AT GYANTSE: FIGHTING: FORAGING: TIBETAN RELIGIOUS ART
The ten days or so spent at Gyantse were occupied in fighting, in
waiting, through periodical armistices, for the result of negotiations
which came to nothing, in sightseeing and in foraging for our present
needs, and for the advance to Lhassa.
The two fights here alluded to were the taking of Tsechin and the taking
of Gyantse-jong. At the former I again had a front seat in the stalls,
watching the show in company with the headquarters' Staff, but had to
leave, with some aggravating message to camp, just as the curtain was
rising on the last act. During that long day, at the end of which
Gyantse-jong was taken, I saw very little of the fighting till just the
very climax, when certain duties took me to the village Pala, where the
Staff were watching the final phase. No boredom on this occasion, but
intense excitement. The final assault on the jong was a sight well worth
remembering, coming as it did at the close of so tedious an action. The
artistic effect of the Maxim on what one might call spectacular warfare
is, I think, greater than that of artillery. Shells going off at
intervals of course bring out the tragedy of war by the awful noise
which they make, but the rapid ping-ping-ping of the Maxim sets your
blood tingling and really excites you. It was a glorious spectacle, that
last assault. The rush through the breach of those Ghurkhas and their
comrades into that frowning impregnable-looking jong to the tune of
artillery, dynamite, and Maxims would have appealed to the veriest man
of peace. And as the jong became ours, the cheer that went up from
every point where troops and followers stood in knots, watching the
outcome, was a glorious climax to that long day.
A flying column that followed the retreating enemy to Dongtse failed to
catch them up, but returned with a fine haul of useful forage. Foraging
had for some time been the order of the day, except when fighting
interfered with it. The Gyantse plain is very rich, with villages dotted
about at close intervals, all standing among rich crops and nominally
containing plenteous stores of what were our staple needs. But the art
of hiding such stores is possessed in a high degree by the Tibetan. Some
officers, who later on had much practice in foraging, became experts in
finding the hidden store-rooms, knowing at a glance at what point on a
given wall in an upper chamber the wall painting ceased to be of a
permanent nature, and was merely a temporary daub concealing the rough
cement and pile of loose unbaked bricks which blocked the doorway of
what, after use of crowbar and mallet, proved a veritable mine of grain
or barley flour.
Of course, while at Gyantse, the towns and lamasarais of Gyantse and
Tsechin were our happiest hunting-grounds. In one lofty room alone we
one day found eight thousand maunds of barley flour, all neatly bagged
and sealed with a Tibetan official seal, doubtless a mobilisation
reserve of the Tibetan army, and, alongside of it, another similar room
filled with loose grain to a height which we could never really explore,
since the weight of the grain made it impossible to open the door more
than an inch or so, from which small aperture our requirements trickled
out by the mule load. If we had had enough transport to carry on from
Gyantse all the supplies which we found there, our commissariat problems
would have been easy.
As we foraged on the days following these fights our way was strewn with
corpses. The warriors from the Kham country, who formed a large part of
the Tibetan army, were glorious in death, long-haired giants, lying as
they fell with their crude weapons lying beside them, and usually with a
peaceful, patient look in their faces. As types of physical humanity
they could not be easily excelled. I remember one day one of the Kham
men, a prisoner, was helping me to set in order a refractory watermill
stone with which I was trying to grind wheat into flour. My commanding
officer came to see how I was getting on and caught sight of the
prisoner. He gazed at him in admiration and then exclaimed:
'By Jove! what a fine corpse he would make!'
Very brutal of him I thought it was till I had seen more corpses, and
then I realised the true artistic insight of the remark.
I suppose it would be no more possible for an ordinary person to do
justice to Gyantse as a sightseer than for any one who had had no
classical education to visit Rome or Athens in the true academic spirit.
Just as the key to those places lies in a knowledge of classical
history, mythology, and archaeology, so would the true key to Gyantse lie
in a knowledge of the history of Buddhism in general, and of the Tibetan
variations of Buddhism in particular. The main tenets of Buddhist
doctrine, as one may acquire them in a handbook or an occasional
magazine article, afford very little clue to Tibetan religious art.
Buddha himself one can understand, and one becomes quite to know and
admire the gently supercilious, ever-smiling expression that is
faithfully caught in every statue and picture of him which one sees. And
one can understand the motive in exemplifying the variations of human
fortune by pictures of the wheel of life which show types of all the
degrees of human happiness and unhappiness--instances of indescribable
tortures at one side of the wheel, lesser miseries adjoining it,
followed by similar gradations so arranged that as we go round the
circle we come at last to fair scenes of ideal human bliss. But the
application of the same kind of gradation to deities worshipped, and to
the representations of them given in art, is not so easily understood.
There is a certain highly symmetrical edifice standing in Gyantse
monastery. The centre of it consists of one huge Buddha reaching from
the ground to the height of, I should say, one hundred and fifty feet.
Round this are built tiers upon tiers of small shrines; each tier
contains one less shrine than the tier below it. The shrines are of
equal size, so that the general effect of the whole edifice is that of a
pyramid. You rise from tier to tier by a narrow hidden staircase. Each
shrine contains one idol. If you start at a certain point on any of the
tiers, and go round that tier, you will first enter the shrine of a
perfect Buddha, for whom you will feel at least some reverence. The next
shrine will contain an idol that impresses you less, and has about it
some taint of the world. The next is a thoroughly worldly idol, the next
is ugly, the next is obviously wicked, and the next a demon. The demons
grow in demoniacal qualities till suddenly you arrive again at the
Buddha from whom you started. The tiers above are all arranged on the
same principle, except that, the number of shrines decreasing by one in
each case, the gradation from Buddha to demon grows more abrupt as you
ascend.
Then again, in the most holy of spots, not only in Gyantse but even, for
instance, in the audience hall in the sacred 'Pota-La,' or
palace-monastery of Lhassa, one comes across images of what to European
eyes appears the lewdest character, and similar representations are
constantly found on the painted scrolls, which everywhere are seen
hanging in the monasteries.
Such strange excrescences on the external face of a religion that ranks
so high in regard to the spirituality of its essential tenets, and the
extent and depth of its influence on human life, as does Buddhism, seem
only to point to the endless intertwinings of religions that must ever
have been in process since the world began. Here we have, for instance,
one of the noblest and purest of religions tainted--at any rate as
regards the art which is ancillary to it--with those twin poisons of
demon-worship and priapism; all contact with which one would have
imagined it to have been pure enough and strong enough to throw off
centuries ago.
That strange similarity on less essential points that exists between
religions which are far removed from each other, both in history and in
doctrine, makes one long to read some really comprehensive history of
human religion that will, by dipping down into the furthest depths of
the past, reveal to us the answer to such problems as, for instance, the
strong and apparently family likeness between the joss-sticks and tallow
altar-lamp of the Buddhist, and the incense and wax-candle of ornate
Christian ritual.
Though it would appear that what is barbaric may survive, in the form
of ritual, as an acknowledged and in some cases, it may be, even a
helpful adjunct to a religion which in every other respect has cast off
all that is barbarous, yet some of those demons and those licentious
pictures that we saw in Tibet seemed to the Western mind altogether too
vile to be thus explained away.
But, even so, what fool shall rush in and criticise the East?