Yugen

An awareness of the universe that triggers an emotional response
too deep for words.

On a solitary hike in the Trossachs, a wild area where the Scottish Highlands begin, I stopped to look at a country kirk near the village where Rob Roy, a Jacobite folk hero, is buried. It was a very modest building, tiny, in fact, and may have been a private chapel for an aristocratic estate, but on my walk I’d seen only old stone cottages and a few recently built houses, nothing remotely grand; I saw no aristocratic presence thereabouts, but that’s not to say there wasn’t one. The kirk stood in a flower filled meadow and the high wall that enclosed it was pitted and mottled with age, its capstones all grown over with lichen; chained and padlocked gates set back from the roadside barred entry to curious idlers like myself. The diminutive chapel and the lovely meadow which it graced was invisible to motorists speeding by.

I’d left one forested trail and was on my way to another that would take me over the hills to where I was camped; to get to it I had to tramp a few miles along a tarmac road, but this was no hardship as the weather was fine and the country air bracing. That morning I’d stood and watched an eagle circling on the thermals, and shortly afterwards I caught sight of a hawk going like a bullet into a nearby copse; gorse the colour of gold flowed down the hillsides; the sounds of birdsong and the gurgling of rocky burns had accompanied me all the way; passing by a steeply sloping field I stopped to watch two rams butting heads. And then I stumbled on the chapel.

There wasn’t a great deal to see: a gravel path leading away from the gates, a scattering of slender trees leaning over the roof of the kirk; sunlight sparkling through the leaf canopy and speckling the dressed stone; long grass growing right up to the walls.

There wasn’t a whisper of a breeze; an extraordinary stillness enveloped everything and was so palpable it vapourised my internal clamour in an instant. It was no more than the cessation of motion and noise, but I remember very keenly how the unearthly silence permeating the little meadow affected me: what was inside felt like outside; what was outside felt like inside; no difference; same, same.

Was it my imagination playing tricks? Too much chi in the air? I’ve tried to write more, to distill the essence of those few moments standing at the gates of the kirk, but it was a vain effort and I gave up; I just couldn’t find the words. The best I can do is refer you to a telling observation from the English playright Harold Pinter: “The more accute the experience, the less articulate its expression.”

An incident from my youth points up an aspect of the experience: one afternoon I got into a foolish argument with a neighbourhood boy who was an amateur boxer and before I realised what had happened I was laid out on the pavement: he had decked me with a punch I never saw coming. I hadn’t even felt the impact of the blow. The sudden transition from vigorous hiking to overarching stillness was as immobilising as that.

*

It wasn’t till we were about to leave Renèe and Bao Pu’s apartment that I saw the Lohan; he was just by the door and we had walked by him, unaware of his presence as we stepped into the apartment. The wood carving was very old and, going by the square holes in its base, was missing a lower half; not a trace of the paint that had once coated its surface remained; though the ravages of time and circumstance were plain to see, the wear and tear of centuries had failed to diminish the wooden monk’s undeniable allure.

The monk’s hands are folded into the dhyana mudra, the same mudra assumed by the Buddha as he sat under the pipal tree before his Enlightenment. His robes drape naturally over his body and are without stylistic adornment; the upright posture is devoid of any sign of physical tension: the shoulders, the place where the weight of the world bears down, are free of tension; the torso is relaxed and suggests a deep repose. But it is around the mouth and the half-closed eyes that the monk’s internal composure is most noticable.

I don’t think the woodcarver just imagined up what can be discerned in the monk’s bearing. Wielding iron gouges and blades to re-create the serenity of deep meditation is immensely skillful and must have been sourced in experiential knowledge of such a state. I have no doubt it was a monk who did the carving.

Before the work of cutting and shaping would have gotten underway, the woodworker monk would have had to find a suitable piece of timber for his project, and most likely would have found it amongst a store of logs stockpiled to season somewhere in the monastery, a workshop or a lean-to perhaps. Inventory would have been inspected, a few lengths picked out and scrutinized, and from them one or two pieces selected. The face of the wooden monk is so distinctive it wouldn’t surprise me if the inspiration for the work had been a sage, or perhaps a revered teacher living in the monastery, whose charisma our master carver wished to replicate; it’s no stretch to imagine him, mallet and chisel in hand, pausing to reference such a being in his mind’s eye.

