In the evening, just before dinner, there had come the sound of some pretty smart drumming and crashing and I was told that the resident lamas — the dignitaries had not yet arrived to preside over the major ceremonies — practised a little in the evenings for the morning service. It is an unforgettable sound, this mixture of tooting and booming, of mice and elephants. It brought back so many forgotten impressions of the past — for this was the ordinary musical scheme of Nepal, Bhutan and all points north. It contrived to combine the sounds of an Alban Berg concerto with that of a goblin being castrated. But the noise did not last, it died away as the dinner gong sounded. Apparently the resident lamas enjoyed quarters on the third floor. Theirs was the music and prayer which would draw us inexorably towards this galloping continuum — the natural force of the cosmos: the Tao!
Most everyone was up before dawn; I saw the kitchen lights switched on and heard the pop of the gas stove which manufactured strong tea for the visitors. I was glad of it, for it was mighty cold, and a heavy dew had turned into frost on my windscreen which I would have to scrape. I tried hot water but it froze as fast I cleared it. The opening service was early also and the virtuous were already abroad, all creased and yellow and yawny from a night of icy sleep in the outbuildings. I was not going to miss the morning service for anything — I knew it would be full of memory-soliciting sounds and shapes. Irrationally I heard the voice of F saying: ‘Our cosmology is a skandah short in their terms.’ There was the smell of incense and muddy gumboots and milk on the stairs. The house was very warm and the friendly throne room as yet almost empty. It is pleasant to arrive a little early and prepare oneself by a quiet breathing and concentrating exercise. (There is nothing specially Tibetan about it: it is equally true for religious services in hallowed places consecrated to this kind of psychic activity, like cathedrals or Christian shrines. You have to make an effort if you want to suck out the marrow of things!)
Gradually the little chapel filled up, the doors were opened, the congregation took up its dispositions on the floor, many adopting the lotus pose. And then the gay body of lamas entered, their square humorous faces smiling, their tough square little bodies bustling forward with an irresistible momentum — the energy of mountain folk who have come to terms with cold and wind and who enjoy rude peasant health. The head lama was brimming with good nature and light and he took his routine in a competent and relaxed way. The youngest lama was a boy of twelve or so. It reminded me a little bit of a Greek Orthodox service where you are apt to come upon a couple of fine, if piratical-looking, old priests assisted by a dissolute-looking beadle and a shaky-looking adolescent who from time to time strikes a triangle and looks around with cretinous joy and astonishment. It was not quite that, for this little Tibetan was in charge of drums which would have rejoiced the heart of ajazz drummer. The chief lama paid the preliminary obeisances to the various goddesses and gods of the various shrines. He walked round the altar, so to speak, bending down to croak a prayer, barely audible, to the divinities, yet on a deep raucous note which reminded one of a tree frog at mating time. There was also something minatory about this serious survey — he was rather like a mastiff checking that all was well. You felt his scrupulous attention and awareness. Then he swept us with a glance and took his place and the service began. It is quite impossible to describe the pleasure and reassurance this ordinary little service gave me. The bongo drums and squiffy fifes brought it all back to me. It was like the plunging hooves of pack mules as they floundered on one of those narrow paths before falling into the ravines below. In a trice the rocky landscapes came into my mind. Always the question of height was the thing. The abysses were literally measureless for on those mountain paths the bandages of dense mist floated below as well as above you. Often one threw a boulder and stood waiting to see when, if ever, it would strike bottom. The waterless mountains of Nepal with their richly-oxygenated air and eternal snow-cloud shapes hiding secret monasteries — I could recover it all through this weird and tilting music. The drumming of hooves on rock! On those vertiginous paths, of course, mules frequently did go overboard — being such foolishly obstinate creatures. There was no room to manoeuvre so that the story was frequently told of them plunging over these precipices in a shower of stones. I had forgotten so many little things! I had forgotten just how physically dirty one could become for lack of water, living in a lamasery at ten thousand feet. Those sweetly enticing cloud-shape monasteries which look so good in photos were often pitiless and barren nooks good for nothing except contemplation and self-discovery through the altering of the mind’s axis, through the art of breathing. At some point, in the stuffy intellectual attic of the quotidian mind a key clicked home, or a pane of glass was smashed, and the pure air rushed in to oxygenate the spirit of the contemplant. Water was as precious as it is in the waterless islands of the Aegean, and what was left over from the winter storms was kept for tea. Illness is comparatively rare up there in those fastnesses probably because though the lama’s spiritual search is strenuous his daily life is anchored to a notion of living without tension, without stress — and the primal root of the disharmony which, in Taoist terms, set off illness is precisely stress. I recalled all this while the service rolled on its way with the chanting and drumming; here and there in it, too, there occurred passages which sounded suddenly as if they were of Indian, even western, provenance. Graceful light airs which suggested Indian peasant songs, or even Scottish ballads; these only hovered for a moment and then returned back to the central gruffness of the two-tone melodic scheme, driven onward by the quavering trump of the bagpipes — squash a goose or a three-month baby slowly and you would get something like this hellish quaver. Then sizzle-bang-boom, the triangles and the big drum took over and the monks began their prostrations; some of them were young Frenchmen, and one hoped it was not just a romantic fad with them to learn Tibetan and turn Buddhist; or just a despairing backlash from the mental self-indulgence of Paris with its tedious mystagogues relentlessly complicating the obvious by giving it fancy names … From Fraud to Freud and back again. Mind you, there would be much to excuse if this were actually the case. I know that if I were condemned to be a French intellectual of today I would certainly leap on the nearest mule and head for Lhasa. Slowly the service ran out of current like an electric train and, sliding down an inclined plane, came to rest on the pulse-beat of the bongo drum, while everyone relaxed and smiled round at his or her neighbour in congratulation; as if it had all been a huge success and entirely due to the wholesale co-operation of us all, which perhaps was really the case. It was breakfast time now, and everyone was thoroughly awake and good-humoured. One saw people more clearly, saw their natures and the roles they played in coming here for the Tibetan New Year. There were one or two very beautiful old ladies and some handsome young girls from Paris. There were also one or two silly-billies aged sixteen whose epithets began and ended with
vachement chouette and who expressed the sort of excitement with the service that one might over a fine performance by a company of actors. Particularly the part of the service where the priest launches into a sort of marionette dance of the hands and wrists. Then there was an Australian who apparently found some special virtue in whirling a prayer-wheel as he ate — he looked like a mentally deficient pot-boy. ‘You can buy electric ones now,’ I told him. ‘They run off a torch battery.’ He looked at me with unfeigned disgust. I could almost here him whisper to himself: ‘Mechanized Buddhism! What next?’ Later I saw him in the library immersed in a translation of the Mahamudra still absently twirling his propitiatory wheel. May a Tibetan demon fly away with him!