Valentine's Relics and No-thing-ness
Relics from Rome, Hidden Tibetan Scriptures and Divine Consorts
We should love everybody, all day, every day. All the time. But we don’t. We separate. We live in holograms. We collide. We don’t understand each other. We disagree. We separate. We may try again. And so on.
“Listen Sariputra, this Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is this Body. This Body is not other than Emptiness and Emptiness is not other than this Body. The same is true of Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations, and Consciousness.” (Prajnapāramtra, The Heart Sutra, translated by Thich nat Tanh).
Now, I was a Buddhist for over 20 years, and I never got close to understanding Emptiness. In fact I began to even feel quite hopeless about it. I was stuck in that swamp where the Buddha warned you not to lurk: nihilism. I seemed to be recklessly praying, over-attaching to rituals, grasping at the lama’s feet. I was gripped by a feeling of useless-ness, and still haunted by guilt. In an endless repetition of entering the shrine-room, prostrating to my teacher and to an infinite range of unreachable Buddhas who had perfected it, I felt guilty and deflated. I lived in a swirl of confused emotions and dealt with them in a very un-skillful way. Even when I was sent to India by my teacher, Lama O, to study Tibetan in the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharmsala, (the seat of Tibet-in-Exile, with the Kashag, the Tibetan parliament, and the home of the XIV Dalai Lama of Tibet), I was in a vortex.
Listening to teachings about karma in the Library, all the different little versions of it codified according to the varying degress of intention behind the action, I was in a vortex. My own vortex. I thought, how can I do this? Why can I not be like Yeshe Tsogyal, and be the consort of some Buddhist superhero like Padmasambhava, the Lotus Born, and whizz up mountains, and reveal teachings that were hidden in rocks and statues? Why could I not be like that, instead of some lost girl in her twenties, trying to do the right thing for the teacher? The guru. Yes, I had found mine, at 21 years old by a lake in County Cavan. I would do anything for him, except, it seemed, to think of myself as his obedient and dutiful chela, translating his precious words. What if I wanted to marry? Have babies? Would I be locked up in a Dharma centre by the shores of a Cavan lake? In short, I was terrified. And yet, hungry to learn the words, curious for its earthy tones- Ga, Kha, Ka, Nga….
The first sentence I learned was from Lama O’s monk Tenzin Shakya, as we sat down under the pine trees in McCloud Ganj and he said “Shing Dong ö-la Kyi-bu duk.” It is very pleasant under the tree. And it was. There I was with my monk companion, drifting from tea to noodles to dumplings to tea to class with Ten-la, our Tibetan language teacher who liked to systematicaly drill the language into us, day in, day out, and avoid questions like the plague.
And every day on the steps of the Library, an old man in a white dhoti, from some nearby village, would come up and stare me in the eyes, his stick held in his left hand, his right hand poised at his mouth. ‘Rupee-rupee’ he would say plaintively until one day I bought him a mango instead of giving him a rupee or two. The next day he came up and said ‘Mango-mango.’ And every day thereafter. By that time I had an addiction to mangoes and lychees. It may have been a bad mango that had me carted off the the Delek hospital with amoebic dystenry. Not for the faint hearted were those toilets in the hospital. The stench alone. Best forgotten, but impossible to forget.
When I recovered, I met Raj. He was wearing a long sleeved cotton shirt and a woollen tank top, which I don’t know how he bore in the heat. He had a very slight frame and a dash of silver hair on his head. Thick spectacles with tortoiseshell frames sat on his nose. He studied at the Library, comparing Sanskrit and Tibetan versions of the Buddhist scripture Prajñaparamita, the Perfection of Wisdom. “What else is there for an old man to do?” He chuckled. I had heard he’d been a spy, but he was certainly a retired diplomat, having served for a long time in the Indian Embassy in Geneva. His wife had passed away and he had come to the Foothills to escape the heat of Lucknow, where he lived with his ailing brother. He had pitched in all his pensionable luck to crack the secret of Emptiness. Śunyata. The elusive thing that Buddhists ‘chase’. Of course they don’t chase, that’s very wrong of me. But they do talk about it, an awful lot. The Nothing-ness-Thing. The non-thing. śunyata, in Buddhist philosophy, is ‘ the voidness that constitutes ultimate reality’ not as a negation of existence but rather as the undifferentiation out of which all apparent entities, distinctions, and dualities arise.
Understand? No. Nobody does. Except those that do. Raj didn’t either. And yet he spent most of his retired life wandering from Dharamsala to Bodhgaya to Manali and back again, to study the Prajñpāramitra, in which the nature of Emptiness is outlined to a student called śariputra, by the Buddha. Raj said he’d asked everyone, including the Dalai Lama, what śunyata meant. ‘Nobody understands it. Nobody. Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Not even the Dalai Lama can tell me what that means.’ He chuckled. And yet he’d become a brilliant scholar, entirely independently, so much so that the addled American and European Buddhist students would endlessly pick his brains on the steps of the Library. I would earwig from the sides.
