Nirvana

After climbing a few sets of steep stone steps, you emerge blinking into the open top level of the temple of Borobudur - Nirvana.

Each of these stupas contains a Buddha statue, many missing parts of themselves after all these centuries but still majestic. The diamond shaped gaps represent the instability of human existence; the square ones, the perfect equilibirum of enlightenment. One stupa's statue is known as the Lucky Buddha, as my guide Aisyah tells me. When terrorists hid 10 bombs in the temple complex, only this one, tucked right into the stupa, failed to explode. She tells me to touch the Buddha and make a wish.

I feel a bit unsure about touching such an ancient monument, but I do anyway. I lean precariously on the rough lip of the stupa and reach my arm through the gap between the interlocking stones, wrap my fingers around the stone thumb, close my eyes and wish.

Relief

Onlookers to the level of Earth, or Form, at Borobudur.

Borobudur!

Hot off the presses from my visit to the Buddhist temple of Borobudur in Java, Indonesia, this morning. It's reputed to be right up there with Angkor Wat (and Bagan, in Burma) - oh, and it is. One of the most beautifully intricate places I've visited, from the moralistic reliefs at the base, through the reliefs telling the jataka tales of Buddha's life, to the simple, beautiful stupas of "Nirvana" at the top level of the temple.

Cryptic, yet comforting

One of the many helpful bilingual advice signs in temples in Chiang Mai.

Moment of enlightenment

I read that statues of the reclining Buddha depict him at the moment of his enlightenment. This, the famous reclining Buddha at Wat Pho, is possibly the most beautiful Buddha in all of Thailand - and that is saying something.

When I visited Wat Pho, I was still in that new-to-Thailand state of excitement everytime I saw an orange-robed monk (you do see quite a few of them here, so it wears off a little). So I was especially pleased to see several young monks in their orange robes and their orange shoulder bags, posing in turn for digital camera photos at Buddha's feet! (The surprise wears off at that too, after your thousandth glimpse of a monk on a mobile phone, or of very young boy monks in internet cafes with enormous headphones on.)

As if the giant golden Buddha were not enough, the walls of the temple are also covered in intricate paintings telling legends (jataka? but I thought I saw Ramayana-inspired paintings). And in the wider temple complex there are some beautiful mosaic-covered chedis (stupas), which I didn't see anywhere else.

It's not possible to convey the immensity and loveliness of Wat Pho or of this Buddha in a single photograph - just go, go, go see for yourselves.

Calling the earth to witness

Buddha is subduing Mara, temptation, illusion, in the old Thai city of Sukhothai.

There are so many distractions while travelling - so much for the senses to take in and discard, so much that is unfamiliar that it overwhelms.

It isn't a bad thing, then, to have so many reminders here of that still point, a way to be alive to the world without being overwhelmed by it.

Not that I'm exactly resisting all earthly temptations, myself...

An chay

Photo: hu tieu chay at a food stall in Can Tho, Vietnam.

I'm a bit fascinated by what I've seen of Vietnamese attitudes to vegetarianism.

On one hand, Vietnam is a historically Buddhist country with a very strong culinary tradition of vegetarian cooking. On the other hand, it can be really hard to find examples of the vegetarian food, as restaurants tend to be very fishy and meaty.

From what I gather, while monks and some few laypeople are strict vegans (eschewing even onion and garlic - imagine Viet food with no fried onion, let alone nuoc mam!), most Viet Buddhists happily eat all manner of living creatures. But it's quite common to fast (eat vegan) on the 1st and 15th of the lunar calendar, so every homecook knows how to prepare a wealth of traditional vegetarian dishes. Otherwise, your best bet is to find one of the vegetarian eateries - they aren't as common as you'd hope, but once you find one you can eat pretty much anything in the huge Vietnamese repertoire in a tasty vegan version.

I've been lucky enough to be staying in a Saigon home and eating homecooking for nearly half my time in the country, including quite a few veggie dishes. One night recently, an auntie prepared vegetarian bun rieu for us. The original version is a spicy tomato and oniony crab soup with rice vermicelli. Soy replaces the crab, and we got to observe the traditional way it's prepared. First you soak soybeans for a long time until they're soft, then rub their skins off. They're pureed and strained into two grades, creamy and frothy (the whey-like part). The latter is curdled (using tamarind as the curdling agent!) to make this really nice light grainy tofu that elegantly replaces the chewy crab floating at the top of the bowl.