Renée described to me how she and her husband discovered the meditating monk:

Bao Pu and I were walking down Hollywood Road in Hong Kong, in the very early days of our jade collecting. We were looking for antique furniture, nothing too fancy, just something for our apartment. We walked into a shop selling mostly antique Chinese furniture; however, towards the back of the dimly lit store a spotlight picked out a worn out old wooden Lohan statue. He spoke to me instantly; his presence was so alive I immediately pointed him out to Bao Pu. I mentioned how much his face resembled my father’s, who had passed away years ago. Bao Pu asked about the price, and then with no hesitation or haggling, said, “We’ll take it!” I turned to him in surprise, but said nothing… Neither of us buy many things, but we were both certain we wanted this statue. The shopkeeper told us it was a Ming Dynasty carving from Jiangsu Province, from a temple that had since been torn down.

To have been able to tease out a bewitching portrait of a Lohan, a realised being free of suffering, from an unforgiving block of hardwood is a truly exceptional accomplishment. It is the woodcarver’s skill manifest at the very highest level. In the facial aspect of the meditating monk one sees the aesthetic expression of Lao Tzu’s laconic observation, “He who speaks does not know; he who knows does not speak.” The indescribable remains indescribable, but the enigmatic monk from Jiangsu, seems to hint at the very thing which cannot be spoken of.

*

My father-in-law, an American from WASP stock, is prone to dramatic mood swings; alcohol loosens him up, but after a few drinks he’s liable to become mawkish and juvenile, which Owain, his grandson, finds amusing. The narratives of our respective lives have followed radically different trajectories and we remain emotionally and intellectually distant from each other, though I wish this were not so.

On our last visit to Chiangmai, the principal city of northern Thailand where he runs a spa with his Thai wife, he treated us to an excursion to Chiang Dao, an unspoilt stretch of hill country en route to The Golden Triangle. It was, on the whole, a peaceful expedition, but sullied on our departure when Christopher got into a spat with the owner of the bungalows we’d been staying in: he was convinced he’d been overcharged, but only complained after the bill had been paid. The proprietor angrily responded by throwing the bill money into the back of the truck where Owain and I were sitting; it was retrieved and re-presented, but hurled back again, the wad of baht somehow ending up in Owain’s lap, where it stayed; then we drove away.

On the day before our departure we went for a walk that took us through a forest wat. The forest monastery tradition in Thailand is a recent initiative ­– begun in 1900 – whose purpose was to revitalise monastic life by drawing on ancient Buddhist practice, and to achieve this by retreating into the forest to lead a morally disciplined life revolving around seclusion and meditation. It was from this action that the forest monastic culture in the north-east of the country emerged.

It was a hot and humid afternoon, the sky was a louring grey smear and the mosquitoes were out in force. The wat was very quiet; I clocked the monks’ houses as we walked by them: single-room, cinder block dwellings with tiled roofs, raised off the ground atop brick piers; rubber sandals outside many of the doors. Christopher is a tall man with long legs and is a fast walker; I’m more of a stroller, but my wife’s walking speed is more like his and she has no trouble keeping up with him; I usually lag behind with Owain on these outings and am content to remain out of earshot.

I saw Christopher come to a stop up ahead and then veer off towards a nearby clump of trees. As Owain I and caught up with Sophia she told us her dad had gone to see if he could rouse the abbot, who he’d met on a previous occasion, and was going to ask him to unlock the gates of a nearby sacred cave he wanted us to see.

I was sweating a lot and had become irritable from the remorseless attention of the mosquitoes; and the prospect of having to feign interest in the holy cave’s collection of market-stall Buddhas and plastic gewgaws only served to put me further out of joint. As we waited for Christopher to return we zig-zagged and shuffled about in a fruitless attempt to avoid being bitten. After what seemed an age he reappeared, loping towards us in the company of an ochre-robed, shaven headed man, the abbot; sotto voce, Christopher told us that he’d interrupted the monk’s afternoon meditation.

I remember the abbot’s surprisingly grubby robes and our awkward manoeuvring around the cave’s mementoes left behind by visitors: bleached photos, candles, beads, cheap figurines of Ganesh, the Hindu deity with the power to remove obstacles, tacky Buddhas; dust laden paper flowers. I don’t recall which of us asked the abbot if he’d be agreeable to posing for a photo; in any event I arranged the bodies on a bench just outside the cave: Owain in the middle, Christopher on his right, the monk on his left, looking ill at ease. Then I asked Christopher and Owain if I could take a picture of the abbot alone; when they moved away he relaxed visibly; you can see in the photograph on the previous page that he has no mask, his face is open. And his ear lobes are a sight to behold, just as elongated as the wooden sage’s from Jiangsu.

This portrait of a nameless monk lay amongst the digital clutter of my desktop for several years, a reminder of a brief but memorable encounter: this is a man who has renounced a material existence to spend his life following in the footsteps of the Buddha. But I wish one of his bhikkhus would do his laundry for him.

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