DALAI LAMA
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE DALAI LAMA
I am a simple monk. Even this is more than I wish to be, but I was never given the choice. Before I could ever be a peasant boy, I succumbed to theater and was taken from my family. My mother has no stories to tell of the young Krishna. Has there ever been a boy who did not like milk and honey? Flowers did not bloom where my footsteps fell, and yet, I can relieve people’s suffering for a short time. I can do this though I am no different than any one else. My mother was delighted that I was lifted from obscurity and we both became holy. I recognized a few simple objects that had belonged to the last Dalai Lama.
I selected a rice bowl and spoon from among a pile of plain objects. His maroon robe was not included or the gold headdresses, and perhaps justly, because these decorative emblems of office are borrowed and never become intimate. Had I been offered opulent choices, as a boy I certainly would have picked them. Gold especially, but anything that gleams reaches out to declare ideals, and I would have overlooked the bruised wooden bowl and spoon, objects that will never pass from the current of time and accompany us during our separated journeys in this world.
To be raised by men alone is a deprivation that can only be forgiven when finally it is understood to have been a necessary sacrifice. To begin life as an orphan acquaints the soul with its original condition. Taking a child from his mother because he recognizes certain objects is justified if it fixes in him for the rest of his life that attentive viewing, the natural way of seeing that would have been lost after childhood, is the gateway to dharma.
I was eager to please my mother and looked at her when I hungrily reached for the bowl and spoon, declaring them mine and refusing to return them to the small collection of other objects brought to our home by the monks. She smiled and her eyes became bright. She had never seen the universe in my opened mouth, but the pomp of ceremony she had witnessed, the glitter and the chants.
By compassionate attention for all who share this life, the child is reduced to the Dalai Lama. Everything else must be discarded, eventually leaving nothing but a rice bowl, a spoon, and the universe.
CHAPTER II
For a long time his only sense is touch. The soul loses this sense between lives, and it is the first recovered after re-birth. Our first memory is always of light. It is the memory of mind being born inside awareness, and so words can reach back and recall it, but before this memory there is the body, and religion is an attempt to remember what the body knows and has no words to tell. The body’s inherited wisdom is translated as separation, desire, pain and love. A Dalai Lama will learn the names of colors and animals in many different languages to learn compassion for the gulf between souls. He should learn the names of the first ten numerals as well. By this, he may learn what tyrannies have been prosecuted on the soul. By learning the musical scales he may heal it.
He had chosen to be reborn because his saddest loss was that of time woven into being within the womb. Every soul remembers the white light at conception and creation winding its song around the stops of his cells. The creation sings to him in the glowing dark.
My first memory from this life is being bathed. The warm water is already a memory when I enter this first moment. I have been lifted from the water and am cold, and my mother holds me against her body. This memory is of the cold shock from the open air and the dazzling prisms in the droplets. I am already two years old; I am found by the cold and pulled outside of myself, and see my mother’s breast and water sparkling with sunlight, but it is not a happy memory, this first carved separation from the world.
In the womb all our lives are remembered, and the radiance of meditation is immeasurable. The body and inspiration are still one.
CHAPTER III
The memory of creation is held in common by all matter, but consciousness is unable to unfold it and feel again the urge through nothingness as it translated itself into song, and then, made by distance ever more an approximation, settled into force. Matter is forever tragic, life is its answered prayer for union.
Only for the first instant was the light pure and without heat, then desire separated from itself and the heat bruised eternity. While light was pure desire, before its separation into being and heat, the speed of movement approached infinity, and soon separation had been so increased that desire became longing. At first all was a mood of undifferentiated anticipation and disappointment as the heart of the universe diffused. The echo of compelled passage created space, “ohm” a vowel enclosed in a fermata. With distance the note gathered duration and by this became forms, which is creation inside a memory. The forms were notes, and when this division had slowed to the speed of light we had been shredded into bundles each hearing the withdrawing “ohm” frayed into a music that reached back and no longer enfolded us.
CHAPTER IV
We lived in warmth and all of us were the same and our pulse was the same. We had satisfied the sun and water, but we were afloat in time and wrapped in longing. The constellations bathed in the water at night and disrobed to desire and we fell in love. From then on we slept at night and recognized the sun. We had touched before but without enchantment. Now, each touch renewed longing. Separation became painful, and we held together to prolong and share our rescue. How different this sex from mitosis; time was incarnated. We died and could not tell the difference between death and separation, but we dreamed of a man and a woman in a garden, and we offered them a fruit and we dreamed this dream when we were dead and the stars could be heard in the night.
Death weighed on us. We had hardly divided ourselves from the longing in sun and water that had brimmed in us until we divided, but now we raced against death to reach each other before time caught us. Time tore at us, and we grew bodies to protect ourselves, and each conveyed death to the other, even the ones we loved. Our dreams were no longer shared and we forgot them, and unrealized they became our genitals. Our bodies became shields and idolatry lurched out of the creation of self from amnesia. Night was implanted in us but we resisted its compelling joy, and awareness became a dark sense, the dimmer it was, the more fully realized.
