LAUNCHING SPEECH FOR BECOMING BUDDHA : THE STORY OF SIDDHARTHA, BY WHITNEY STEWART & SALLY RIPPIN; 4th May, 2005, at the Greville Street Bookstore, Greville Street, Prahran [Melbourne].
It's a great pleasure for me to be launching Sally Rippin's book tonight. I've got to know Sally as a neighbour at the Writers' Centre where she occupies a studio adjacent to Collected Works Bookshop on the 1st floor of the Nicholas Building. I'm aware of her working away next door and always look forward to our conversations & green teas!
I'm dedicating my remarks tonight to my brother Bernard, who I've recently visited in Weymouth,UK --Bernard and his long struggle with agoraphobia and, of a more positive kind, with Buddhism's precepts & practices, its Asian traditions & its manifestations over the past century in the West... And to my dear friend Cathy O'Brien who presently lives & works in Laos, and apart from teaching English to everyone in Vientiane she's up to her ever widening eyes in that fantastic amalgamation of animist & Buddhist ceremony & practice... I dedicate it also to the continuing conversation between Cathy, myself & Kris Coad, the ceramic artist, around & about Indian, Chinese, Japanese & SE Asian aesthetics & themes...
It's also very nice to reacquaint with Jurate [Sasnaitis] in her shop [Greville Street Bookstore], and with [co proprietor] Des Cowley, who were friends & colleagues for many years at Collected Works...
This launching gives me the opportunity to tie together several strands of my life & my loves!
I was in Bangkok recently, to meet Cathy and to attend the wonderful retrospective exhibition of the Thai artist,the late Montian Boonma... It was impressive to say the least... He is one of Asia's preeminent contemporary artists [sculpture & installation] whose modern art practice is also perfectly explicable as Buddhist art --as his catalogue noted, "Boonma returned to local wisdom due to his consciousness of traditional society and his appreciation of Thai art"...
Cathy took me to the King's Palace temple complex, and I realised what an important place it was in the Buddhist world... And I was overwhelmed by the temples, the statuary, the sense of 'living temple' or church --and by the magnificent murals, hundreds of yards of the Ramayana story...
It so happens I'm a reader of Thomas Merton, who died tragically in Bangkok in 1968 --so when I arrived in England [the next leg of my '05 journey] I raided my brother Bernard's extensive library for his Mertons and found the Asian Journal...[I feel very much like Thomas Merton who on the occasion he was asked to lead a prayer confessed, "I have no idea what I am going to say." He then spoke profoundly about openness... "I am going to be silent a minute, then I will say something... 'O God we are one with you, you have made us one with you, you have taught us if we are open to one another You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts.' ]
This is Thomas Merton at the King's Palace : "There are of course Disneyland tendencies in all these Thai wats and I suppose at times they go over the line... As for the frescos, yes they were good too, in their way, so close to a comic strip; this is not meant to imply a judgement good or bad, after all I think the murals are perhaps the best thing in the whole temple. Hanuman has a prominent place in all this --he is at once a monkey, god and successful fighter and I think this says much that illumines the whole comic book and pre comic book tradition." --which takes me to illustration and specifically this book by Whitney Stewart & Sally Rippin.
My only personal experience of such a project has been working with Jiri Tibor Novak twenty years ago on my book, our book, Christopher... But I've always loved the pictures accompanying text, for prime example the Universal Comics era of literary classics --Mort D'Arthur, especially the Holy Grail chapter when Galahad lays eyes on the challice...
Let us open the book, Becoming Buddha... On the title page Sally's wild goose... In the book-trade I came to know it as the logo of Scottish press, Floris, publisher mostly of Rudolph Steiner titles but also Celtic & Scottish Gaelic works of literature & spirituality... I visited the abbey at Iona in the west of Scotland in 1990, whose symbol is the wild goose...
On the next page [the foreward by Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama] the lotus flower & the leaf of the Bodhi tree --beautiful marginal decoration... This is, of course, a book dedicated to the Tibetan cause & its form of Buddhist practice. It is blessed by the Dalai Lama. It is a picture book of one of the great stories of the world...
The writer's sentence, "At a time when the oldest bodhi trees in Asia were still in youthfull bloom..." is juxtaposed on this page with Sally's dance of leaves. Of course, the branch is assumed --literally, the leaves hang --but without the branch the leaves are miraculously suspended... The child is looking out of the pouch of the mother --with them there eyes!
[And so we follow the story of Siddhartha from baby to boy to youth to marriage to his life outside the palace.] Here Siddartha & his friend meet the monk... Sally's picture of Siddhartha's face is, I think, deliberately unformed --that is, it has less delineation than the monk's. But, one anticipates Siddhartha's progress in the beatific expression of the monk who meditates --in the story an as yet unknown practice. The face of the Buddha, as we would recognize it from its thousands of images in the great Asian traditions, is more that of the monk than Siddhartha...
The picture of Siddhartha as an experienced meditator yields, I think, to a kind of androgeny in its representation... Neither male nor female --maybe like one of the sacred transvestites of India, male & female simultaneously --the shaven dome of both baby & old one --the closed lids of an inner-seeing & not-sleeping person. And note the brilliant touch of the blue ribbon of thought/non-thought, the ribbon or vibration, the invisible thread which illustrates a transportation, a beyond-oneself, a transpersonality... The lumpyness of it is so much to the point of the realness of meditation --it's great that we dont have some wafting airy-fairy emanation! And the lumps perhaps contain monkey feet & tails! The figures work as decoration & the imagery suggested by the text...
In all the pictures thus far, black is border & background, positively or implied. But in this picture, which illustrates a scene prior to Siddhartha's enlightenment, --we could call it the Temptation and accept the Christian significance of that term --Sally has bordered the dramatic event with blue. I think the blue is the prelude to the golden orange of the magnificent next chapter/next page... Blue is a transcending colour, the colour of sky, of air (if it could be coloured) --it's the colour of the sea as well but that's the reflection of the sky!
The image of Siddhartha, on this orange & gold page, touching the earth with the fingertips of his right hand as his left hand rests across his thigh, is absolutely at one with Whitney Stewart's text... "Siddhartha's mind was steady. No trace of inner darkness blinded him. Free from pride, doubt and fear, from anger, excitement and sorrow. Siddhartha had clear vision..."
Here is Buddhism's figure of the enlightened person --here is the continuum of earth, nature, mind, and one thinks of Romanticism's legacy to modernity, including environmentalism's mystical aura & etc...
In her 'Illustrator's Note', Sally states she's not a Buddhist, "but have a great respect for Buddhism and the Dalai Lama. I knew that in illustrating this book, the challenge for me would be to work with historical images of Siddhartha already created by many wonderful artists over hundreds of years , but also to bring to each picture my own interpretation of Whitney's text. I began by collecting together as many beautiful materials and images of Siddhartha as I could find to inspire me. From there I began to paint Siddhartha the way that he appeared to me in my mind. While I painted each illustration, I practised the Dalai Lama's meditation exercises in this book and worked to create the most peaceful and beautiful image I could, all the while aiming to represent the light and compassion that Siddhartha, and now the Dalai Lama, bring to this world."
For those wishing to explore further I'd recommend, in addition to the multitudinous classical Buddhist literature, Herman Hesse's wonderful Siddhartha, which many people here would already know, and Thich Nhat Hanh's recent 600 page life of the Buddha, Old Path White Clouds, which draws on 24 Pali, Sanskrit & Chinese sources...
So, without further ado, I declare Sally's book, Sally & Whitney's book, launched!
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Becoming Buddha : the story of Siddhartha, published by Lothian Books , Melbourne, 2005.
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