The New York Review of Books - 26.03.2020

38 The New York Review

cosmos are, quite simply, “not a place.”
What, then, are they? An empty space,
perhaps, in a cosmos whose true nature
is emptiness. In meditation the ritual-
ist begins by dissolving external reality
into the emptiness that is its nature—
and then recreates the seductive but
empty world, or the Buddha himself,
no less empty, in his mind.

Those who want practical guidance in
navigating such worlds would do well to
follow the essays in Awaken, the superb
catalog of an exhibition of Himalayan
art at the Asian Museum of San Fran-
cisco. The curators, John Henry Rice
and Jeffrey S. Durham, have conceived
an inspired program meant to initiate
the reader-spectator into the practices
of Tantric Buddhist visualization. They
have adopted a fifteenth-century Ti-
betan master of the famed Ngor mon-
astery, Gorampa Sonam Senge, as their
guide in a series of short, beautifully
written chapters that take us through
preparatory rituals and exercises to
the sophisticated meditative discipline
of the monks. At each stage, objects
of breathtaking artistry illustrate the
path. In addition to these chapters and
to the splendid images, there are excel-
lent essays by well-known specialists
in Tibetan art and religion, including
Huntington, who offers another lucid
statement about “Seeing the Unseen.”
Emptiness exercises aided by the
ravishing geometric diagrams called
mandalas, which one is meant to enter
into or, better, to take into oneself, are
a highly disciplined corpus, not are-
nas for individual creativity. At every
step, one meets fragments of cosmos,

sometimes correlated to the graphic

geographies that Himalayan Buddhism

developed over centuries; indeed, the

entire cosmos, with its mountains and

continents and oceans, may be offered

up to a Buddhist deity in a colored

and crafted simulacrum in exchange

for the longed-for goal of true awaken-

ing. A Himalayan mandala is usually a

crowded space: there are godly and de-

monic spheres, labyrinths, palaces, gate-

ways guarded by terrifying gatekeepers,

mantric buzzes and hums, disorienting

temporal rhythms, and hosts of deities,

some ominous, others benign. With per-

sistence, a meditator learns to create in

open (mental) space the entire three- or

four-dimensional universe with all its

objects and living beings.

Similarly, in the South Indian tra-

dition of Kudiyattam drama, which

has survived in Kerala since medieval

times, the actor begins a performance

that may last many days and nights

by dancing into existence the world in

which the drama will take place, “from

the Creator God, Brahma, down to the

ants,” as the texts like to say. All this

happens in empty space that the per-

former fills, piece by piece, through

the movements of hands, feet, and

eyes, while accompanied by sung San-

skrit verses. At the end of the perfor-

mance, the primary actor takes apart

this dense, invisible universe, actually

burning it, in the form of three oil-

soaked wicks, on the stage—always, for

me, a moment of unutterable sadness.^3

So is South Asian cosmology all a

matter of conjuring up ephemeral visu-

alizations in the absence of any empiri-

cal knowledge of the universe? By no

means. The ancient Sanskrit encyclo-

pedists knew there was such a place as

India, which they situated in the south-

ern section of Black Plum Island, Jam-

budvipa, encompassing the cosmic axis

Mount Meru. They also knew that to

the north lay mountains and lands peo-

pled by tribes that were very different

from the inhabitants of the plains—for

example, the Uttarakurus, who some-

times married goddesses (but never

for more than a week) and who lived

for thousands of years. Hundreds of

territories, rivers, mountains, peoples,

remote tribes, and ecological zones are

named in these Hindu texts, known

as Puranas; they combine an intense

ethnographic curiosity with inherited,

richly configured geographical data.

The same texts inform us that Black

Plum Island is the innermost continent

of seven concentric ones, each separated

from the next by an ocean (of saltwater,

jaggery syrup, wine, butter, curd, and

milk, respectively). A somewhat simpler,

and probably older, model has Meru

surrounded by four continents that

are like petals of a lotus; the southern

petal, Bharata, is home to India. Bud-

dhist cosmologists such as the fourth-to-

fifth-century Vasubandhu and the fifth-

century Buddhaghosa retained the cos-

mic mountain Meru, extending upward

through many stacked heavens, while

placing the continents, such as Jambud-

vipa, along a vast horizontal axis that is

ultimately bounded by a range of moun-

tains known as Cakravala.

In these complex systems, time pro-

ceeds at different paces at different

points in the cosmos, and sunrise over

one continent coincides with midnight

over another. Even more complex, and

close to the overlapping homologies

and transformative models mentioned

earlier, is the “grand unified theory”

known as the Wheel of Time, kala-

cakra, a subject favored by the Himala-

yan painters. Here we have a radically

ethicized and relativized cosmos that,

in Huntington’s words, “is nothing

more than illusory perceptions deter-

mined by the propensities of the indi-

viduals who experience it.”