Sometimes we became plants. Just before reincarnation, a Buddha will choose to be a flower, usually a Lotus because this is Vishnu’s flower. Because I am only a simple monk, I chose to be an orchid. I had loved so deeply in my previous life that to complete desire I had to marry the moon attended by moths.
With sex came the senses, fragmenting our knowledge, condensing it to squeeze through portals. We lost the ability to know each other completely, but sex had made that inevitable when desire found an object other than creation itself. That same moment in each, the song of creation withdrew and divinity spoke the first law: beauty. All that would be eternal emerged from within us in that moment. The gods came into being and existence was divided. We were left with echoes. Beauty is the echo of unity, what was pushed from us calling back across the gulf.
CHAPTER V
I lived a many lives as an ant. From these teachings arose the Bhagavad Gita. The dharma is served without question by an ant through blindness, labor, war, and custodianship over death and decay. It was we who invented an ark for the written or embodied lyric, and who were first given soma to insure our lives we had offered to obedience.
Insects only know creation through fertility, for the rest we served the elemental gods so completely that we remained ignorant of worship. Some serve the moon, shadows and death, others the sun. The butterfly enlists in service to the flower and wears the covenant of these religious orders on his wings. When I was a moth I placed my eggs on the muted flute of the nightshade, and immersed in inviolate silence the stars breathed nebulae onto my wings.
I have been reluctant to leave each phylum and traverse the empty death between, but as a cicada I slept buried for seventeen years and was familiar with navigating to rebirth through transparent night. Krishna brought his sweet tooth with him from the hive, and Orpheus learned meter from the crickets, so obedient to the law that their song is pure math and yet summons autumn from the reeds.
CHAPTER VI
I longed for origin in the sea, immersed in the eternal, but only during periods of stillness spent absorbing the heat of the sun was I able to trace that continual spindling of the elements into form.
We turtles were the first to emerge from the water to lay our eggs and draw down the grief of orgasm into the labor at birth. All that we lost is in our eyes, the great sphere of heaven that marries the water. I was a turtle many times and felt the full weight of separation. Gravity clung to every motion and I moved with funeral slowness. As a female I felt this longing at the threshold of existence each time I crawled from the sea, abandoning my eggs to the emptiness racing away from me.
There I am forever at the edge of the moon-plowed ocean, and from the apparel of the goddess, death and birth, and from the fatigue that yokes me to the ocean, from this silent edge outlined by the whisper of the tide on the sand, I weave womb and wings. All my descendents have this dream planted in the egg: The moon globe floating over the glassy sea, a barren shore, the silent echo of the song of the turtle, the soul’s lament to departing spirit.
CHAPTER VII
I have been a cat. When cats sleep we hatch into the bardo as dragons. Our sleep is kindred with the serpent. Of animals with a womb, kundalini is most awake in us. Stroking along our spine will curry sparks from our fur, and our retinas crystallize. Our hearing is tuned to such high registers we can audit the broader angstroms of color and especially asleep hear the whispers of ghosts.
In Egypt I lived in the Temple at Karnak with hundreds of other cats. I was a favorite of a priest and he brought me warm goat’s milk and I greeted him with my tail straight up and rubbed against his shins. The milk gave me dreams of Krishna who I would follow as he stole milk from the dairymaids. He always offered me a little, sometimes in a bowl, sometimes from his fingertips. When he circled his finger around the rim of the bowl it lifted a chord, and when I heard the highest notes I could see Krishna was blue, and I could see all the colors of that world from the time when the animals were betrothed to creation.
The stones remained warm into the night, and cobras, lizards and tortoises joined us. Swallows built wattle nests under the flat ceiling and wasps their paper hives. Scorpions crawled along the stairs.
Stone idols were placed in the temple, and the priests came at night and they would kill an antelope or a bull and we padded up to drink the blood, and while we licked the blood from our paws and lips, the priests danced and then lay with women. Now the silent bell struck as they coupled, and the temple and idols were recast in lunar spindrift, and cats and cobras gathered in a circle around them at the edge of the tranquil sea within an unblinking eye.
CHAPTER VIII
We are the animal with amnesia. We were chosen while we were still lemurs and tarsiers to suffer awakening because of our hands and color vision. We could see colors by moonlight, even by the stars. We could see the colors inside things and so were bound to sing, and singing is discovery summoned from forgetting; it engenders language, the body of withdrawn creation.
Why were the birds bypassed? Certainly the owls had eyes tuned to chords of the prism. It was our hands with their sensitive, clawless fingers that elected us. Long after other animals are weaned we continued to nurse at the world’s breasts. We remained infants, large-eyed, flat faced and without snouts. Bloom and ripeness enchanted us, the imprint of our mother. Our knowledge was immediate, our feeble sense of smell forcing us close to erupting detail. We were aided by touch, and so even in hunger, were gentle and reverent with the providential gifts hung abundantly or else surely missed by us. By the shape of ripeness we traced endlessly the globe of the world, lucky as infants and fools are, while birds leave the nest already knowing the route from Orion to the Pleiades.
