Red Feather Lakes, Colorado
In his explanation of his path into Tibetan Buddhism, or at least the paths he didn't follow, Dale writes:
Much of the greatest Buddhist literature and art is Zen. Zen shrines are beautiful. Tibetan shrines are gaudy and clashing and rococo and -- not to put too fine a point upon it -- ugly.
To which I would reply:
Which is to say, well, yes. "Gaudy and clashing and rococo" are part of the look. And the architecture is austere compared to the painting. But I can see the kitchiness only in my photographs. At the time, these images were ... not beautiful perhaps, but authentic.
Authentic, because of what I went through to get there:
Such is the 20-minute hike from the main camp of Shambhala Mountain Center up to the Great Stupa. The elevation is over 8000 feet; every step is an aerobic. The weather is pure Beethoven: flashes of sublimity amid waves of levelling bombast. Each time I did the walk, I felt myself shedding layers of judgment, so that even a giant Mickey Mouse statue might have seemed transcendent at that location.
Still, the photos of it are another matter. And I dread the results if you build such a stupa at sea level, amid a city, without the benefit of that long, strenuous, gentle approach. Tibetan imagery is to be encountered after a walk across the blasted plains of Tibet, or our own small Tibet in Colorado. If I saw the Great Stupa as I walked down a big-city street, I might well gawk, and keep walking.
Really I had to cast back a little bit to recover that sense of distressing garishness I had when I was first going to KCC -- my relationship to all those images has changed an awful lot, over the years.
But yes, a vast barren vertiginous backdrop decisively changes the Gestalt.
Posted by: dale | 2005.10.04 at 17:12