The New York Review of Books - 26.03.2020

36 The New York Review

Creating the Universe:
Depictions of the Cosmos
in Himalayan Buddhism
by Eric Huntington.
University of
Wash i ngton P ress,
283 pp., $65.00

Awaken :
A Tibetan Buddhist Journey
Towa rd E n l ig hten ment
an exhibition at the Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts,
Richmond,
April 27–August 18, 2019;
and the Asian Art Museum of
San Francisco,
January 17–April 19, 2020.
Catalog of the exhibition by
John Henry Rice and
Jeffrey S. Durham.
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,
244 pp., $45.00
(distributed by
Yale University Press)

Once there was a woman who
lived inside a rock. She had a
husband, a desiccated, barren
yogi, who also inhabited the
rock and spent his days and
nights in meditation, striving
for liberation from earthly ex-
istence; he never touched his
wife, whom he had created out
of his own imagination. The
woman, “like a lotus burnt
by frost,” was weary of this
loveless life; she, too, sought
release. One day a great sage,
Vasishtha, wandering through
the wilderness, heard the
woman singing a sad and gen-
tle song; he followed her voice
and found her sitting outside the rock.
She introduced herself and told the
sage her story.
She also taught him how to fol-
low her into the rock. This took some
practice—at first Vasishtha could see
only the rough stony surface. Eventu-
ally, he was able to enter into the deep,
open spaces inside. There he saw end-
less worlds folded within worlds; every
atom contained millions of interlock-
ing universes. Vasishtha watched as
these universes all came to an end in a
catastrophic fire, in which the woman
and her husband also perished. Pro-
foundly unnerved, Vasishtha resumed
his travels, still searching for truth.
Life, he concluded, is a strange affair,
always full of surprises.
Was this rock meant to be thought
of as a real object, occupying some

defined space in a familiar cosmos?

Yes—at least as real as the pictures

of the cosmos that Eric Huntington

discusses in Creating the Universe, his

masterful book on Buddhist cosmol-

ogy. The story of the rock comes to us in

a Kashmiri Sanskrit text, perhaps from

the tenth century, known as “The Way

to Freedom” (Mokshopaya), which

stands at the center of an astonishing

collection of metaphysical narratives

called the Yoga-vasishtha that seeks

to prove to its readers that reality is

internal to our minds. This mind-born

texture of existence includes capacious,

elastic, expansive rocks that can open

up to reveal an infinite set of overlap-

ping and mutually embedded worlds.

Such a cosmos can be mapped in

minute detail. Huntington’s book is

a lucid study of the cosmograms that

South Asian cosmographers, architects,

ritualists, and artists produced over

many centuries, with particular empha-

sis on the colorful visions of Mahayana

Buddhists in the eastern Himalayas,

including Tibet. South Asian cosmol-

ogy has been explored by earlier schol-

ars such as Willibald Kirfel, Paul Mus,

and, more recently, the anthropologist

Robert Levy in his book on the Nepal-

ese Newars,^1 but Huntington’s work ex-

cels in the range, precision, and depth of

his understanding. His book is lavishly

illustrated with artistic versions of the

Buddhist universe and with stunning

photographs of ritual models

of it created from colored sand

and stone. Once, in Ladakh,

in the western Himalayas, I

saw an intricate and beautiful

model taken apart by Buddhist

monks in a flurry of golden

dust as the ritual they were per-

forming reached its end. Such

is the fate of all our universes.

Some South Asian cosmolo-

gies are fairly straightforward;

usually they are motivated, at

least in part, by the powerful

wish to establish connections

and modes of access to realms

that are normally felt to be cut

off from one another. For ex-

ample, in the ritual enactments

called Teyyam, practiced in

the northern parts of Kerala, in

southwestern India, the elabo-

rately costumed performer

brings a dormant god or god-

dess to life by naming him or

her, thus embodying this deity.

Human beings inhabit a middle

space, bhulokam, in a three-

fold universe; above us there is

the Upper World, melulakam,

and beneath us the dark Lower

World, kizhulakam, where

snakes and demons exist. To

materialize a god in our mid-

dle space, the ritualist has to

speak the formula: “By think-

ing about [or attending to] your

presence [tottam], I invoke

you into manifestation.”^2 To t -

tam implies emergence, a move

from subtle, hidden, and poten-

tial space into external, visible

space; it is not by chance that such a

move depends upon uttering sounds or

words that create the desired connec-

tivity. Language is always a central part

of South Asian cosmic models, which

work mainly on the level of sound re-

leased into space, usually the vast space

within the mind or within the imagina-

tion that shapes and defines the mind.

“Modeling” is probably a more ac-

curate term than “representing” for the

way South Asian cosmograms behave,

including those that are visual depic-

tions (Huntington’s term) of the cos-

mos. Of course, such depictions, like

maps in general, incorporate represen-

tational elements, and many of them,

Buddhist Baedekers

David Shulman

were fears that the^ funeral procession
might be disrupted by protests or even
terrorism.
Yet on the day itself, all was quiet. I
attended the funeral at St. Paul’s cathe-
dral, and sat toward the front, with the
foreign delegations. Arrayed before us
were not only all of her friends but all
of her enemies: Heseltine, who stabbed
her in the back; Major, whose prime
ministership she sought to undermine;
and Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader

who never managed to defeat her. All

of them sat and listened as the bishop

of London gently acknowledged their

strong feelings and then sought to put

them to rest, delivering the most elo-

quent eulogy I have ever heard. He

reminded the room not of where she

ended up, but of where she had come

from, living above her father’s shop in

Grantham, struggling to get into uni-

versity, working to join a world that

had long rejected people like her: “In

a setting like this, in the presence of

the leaders of the nations, or any rep-

resentatives of nations and countries

th roug hout the world , it is ea sy to forget

the immense hurdles she had to climb.”

He also sought to temper some of the

ill will. “After the storm of a life lived

in the heat of political controversy,

there is a great calm,” he said.

The storm of conflicting opinions

centres on the Mrs Thatcher who

became a symbolic figure—even

an “ism.” Today the remains of the

real Margaret Hilda Thatcher are

here at her funeral service. Lying

here, she is one of us, subject to

the common destiny of all human

beings.

I won’t say that ended the historical

argument, but it did, somehow, stop

the public bitterness—and the country

moved on. Q

Mandala of Vajrabhairava, Ngor Monastery, Tibet, 1650 –1750

Avery Brundage Collection /Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

(^2) Thanks to Abhilash Malayil for draw-
ing attention to this formulation.
(^1) Robert I. Levy, Mesocosm: Hinduism
and the Organization of a Traditional
Newar City in Nepal (University of
California Press, 1990).