We owe language to our hands. Hands tease form from music, both an abstraction and embodiment. A word is a note spooned from the river, and as our hands continued their inventive myopia, we drew farther from creation and our longing more amorous. We left the trees to free our hands to conjure a tree that would bear a moon. A million years of chorals ensued.
We stayed near the edge of the forest and at night would return to sleep in the branches, and there we regained fluency in our bodies, sprawling royally on the boughs. We fed and delayed sleeping to enjoy our pleasure. But, language came between each of us and the forest. Our singing summoned a forest we otherwise could only see in dreams, and after a time we would eat rapidly so we could rush into those dreams, and at the last we stopped returning from the plains except in dreams.
We fled to the banks of the rivers, and there we wept when the waters wove a dream into our ears: Again each flower and animal looks back at us, and the night glows in milky white. But the iris of creation had closed on us. We were afraid of the night and of our dreams, and the first reifications of our souls-listening bowls made from fruits, and reed combs to curry notes from the ether-were converted into deaf weapons to mourn our desires orphaned into murder.
CHAPTER IX
We became strangers to each other, and became objects of longing. We could not appease our loss and became fierce and cruel when coupling, and wept at orgasm, grieving each time at the brevity of our glimpse into the light.
With all that we once had known eluding us, it became hidden treasure, and the most precious of all was the lost attention that had kept us fully joined to creation, each thing, glowing at night, clothed in its essence. What impenetrable jewels their afterimages became in our closed eyes. We were left to name things, a toneless mnemonic to replace their fullness. We were drawn to fire to serve as the inner light and drive back the dark in which our forfeits glowed. Other creatures shun it because of its pure externality, its renunciation and interrogation of form, but its confirmation of separation is why we worshipped it, and fusing it with sex, we charged creation with sin. The lyre turned to bow and we hunted the antelope and the unicorn.
We feared the night, but we did not retreat to the caves for protection. We entered them to forge a womb out of empty darkness, and rebirth our lost family. Using what we had taken from the bowels of slain animals, having stolen the life filament by eclipsing it with death, we sought to reanimate the elements by controlling their passages into eternity.
Fires burned and we spun with torches held at arms’ length to catch the shapes of beasts outlined by the echoes in our songs. As we sang and chanted the fur dropped from our bodies and we became the infants our souls had once been. We were our first art; we made ourselves naked so that we would glow again, and took to heart our beauty and terror.
CHAPTER X
We prophesied from the entrails of slain animals, and our lovers were auguries. It is from the positions in coitus and the disgorged coils of the intestines and shapes of womb, ovaries and testes that our alphabets were formed. Writing recorded the burial of song in language.
In animal gore we looked for the lost landscapes of heaven.
The woodchuck: Spear of sunlight through the earth’s breast. Birthed again each morning from the derma of roots, beetles, worms, gestating rot and musk. Mud on his nose like the milk spill of a nursing infant; clods, pebbles, pillars of grass, a holy boulder at the woods edge, the circumference of the world in an areola. Casting from the lime green bowels the interval between the globe’s heartbeat, a single pore of our mother’s body and our infant dreams: The earth held still, gleaming, glowing in our newborn iris.
Fish: Cosmos, voice, gamete. The gills, a forced confession and external sentience fully inspirited in the water, threaded to all the syllables in rain, ripple, cockle and purl. Raking apparent silence suffused with light and harvesting constellations stored in the ovaries. A needle darning shadows into blood, the tranquil underworld of surrendered passion. Cut along the underbelly to spill the tide out of form: Storm and green thunder that wring seasons from the soulless blue; and light, reflection and paradox that coagulate into the piercing immediate shoring this body.
Bird: The source of form exceeding itself and throwing open joy into transparency. With birds we tried to trace the coronas of radiance. We opened the throat and breast to find their song, and by its absence cupped the shape of compelled harmony, and spread their wings and plumage to hear its echo returned from the sun. By their legs and feet we learned what dropped from them in flight, and determined this to be the weight of the soul, the force needed to anchor light. Our auguries with them were used to hear inside the sounding bowl of dreams, to flense infinity from light.
The remaining element is fire, and this one we sought in coupling. And it is through love that we can occasionally settle the vagrant ghosts that exile flushed from our bodies.
CHAPTER XI
A train station, a deathbed, a carpet tack. A curtained window, distant hills, horizon or a wall. A keyhole, a glowing room, the tips of the tips of the longest fingers parting, the last breath. None of these ever were.
Then, what is not illusion? Everything you see arriving and becoming. Every thing you have brought out from disappearance. What you love, you have always loved. The rest never was; you did not save it. I owe you my life.
CHAPTER XII
He dropped from his mother’s breast and took his first steps on feet smaller than a thumb to the first knuckle. Where his feet fell, flowers rose in full bloom. Every eye sees him when the sun strikes the petals of its closed lids. Blessed and blessing are flowers and your eyes.
