hidden staircase. Each shrine contains one idol. If you start at a certain point on any of the tiers, and go round that tier, you will first enter the shrine of a perfect Buddha, for whom you will feel at least some reverence. The next shrine will contain an idol that impresses you less, and has about it some taint of the world. The next is a thoroughly worldly idol, the next is ugly, the next is obviously wicked, and the next a demon. The demons grow in demoniacal qualities till suddenly you arrive again at the Buddha from whom you started. The tiers above are all arranged on the same principle, except that, the number of shrines decreasing by one in each case, the gradation from Buddha to demon grows more abrupt as you ascend.
Then again, in the most holy of spots, not only in Gyantse but even, for instance, in the audience hall in the sacred 'Potá-Là,' or palace-monastery of Lhassa, one comes across images of what to European eyes appears the lewdest character, and similar representations are constantly found on the painted scrolls, which everywhere are seen hanging in the monasteries.
Such strange excrescences on the external face of a religion that ranks so high in regard to the spirituality of its essential tenets, and the extent and depth of its influence on human life, as does Buddhism, seem only to point to the endless intertwinings of religions that must ever have been in process since the world began. Here we have, for instance, one of the noblest and purest of religions tainted—at any rate as regards the art which is ancillary to it—with those twin poisons of demon-worship and priapism; all contact with which one would have imagined it to have been pure enough and strong enough to throw off centuries ago.
That strange similarity on less essential points that exists between religions which are far removed from each other, both in history and in doctrine, makes one long to read some really comprehensive history of human religion that will, by dipping down into the furthest depths of the past, reveal to us the answer to such problems as, for instance, the strong and apparently family likeness between the joss-sticks and tallow altar-lamp of the Buddhist, and the incense and wax-candle of ornate Christian ritual.
Though it would appear that what is barbaric may survive, in the form of ritual, as an acknowledged and in some cases, it may be, even a helpful adjunct to a religion which in every other respect has cast off all that is barbarous, yet some of those demons and those licentious pictures that we saw in Tibet seemed to the Western mind altogether too vile to be thus explained away.
But, even so, what fool shall rush in and criticise the East?