Tibet, Tibet, Tibet: Eliot Pattison's The Skull Mantra, A 21st Century Siddhartha by Ceci Lumley
Given my own inclination to dabble in far-flung metaphysics, I have over the years read quite a bit about from and about the country, ranging from serious scholarly stuff to New Age drivel. While I found much that resonated well with my own searchings, Tibetan Buddhism, with its extreme imagery, seemed just a little too strange. Eliot Pattison, in his recent novel, The Skull Mantra, which takes place in contemporary Tibet, doesn't so much remove the strangeness as make it vividly real and (remarkably) understandable. The Freudians and the Anti-Freudians can debate all they alike about whether biology (as Freud said) is destiny. But for human beings, one can make an excellent case that geography certainly is destiny, or at least profoundly shapes destiny. Let a bunch of intelligent, sensitive human beings call the Himalayas home for a few thousand years and what you get is: Tibet. At one point, a character in The Skull Mantra ponders whether all the world's most religious people have not in fact occupied mountainous regions. Though it's being marketed as a mystery/thriller, Pattison's story is one that, as they say, transcends the genre. The only other alleged mystery I've read recently that is like it is Joseph Kanon's remarkable Los Alamos, in which Kanon brings to startlingly effective life the odd, insular, pressurized world that was created by the Manhattan Project in the mountains of north central New Mexico. Pattison has done something similar for Tibet, surely a more difficult feat. Right off, at the beginning, we are plunged into life (one wants quotes around that word in this context) in a forced-labor camp in eastern Tibet. Hard to imagine a more alien setting, but Pattison puts us in it and, with endless telling details, makes it immediately real and believable. The setting quickly expands beyond the prison camp as a murder-- possibly political, possibly other-worldly-- takes center stage. One of the prisoners, an ethnic Chinese with strong sympathy for Tibet, Tibetans, and the dying Tibetan culture, becomes the investigator.
Result: I felt I learned more about Tibetan Buddhism from this "mystery" novel than I learned from all the Richard Wilhelm translations and other Western takes on the subject I had read. But that, as I say, is a kind of obbligato that continues from first page to last. Not to lose the main point: The Skull Mantra is also just a plain good story, set in an exotic locale, and very well told. You can certainly read it as such and be well-rewarded for your time. What elevates out of its genre is the fact that it also contains a repast of hard-won, hard-lived wisdom for any seekers fumbling toward a way out of the reductive Western morass. Hesse's Siddhartha served its age well as a fictional depiction of the journey toward self-knowledge. The Skull Mantra, which deals with the same journey, is perhaps a Siddhartha for the 21st century. Hesse now seems naive, bordering on the simplistic, in his narrow, arrow-straight focus on one character and his predictable progress. In contrast, Eliot Pattison gives us several characters, all of whom are on a somewhat different paths, moving at different rates, encountering different obstacles and different bits of wisdom and insight to help them along. Problems and ambiguities abound. The path is often obscure, and the direction one should go often murky and unclear. Moments of clarity occasionally banish the darkness. I'll leave you with this example. One of the Americans, who is much taken by Tibetan Buddhism, finds himself on a particularly tortuous path. Late in the book he comes to the following realization:
"The Buddhists, they have eight hot and eight cold hells. END
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There are many
Tibets: the Tibet of movie stars (Richard Gere at al.), the Tibet of the exiles (the Dalai
Lama et al.), the Tibet of the mystics and the pseudo- mystics (Alexandra David-Neel, Mme.
Blavatsky, etc.), sexual Tibet (tantric yoga), the Tibet of the artists (Nicholas
Roerich), the Tibet of grand theoreticians (Jung, etc.). Today, inside Tibet, there are
apparently only two: the Chinese Tibet, and whatever fragments remain, after five decades
of Chinese occupation, of the old Tibet.
As the plot unfolds to
involve various Chinese and Tibetan officials (not to mention a couple of Americans
involved in a joint venture with the government), there is a continuing obbligato, or
maybe it's a kind of figured bass. Whatever metaphor you want, there are repeated
references to Tibetan Buddhism which I found not only respectful but enlightening, so to
speak. Lamas and monks appear who, though enduring the most awful of existences, quite
believably wind up uttering the most awesome statements about themselves, the world, and
their (and our) place in it. Life lessons in applied Buddhism.
