Customer Reviews

Insights of a Himalayan Pilgrim (Tibetan Art & Culture Series)

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I highly recommend this book. After reading, I can see this book is from both a Lama and a former westerner. But much more than that, it's written in somewhat of a Jungian style, and that's what I mean by a westerner who is also a Lama, a devoted experiential Buddhist with years of life experience. Anotherwards, like Jung, it contains the Western intellectual comprehension and is in no way blinded by such scholarship of objectivity, but accented, enhanced, or shall I say enlightened, by the Eastern frame of non-discursive understanding of symbols and pictorial visualizations which can only come from the depths of understanding through subjective experience.

"Art is the living expression of religion. Religion without art is a dead system of dogmas, which have no effect on life. As long as Buddhism was reduced to the narrow confines of a monastic community, it exhausted itself in dogmatic quarrels and discussions which had no effect on the lay-community, but with the advent of Mahayana Buddhism the greatest works of art in India were created, and Buddhism spread its message over the greater part of Asia." p. 64

"The realm of religious life is a specific form of human experience, or, better, an expression of an inner experience. Therefore no objective scientific description can ever do justice to the realm of religion, since it cannot grasp what is most essential. At the very moment in which the subjective experience is treated as the object of intellectual observation or inquiry, it is robbed of its aliveness and immediacy." P. 89

"The Buddha neither claimed to be the bearer of a divine revelation nor of preaching an ancient religious tradition, but rested firmly on the basis or experience.. . . it was not Buddha's intention to invent a new theory about the origin of the world and the cosmos, but to make us aware that the only cosmos which we can observe and significantly influence is our own body with its psycho-physical functioning. He realized that the functions of our body as well as those of our consciousness are not erratic, but according to those natural laws which we interpret according to th4e level of our development and understanding and then project onto inner events. P. 95

"This experience of the transcendental cannot be grasped by means of logical and dialectical thinking; therefore it is also beyond the realm of verbal description. This is why in the Pali canon it is said of the Dharma, "Well proclaimed is the law by the Enlightened One: visible to everybody, timeless, deep, understandable only for the wise ones." The simplicity of this praise of the Dharma can only become confusing for intellectuals, but those who have acquired wisdom, who have regained their inner wholeness, will immediately understand. P. 95-96

Govinda, very much like Carl Jung, speaks about Buddha's choice of synchronicity over causal and dialectic, and the need to envision a "pictorially evocative" language, that is, imagery within the self to perceive reality of the religious realm of experience. This is a crucial point of his book. He relates the problems of one-sided thinking in "ego-frozen" levels of perception. This again is the difference of dogmatic, logical, theological religion, which is dead, and that of internal visualizations coupled with understandings within subjective experiential religion, a living experience.

There is an important difference from Lama Govinda and the Tibetan Sogyal Rinpoche, who wrote in his book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, that the guru disciple relationship was absolutely crucial and necessary in what he related as an alchemy of devotion that brought forth the subjective enlightened experience. While Lama Govinda acknowledges such spiritual gurus, he does not emphasise this guru disciple relationship as absolutely crucial but rather as the early part of the development of the psyche, as "Buddha rejected such disowning of one's discriminative faculties." P. 115

"Although we are not endowed with universal of divine power, by opening to its influence, we can create within ourselves the readiness to become receptive to it. Light is always present, but as long as we shut it out, we remain in the dark. Even the highest power requires our own willingness to cooperate. If we emphasize our egocentricity, we close ourselves off from this power which otherwise would always be accessible."

"The amazing fact is, that precisely at the very moment in which we are filled with this power, it will not abolish or destroy our personality. It will fill us up like a vessel, so that even at the moment when this form is breaking up and our ego-consciousness is extinguished, the uniqueness of our individuality will continue to vibrate and be transformed into a unique expression of universality which cannot be duplicated."

"Power is not creative. It becomes creative only when meeting resistance. This is why the universal is dependent on the individual, the divine within the human being, in order to recognize itself.' P. 151

The danger of the West is to overemphasize individuality, while the East denies such. Govinda emphasizes the need to remain in the world integration, while release our egos. The idea is to transcend polarity, we do not deny either side.

The idea of deities and demons are equated to the human ability to create form for forces that do not create or destroy us, but project anthropomorphic form to such forces, which in turn, create their reality.

Govinda writes an interesting account of Hinduism being a later historical development from Buddhism and not the other way around.

Mantras and Mandala's must be coupled with understanding of both the words used and pictorial visualizations and their subsequent meanings.

Karma is not the relationship between actions, but the internal intensions of the individual, which bring forth their actions.

And on language: "Translators of language are often not aware that, because meaning shifted in the course of millennia, even a literal translation gives the modern reader incurred ideas, since the modern reader is used to thinking in abstract terms and is no longer rooted in the pictorially evocative language of ancient times." P. 103

Lama Govinda's writing is poetic, informative, and easily read. He sheds light on the differences between Buddhism and other religions, such as Hinduism. His comments are kind and factual rather than critical. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in Tibet, Tibet's ancient religion, and/or Buddhism.