Alexandra David-Neel - Initiations and Initiates in Tibet

T O present to Westerners a perfectly clear and complete idea of the mysticism of the Tibetans is almost impossible. There is a wide gulf between the various religious and philosophical conceptions which they accept and those which serve as basis for the meditations of the ascetics of the Land of Snow. The very word mysticism, which I have used in a previous book and which I shall continue to use in this because I can find none better, must be understood, when dealing with Tibet, in a sense altogether different from the one we are accustomed to give it.

In the West, a mystic is a devout person,of a very superior type, granted, but always essentially a believer, the worshipper of a God.

On the contrary, the Tibetan mystic will probably be regarded by many Occidentals as an atheist. If we call him by such a name, however, we must guard against attributing to the term those feelings and ideas which it connotes in Western lands.

In countries under Christian influence the atheist, for centuries past, has been a rare exception, a kind of demoniacal character appearing in the flock of faithful believers. Even in these days he appears before the imagination of many as a rebel confronting Faith and Religion in a theatrical attitude of denial and challenge. There is nothing like this in Tibet where the idea of a supreme personal God has never held sway.

Among the numerous deities in the Lamaistic pantheon, there is not one that occupies the rle of an eternal omnipotent Being, the creator of the world. These deities are regarded as belonging to one of the six species of conscious beings recognised by popular belief. The abodes assigned to them are not always situated outside of our earth. Besides, when their habitual sojourn is allocated to other regions of space, these latter, so the Tibetans believe, are sufficiently near the earth to enable the gods to intervene at every turn. And so prudence enjoins one to live on neighbourly terms with the less important of these gods, to enlist the favour of the more powerful and to receive clemency or neutrality from those of evil disposition, even to resist them.

This religion, compounded of an exchange of good services, testimonies of respect, and a lion-tamers cunning, has nothing in common with the love that inflames certain Christian saints, still less with the passionate transportsso promptly degenerating into sensualityof certain bhaktas of India.

Sprung from such an environment, dominating it though retaining the impression it has made upon his nature, the Tibetan contemplative is giving way to no sentimental impulse when he leaves the society of men and withdraws to the desert. Still less does he imagine that he is doing anything in the nature of a sacrifice.

In contradistinction to the Occidental who frequently enters the cloister after doing violence to his deepest affections, with tear-stained face painfully tearing himself away from what he still designates as the good things of this world, the Tibetan ascetic, like the Hindu sannysin , envisages renunciation as a happy deliverance.

Buddhist writings contain many passages descriptive of this state of mind:

Home life is strict slavery, freedom consists in leaving home.

In the eyes of the Tathgata, the splendour of a king is no more than spittle or a speck of dust.

Full of charms are the lonely woods. Those who are freed delight in things that do not attract the populace.

No rapture awaits the sober thinker in his hermitage, his hut or cave, amid the immensity of Tibetan solitudes. Ecstasy, however, will be his for him to plunge himself therein. What will keep him in a state of attentive immobility day after day, month after month, and year after year, will be the contemplation of the working of his thought in self-analysis, effacing its own functionings according as they are discovered to be untrue, until the time comes when reasoning ceases because it has been replaced by direct perception.

Then, the storms raised by thought-creating theories and speculations having calmed down, the ocean of the mind becomes tranquil and smooth, without a single ripple disturbing its surface. In this faultlessly smooth mirror things are reflected without their image becoming distortedand this is the starting-point of a series of states which originate neither in ordinary consciousness nor in unconsciousness. This is the entrance into a sphere different from that in which we habitually move; hence, after making a certain number of reservations as to the meaning of the term, we may speak of Tibetan mysticism.