The Temple of the Lamas, the oldest sanctuary in Pekin, and one of the
most curious in the world, contains a profusion of marvellous work of
the old Chinese gold and silver smiths, and a library of inestimable
value.
This precious temple has seldom been seen, although it has been in
existence for centuries. Before this year's European invasion, access
to it was strictly forbidden to "outside barbarians," and even since
the Allies have had possession of Pekin, very few have ever gone there.
It is protected by its location in an angle of the Tartar wall in quite
a lifeless part of the city whose different quarters are dying from
century to century as old trees lose their branches one by one.
Going there to-day on a pilgrimage with the members of the French
legation, we find that we are all there for the first time.
In order to reach it we first cross the eastern market-place, three or
four kilometres through a sunless and desolate Pekin,--a Pekin that
bears the marks of war and defeat, and where things are spread out
for sale on the filth and ashes of the ground. Some matchless objects
transmitted by one generation of mandarins to another are to be found
among the rags and old iron; ancient palaces, as well as the houses of
the poor, have emptied here some of their most astonishing contents;
the sordid and the marvellous lie side by side,--here some pestilential
rags, there a bibelot three thousand years old. Along the walls of the
houses as far as one can see, the cast-off garments of dead men and
women are hung. It is a place for the sale of extravagant clothing
without end, opulent furs from Mongolia stolen from the rich, gay
costumes of a courtesan, or magnificent heavy silk robes which belonged
to great ladies who have disappeared. The Chinese populace, who have
done a hundred times more than the invaders in the way of pillage,
burning, and destruction in Pekin, the uniformly dirty populace,
dressed in blue cotton, with squinting, evil eyes, swarm and crawl
about, eagerly searching and raising a perfect cloud of microbes and
dust. Ignoble scoundrels with long queues circulate amongst the crowd,
offering robes of ermine or blue-fox, or admirable sables for a few
piasters, in their eagerness to be rid of stolen goods.
* * * * *
As we approach the object of our journey it grows more quiet; the busy,
crowded streets are gradually succeeded by streets that have perished
of old age, where there are no passers; grass grows on the thresholds
and behind abandoned walls; we see trees with branches knotted like the
arms of the aged.
We dismount before a crumbling entrance which seems to open into a park
which might be a ghosts' walk; and this is the entrance to the temple.
What sort of a reception shall we have in this mysterious enclosure? We
do not know; and at first there is no one to receive us. But the chief
of the Lamas soon appears, bowing, with his keys, and we follow him
across the funereal park.
With a violet dress, a shaven head, and a face like old wax, at once
smiling, frightened, and hostile, he conducts us to a second door,
opening into an immense court paved with white stones, completely
surrounded by the curious walls of the first buildings of the temple.
Their foundations are massive, their roofs curved and forked, the walls
themselves awe-inspiring on account of their size, and hermetically
sealed; and all this is the color of ochre and rust, with golden
reflections thrown on the high roofs by the evening sun.
The court is deserted, the grass grows between the paving-stones. On
the white marble balustrades in front of the closed doors of these
great temples are ranged "prayer-mills," which are conical thrones made
of bronze, and engraved with secret symbols, which the priests turn and
turn while murmuring words unintelligible to men of our day.
In old Asia, which is our ancestor, I have penetrated to the heart
of ancient sanctuaries, trembling meanwhile with indefinable anguish
before symbols whose meaning has been lost for centuries. This kind of
anguish has never been so tinged with melancholy as to-night, standing
before this row of silent "prayer-mills" in the cold, the wind, the
solitude, the dilapidation of this court, with its white grass-grown
pavement and mysterious yellow walls.
Young Lamas appear one after the other as noiselessly as shadows, and
even Lama children, for they begin to instruct them quite young in the
old rites no longer understood by any one.
They are young, but they have no appearance of youth; senility is
upon them as well as a look of I know not what of mystical dulness;
their gaze seems to have come from past centuries and to have lost its
clearness on the way. Whether from poverty or renunciation, the yellow
gowns that cover their thin bodies are faded and torn. Their faces
and their dress, as well as their religion and their sanctuary, are
covered, so to speak, with the ashes of time.
They are glad to show us all that we wish to see in their old
buildings; and we begin with the study-rooms, where so many generations
of obscure and unprogressive priests have been slowly formed.
By looking closely, it is plain that all these walls, now the color of
the oxydized metal, were once covered with beautiful designs in lacquer
and gilt; to harmonize them all into the present old-bronze shades
has required an indefinite succession of burning summers and glacial
winters, together with the dust,--the incessant dust blown across Pekin
from the deserts of Mongolia.
Their study-rooms are very dark,--anything else would have surprised
us; and this explains why their eyes protrude so from their drooping
lids. Very dark these rooms are, but immense; sumptuous still, in spite
of their neglect, and conceived on a grand scale, as are all the
monuments of this city, which was in its day the most magnificent in
the world. The high ceilings are supported by lacquered columns. There
are small seats for the students, and carved desks by the hundred,
all arranged in rows and worn and defaced by long use. Gods in golden
robes are seated in the corners. The wall hangings of priceless old
work represent the joys of Nirvana. The libraries are overflowing with
old manuscripts, some in the form of books, and others in great rolls
wrapped up in colored silks.
We are shown into the first temple, which, as soon as the door is
opened, shines with a golden glow,--the glow of gold used discreetly,
and with the warm, reddish tones which lacquer takes on in the course
of centuries. There are three golden altars, on which are enthroned
in the midst of a pleiad of small golden gods three great ones, with
downcast eyes. The straight stems of the gold flowers standing in gold
vases in front of the altars are of archaic stiffness. The repetition,
the persistent multiplication of the same objects, attitudes, and
faces, is one of the characteristics of the unchanging art of pagodas.
As is the case with all the temples of the past, there is here no
opening for the light; only the light that comes in through the
half-opened doors illumines from below the smile of the great seated
idols, and shows dimly the decorations of the ceiling. Nothing has been
touched, nothing taken away, not even the admirable cloisonné vases
where sticks of incense are burning,--evidently this place has been
ignored.
Behind this temple, behind its dusty dependencies, in which the
tortures of the Buddhist hell are depicted, the Lamas conduct us to a
second court, paved in white stones, similar in every way to the first;
the same dilapidation, the same solitude, the same coppery-yellow walls.
After this second court comes another temple, identical with the first,
so much so that one wonders if one is not the victim of an illusion;
the same figures, the same smiles, the same gold bouquets in vases of
gold,--a patient and servile reproduction of the same magnificence.
After this second temple there is a third court, and a third temple
exactly like the two others. But the sun is now lower, and lights
only the extreme tips of the faience roofs and the thousands of small
monsters of yellow enamel which seem to be chasing one another over the
tiling. The wind increases, and we shiver with cold. The pigeons in the
carved cornice begin to seek their nests, and the silent owls wake up
and begin to fly about.
As we expected, this last temple--possibly the oldest, certainly the
most dilapidated--is only a repetition of the other two, save for an
idol in the centre, which, instead of being seated and life-sized,
is colossal and standing. The gold ceiling rises from about half the
height of the statue into a cupola, also gilded, which forms a sort of
box enclosing the upper part of the figure. To see the face one must
go close to the altars and look up between the rigid flowers and the
incense-burners. It then looks like a Titanic mummy in its case, with
a downcast look that makes one nervous. But on looking steadily, it
exercises a sort of spell; one is hypnotized and held by that smile so
impartially bestowed upon all this entourage of dying splendor, gold,
dust, cold, twilight, ruins, silence.