![]() ![]() It was at the age of 20 in 1964 that she became one of the first Westerners to be ordained as a Buddhist nun. ![]() Her priorities are rooted in the social implications of Buddhism, which is attested by her early life focus. Even when discussing a topic like visualization, she remains focused on the liberation attained in the process, not the abstract or structural, the psychological or the mystical methods and effects. In Himalayan sacred art, erotism, like all other visualizations, activates the mind's eye - the eye of inward apperception - to transform our external perception of our own presumed singular and disparate realities into bridges to endless other individualities that together build the continuity that binds us as a whole.īut discussions of magical realism, surrealism and the art of spectacle and erotism are not what concerns the impressively serene and pragmatic Jetsunma, as she is called by everyone to her apparent satisfaction. South-Asian civilization as a whole requires no Freud or Bataille to instruct them on how and why erotism cannot be deleted from the history of religion, however much the world's othodoxies would wish it away. Then, too, it is to it's credit that Himalayan Buddhist devotional art and meditative visualization, like much of the Indian art from which it derives, welcomes the erotic character in art. I'm referring to such seminal figures in the arts as Phillip Glass, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson and scores of others like them. The Himalayan taste for vivid, some might say electric color, combined with the erotism of certain of its sculptures and paintings, seems especially out of sync with the Zen-like minimalism of its more famous artist and intellectual practitioners. Himalayan Buddhism is particularly possessed of a hyper-magical pantheon of allegorical protagonists and antagonists especially difficult to reconcile with the more Zen-like principles of many Mahayana Buddhists and which place value on conceptual, perceptual and physical emptiness, stillness, and even an art of poverty over the wealth of chromatic and gilded embellishments of the Himalayan art of spirituality. Even in the centuries of their elaboration in Hinduism and Buddhism one-to-two millennia ago, they must have seemed too unbelievable by the more rational earthbound devotees of Buddhism, especially those concerned with the philosophy of ethics and compassion, to be considered as anything more than an artist's ingenious escape from the mundane pictorial constrictions of ordinary life. ![]() Most of the new Buddhists I meet are highly rational individuals, yet they meditate seriously and serenely with the aid of supernatural, even monstrous figurative, sometimes barely humanoid, iconography that include primary- and secondary-colored entities, some with six or eight arms - buddhas, bodhisattvas, yogis and hybrid beings, some even gods and goddesses - that resemble characters we today see in comic books and screen animations. In my case, as a student of world cultures and in particular of belief systems, mythologies and mythopoetics, I'm interested in why a faith and artistic sensibility that is so spectacularly mythological in an archaic sense has such an appeal to so many Americans brought up in a culture of modernism. But there were also those like myself who are neither Buddhist nor a practitioner of meditation but were there because the visualization in question regards the art of Himalayan Buddhism - or Tibetan Buddhism as it's more often, if narrowly, called. The audience revealed themselves in their questions to be largely enthusiastic Americans, many no doubt who embrace or are considering embracing Buddhism as the guiding principle for their lives. ![]()
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