The auntie who made the soup has actually been eating vegan for a few months for religious reasons, but despite turning out plenty of food for the visiting fish-and-chip-ocrite, she is surprisingly ununderstanding about my breed of vegetarianism. She told my friend that I should "practice" eating meat! I found this contrast surprising and amusing, but in the end it makes sense. Vegetarianism in Vietnam is traditionally a matter of religion, not taste, and when times are hard, you have to eat what you can get!

In Vietnam, what you get is liable to be delicious.

Believe!

Boddhisattvas are all loving-kindness, but there are more forceful deities to help convert the masses. These fearsome statues are often placed at the entrance to temples to help instill a sense of urgency in the not-yet-devout.

Siddhatta vs. Siddhartha

Photo: Jizo at a Shinto shrine in downtown Kyoto.

Before I left on my trip, one of my preparations was to stop at a used book store to let serendipity help me choose what to read at the beginning of my trip. Pulp Fiction on W. Broadway happened to have a good Asia non-fiction section, and the first of the books I ended up reading was Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha (titled: Buddha).

I had already read her very interesting A History of Myth and listened to her TED talk on compassion, so I was looking forward to it. I ended up reading the whole thing in the first few jetlagged days, so that it was caught up in the early fog of arrival. Then I read it again more slowly midway through the trip (I read each book I bought at least twice before finally getting some new ones in Kyoto!).

I don't really know much about Buddhism, so rather than trying to offer a critique of the book I can just say that it really awakened my interest, making me want to read more fully about the history of Buddhism as it developed as a religion. It also made me want to explore more fully the gaps that lie between the official history and theology of a religion and the understanding that believers have; and the distance between how it's practiced by monks and by laypeople. Despite also not knowing much about Hinduism, I'd had the same feeling when I had the chance to take a religious studies class about it at university. The teacher strongly believed in the importance of studying practical Hinduism with equal weight, rather than sticking solely to the textual tradition, and I really absorbed that attitude. The little that I know from listening to people who practice Buddhism gives me a really different idea than what I took from Armstrong's version of Buddha's teachings.

Japan is the only Buddhist country I've visited so far, and it's a fascinating and unique one, given the deep and longlasting syncretism with native Shinto practice. That's a whole post (or lifetime of study) in itself, and even looking just at Buddhism in Japan shows such a huge variety of sects and beliefs in monastic practice, let alone about how most Japanese feel about or understand Buddhism. I am excited to travel soon to Vietnam and to see Buddhism in a totally different context (not without syncretism of its own, of course).

Something else that I found myself thinking of as I read this book, was another book I studied at university in a German lit class - Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. (Armstrong's book is mostly based on the Pali canon and so she uses Pali spelling rather than Sanskrit, so I am making a distinction between Hesse's Siddhartha and Armstrong's Siddhatta). Leaving aside the whole problem of cultural imperialism and Hesse's appropriation of Indian tradition (and noting that Armstrong too is a Western interpreter of Eastern tradition), I remembered my visceral reaction to the book when I read it at 19. I HATED it. The contrast of noble Siddhartha with fleshy Kamala made my skin crawl. The whole thing just seemed like typical male self-indulgence - sure, subsist on the food that the women prepare and donate to you, and adopt their sons into your sanghas, but be sure to point out to them their inferiority, their hopeless trappedness in samsara BECAUSE YOUR CULTURAL LAWS WON'T ALLOW THEM TO ESCAPE IT.

While Armstrong's depiction of Buddha isn't quite as creepy as I remember Hesse's being, she does point out the misogyny in the Buddhist tradition, wherever it originally crept in. Women could only be admitted as nuns subservient to the monks and following an additional set of rules; and in a whole large branch of Buddhism today there are no nuns because it is now viewed as impossible to fulfill those conditions.

In her broader discussion of the Axial age in which both Hinduism and Buddhism developed, she points out that along with the new spirituality came a new and more crippling misogyny, which is something that tends to keep me from identifying with any religion I've ever heard of, however impressive some of it other aspects are. The question of why those two strands developed together near-simultaneously in discrete parts of the world is a fascinating one. I do find it hard to get past what seems to me like clear hypocrisy antithetical to a true state of enlightenment. But of course that's just my lesser feminine self speaking!

To complement the history, I also picked up a book on Buddhist practice by the Dalai Lama. Even though I'm not going to Tibet I thought it might help provide more context for mostly Buddhist South-East Asia. I can't say that I feel any closer to enlightenment, but it was certainly an interesting text to read and ponder.

All of it a bit moot of course, in Hindu Bali.

Jizo

Local god or boddhisattva with someone's gifted prayer beads.