Nineteenth-century colonial authors

loved to poke fun at the Hindu oceans

of syrup and honey and their counter-

parts in the Buddhist systems, but they

characteristically failed to see that an-

cient South Asians were truly curious

about parts of the world beyond India

(though not as curious as the ancient

Greeks, who explored whatever lands

they could physically reach by land or

sea). Even to a modern scholar, the

standard Indian cosmologies might

seem to mix bits of realistic geographic

knowledge with near-infinite vistas of

imaginary or mythic realms. But this

formulation, which privileges a rather

impoverished notion of what counts

as knowledge, distorts the cosmologi-

cal impulse and makes no attempt to

fathom its operative logic. Much of

Huntington’s book is concerned with

decoding that logic as seen in the ex-

quisitely painted mandalas of Tibet; in

the architectural design of Buddhist

monuments in the Himalayas and in

Southeast Asia; in ritual constructions

of potential worlds that can be offered

to Buddhist deities, inside or outside

the mind; and in the geo-cosmic maps

that greet pilgrims at the entrance to the

great Tibetan monasteries and shrines.

Although traditional cosmographies

are still very much alive in South Asia in

a wide range of settings and milieux—

from geomantic and cosmo- spatial prin-

ciples of design (Vastu-sastra), without

which no house can be built, to practical

astrological calculations, ritual calen-

dars, and the biographies of every living

god and goddess—a parallel corpus of

precise, observation-based geographic

literature, including detailed maps,

began to appear in various parts of

the subcontinent from roughly the six-

teenth century on. This literature was

soon integrated into the novel genre of

encyclopedias composed in the vernac-

ulars of South India; it also forms part

of the universal histories written in

those languages a century or two later.

On the southwestern coast, we find al-

ready in the mid-fifteenth century the

first practical navigation manual for the

use of sailors to and from the Lakshad-

weep islands, written in Malayalam in

the Arabi-Malayalam script.^4 Matthew

Kapstein has studied the emergent dis-

cipline of geography, still squeezed,

with some difficulty, into the earlier

orthodox cosmology, in sources from

eighteenth-century Tibet.^5 Something

very new was happening in South Asian

intellectual domains. The universe had

simultaneously shrunk and expanded

as an entirely earthly geography hesi-

tantly detached itself from traditional

cosmology.

So when the early-sixteenth-century

Telugu poet Allasani Peddana intro-

duces a wandering yogi to his restless

hero Pravara, stuck at home in the Gan-

getic plain, the latter asks his new friend:

What are the countries you have

visited? The mountains you have

climbed? The rivers you’ve bathed

in? The islands you’ve explored?

The godly forests you’ve entered?

The oceans you have come to? Tell

me about all of them, in all their

new and wonderful details.

And the yogi casually replies, “Why

mention this place or that? I’ve seen

everything under the sky.”^6 He then

proceeds to give a list of specific sites,

stretching from the shrine of the god-

dess Hingula in the far northwest of

the subcontinent to the distant limits of

north, east, and south. Both the queries

and the reply ring true, as if anchored

in personal experience or a yearning

for such experience; both parties to the

conversation inhabit a tangible, more

or less accessible, above all knowable

new world. Q

(^3) See my description in “Creating and
Destroying the Universe in Twenty-
Nine Nights,” NYR Daily, November
24, 2012.
(^4) The Rahmani of M.P. Kunhikunhi
Malmi of Kavaratti: A Sailing Manual
of Lakshadweep, edited by Lotika
Varadarajan (Delhi: Manohar, 2004).
Again, thanks to Abhilash Malayil.
(^5) Matthew T. Kapstein, “Just Where
on Jambudvipa Are We? New Geo-
graphical Knowledge and Old Cosmo-
logical Schemes in Eighteenth-Century
Tibet,” in Forms of Knowledge in Early
Modern Asia: Explorations in the In-
tellectual History of India and Tibet,
1500 –1800, edited by Sheldon Pollock
(Duke University Press, 2011).
(^6) The Story of Manu, translated by
Velcheru Narayana Rao and David
Shulman (Murty Classical Library of
India/Harvard University Press, 2015),
pp. 57–59.

Wanderlust

30

years

S

UM

ME

R^ CLASS

IC

S

T

H

E

EX

AMINED

L

IF

E

1991

2020

Weeklong seminars

in literature, science,

history, film, and

philosophy for adults

of all ages.

REGISTER ONLINE

WWW.SJC.EDU/SUMMER-CLASSICS

3 WEEKS OF SEMINARS

IN SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

July 5-10

July 12-17

July 19-24