bodhisattva

Ashmolean gallery 38. China from AD 800. Takes me back to Cowper Street school when I taught 2nd year history to fill a gap in my timetable. According to Messrs Carter & Mears then, European History began on Christmas Day in the year 800 when the Pope in St Peter’s crowned Charlemagne (alias Carolus Magnus alias Karl der Gross) as Holy Roman Emperor.

And I look round at the exhibition and see what the Chinese were doing and I make comparisons. And I’m sad our history books didn’t have more to say about the world at the other end of the Silk Road.

I sit and gaze at the figtree wood statue of a seated bodhisattva. It’s still full of power. Evident as soon as I make contact. The silence which radiates is tangible and totally engulfing.

When my thoughts begin to wonder I leave my seat and move to stand beside a table of treasures. The electricity shoots through my body. My fingers curl up. It takes a conscious effort to choke away the tears. To move half a footstep away. The memories are overwhelming. It’s like that nowadays whenever I’m tuned to a sensitive channel. I hadn’t expected it to be so strong here in this space today.  

I’m drawn back to that afternoon in Guangzhou (on the Pearl River) when I walked up to the second floor of an old pagoda and remembered my mother handing me over to the monastery when I was twelve years old. I used to take their tiny meals to the monks who were meditating there. It could take them 24 hours or 24 days to make all their devotions at each stage and gradually make their way up to the highest platform.

I leave the gallery and make my way down to the bookshop in the basement. They have reproductions of those very typical southeast asian statue heads. (To me they are Siamese but I’m sure that’s no longer ‘correct’.) There’s that unmistakeable penetrating twinge that pierces whenever something once so familiar shows up in an unexpected context. My sister and I were sacred dancers at the royal court. I can still feel the humidity. See the smooth wooden columns and the deep crimson silks stretched and gathered overhead.

Times Past merges into Times Present and I prepare for Times Yet to Come. Next time ..

francis cameron, oxford, 10 april 2012

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