THE PASSING SCENE

By Jonathan Landaw

Many years ago, before the birth of my children – for now I have reached the advanced age when, like my parents before me, I date events in relation to the staggered, and staggering, arrival of these appendages to my identity – I spent much of my time in Nepal and India, studying with the various Tibetan lamas who were to have such a profound impact on my life. One of my frequent winter stopovers in those days was the Nepalese Mahayana Gompa, located near the northern edge of the Kathmandu valley on a hill called Kopan. Kopan is among my most favorite places in the world, not least because of the remarkable view it offers of a most remarkable valley and its colossal monument to enlightenment: the Great Stupa of Boudhanath.

According to both ancient legend and geological evidence, Kathmandu was once the site of a great lake, and on chill December mornings when fog fills the bowl-like expanse of the valley with what, from the vantage point of Kopan, appears to be an ocean of cream, this primordial lake reappears, like an apparition. It was one of the morning’s most enjoyable rituals to arise from early meditation, or from sleep – these two stages often being indistinguishable – retrieve some ersatz coffee from the kitchen and, while still wrapped in blankets, peer through rising steam at the unfolding scene below. Everything was magic! Even before the sun broke over the mountains far to the left, its light would reveal a rolling lake whose whiteness would grow, moment by moment, until it reached an almost blinding intensity. On one most magical of mornings, a solitary shaft from the sun’s brilliant eye shot across the top of the billowing waves of fog and struck the golden spire of the Great Stupa, the only structure tall enough to stick up through this sea of whiteness. At that moment – or was it later, when the surrealistic scene replayed itself in my memory? – verses from Fitzgerald’s Rubiyat sprang to mind, perhaps imperfectly recalled, but with a powerful, other-worldly significance: Wake! For the sun that scatters into flight / The stars of heaven from the field of night / Drives night before it and strikes / The sultan’s turret with a shaft of light.

Those mornings, as the sun rose higher, the cream lake would slowly dissolve, and through the fleecy mist would appear trees, farm houses and the intricate pattern of terraced fields carpeting the valley’s floor. All these appearances, including the sights and sounds of the people and animals making their way across the medieval landscape, seemed at such times to be no more real than dream images. The eerie way they emerged from the cream lake seemed to illustrate my teacher’s repeated reminders that the apparently substantial entities of our life are but mere appearances rising from the field of consciousness, abiding a moment, then dissolving back into that field once again. Before too long, of course, the scene before me lost its illusory aura, the growing harshness of the sunlight reinforcing the familiar solidity of things; but every morning I would peer intently into the mist, trying to decipher the elusive vision, and learn something about the world of appearances.

I was not the only one on this early morning vigil. Most of the other Westerners on the hill were also transfixed by the dawn spectacle, standing like silent sentinels as they sipped from their steaming cups of wake-up beverage. Among them was a dear friend of mine, long a resident of Nepal, who was soon to enter a solitary meditational retreat in one of the small houses just down from the crest of the hill. I was planning to travel to India in a week or so, and it was arranged that I would bring lunch to her from the main kitchen during the start of her retreat. When I asked if she intended to observe silence – so I would know whether or not to speak to her each day – she replied, “It is okay to talk, but not in a concrete way.” And a few days into her retreat she told me that a song had spontaneously arisen in her mind. She sang it for me, and I still remember it.

Its final stanza is: May the sentient beings have happiness; / May they have no suffering anymore; / May their spacious love be born!

Years later, I named my first daughter after her.