I had some kind of ridiculous dream that I would end up being swept away from this little hill station to Tibet, like Yeshe Tsogyal, consort of the Tantric Buddhist saint Padmasambhava, the Lotus Born One (who was from Pakistan, in case you didn’t know). This pair concealed a miriad teachings (Ter Ma) in rocks and statues to protect them from the darkness that descended on Tibet in the 8th Century (yes, darkness descended in that Buddhism was eclipsed. Of course the darkest time was the 1949 invasion of Tibet by the PLA) A Ter-ton (Tibetan: གཏེར་སྟོན་, Wylie: gter ston) is a person who discovers those concealed teachings and who may be an incarnation of one of the twenty five main disciples of Padmasambhava who foresaw that dark time in Tibet.
Termas are sometimes hidden in objects like statues or rocks or in the minds of Padmasambhava’s incarnations. Tertöns discover texts/ Terma at conjunctions of the right time and place and the teachings within them range from simple transmissions/ downloads to entire meditation systems. Anyway, I wasn’t Yeshe Tsogyal, and my Tibetan really only reached a level of being able to converse (but good enough to tell my mountain friends all about the famine in Ireland and how mean the British were to us). As I got better at speaking Tibetan, doors opened further and further up the Himalaya, so that I ended up in craggy old monasteries and villages on the Tibetan border, studying my Tibetan grammar, eating endless plates of chapati, dal and over-sweet tea to wash it down. And the more I was there, the more I learned. It was possibly the most expansive time of my entire life. But I came nowhere near to understanding Emptiness. Raj said that word was the most stupid translation of all time. It brings you nowhere near to an understanding of śunyata. Which must be vast-ness itself. Emptiness. Where does that bring you? Something has to be empty of something. So it’s a trap.
I did, however, become some kind of consort partner for a Nyingma lama but he got things a bit out of balance as he had several consorts, wives and a scattering of children from Kathmandu to Toronto to Wicklow where our son lives, far from the madding crowds of Tibet and its hinterlands. That is another story.
But it does bring us back to Ireland, and romance. Here we are, in the spring. We have just celebrated Brigid’s Day, the first bank holiday dedicated to an Irish Godess-Saint. The first. Maybe she too was a Ter-ton, who knows.
She the healer, the midwife, the poet, the saint. The keeper of the eternal flame. The druid’s daughter. She is celebrated at the same time as Saraswati is in India, one of my dearest goddesses: patron of music, art, science in the Hindu pantheon.
Both of these Goddesses are independent. However Saraswati, although she always appears alone, is in fact the wife-consort of Brahma. But she may have been the first wife of Vishnu, who already had his hands full with two other wives, so he gave Saraswati to Brahma. But she is not a mother, similarly to Brigid. She is of the arts. She is a muse. She gives birth to creations other than babies. Like Brigid. Her time of year is the beginning of February in India.
Brigid, honoured as one of our patron saints (without the booze and the parades) brings us on the slip road to Valentine’s Day, one of the most monetised days of the Western World. Shame on you, if you haven’t got a dozen red roses hooked on your arm, and you’re not out for dinner with your divine partner. Even if it is the Early Bird. Like I said in the beginning, should we not all be loving each other, al-ways? Why is it reduced to the one person? But it’s interesting, since a lot of these Gods and Goddesses are consorts of each other.
I wonder could Padmasambhava have brought Tantric Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th Century and hidden all those Termas when the Dark-ness was looming, without Yeshe Tsogyal? Could Shiva have done his meditations without the wisdom of Parvati? Where would we be without their son, the great remover of obstacles, Ganesha?
Can we get away from the male-female symbiosis? And since we are getting away from it with gender ideology, where does that leave us? In Emptiness? In a ditch? In No-man’s-and-no-woman’s-land? In a Waste-land? Where are we going?
Back to love. That will help. It is always a balm. Back to the nice dinners with the nice couples and the roses and the chocolates. Back to Rome. There are around 11 other Valentines. The ‘Catholic Encyclopaedia’ and other hagiographical sources describe three separate St. Valentines that appear in connection with 14 February.
One 15th century account describes Valentine as a temple priest who was beheaded near Rome for helping Christian couples marry. Another account says he was the Bishop of Terni, martyred by Claudius II. Anyway, what matters is what remains. As in, his relics. The flower-adorned skull of St. Valentine is on display in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome. In the early 1800s, the excavation of a catacomb near Rome revealed skeletal remains and other relics now associated with St. Valentine. These relics have been distributed across the world- Czech Republic, Scotland, England, France and would you believe it, Dirty old Dublin.
In 1836, the Carmelite priest John Spratt received a gift from Pope Gregory XVI (1765-1846) containing a “small vessel tinged” with St. Valentine’s blood. Spratt had attracted attention as a preacher, and maybe some Jesuits who had been in Dublin brought him to Rome where the elite flocked to hear him. He was gifted by Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846) with no less than the remains of Saint Valentine himself. It was a “small vessel tinged” with St. Valentine’s blood.
The gift was taken to Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, Ireland, where it remains. On November 10, 1836, the Reliquary containing the remains arrived in Dublin and were brought in solemn procession to Whitefriar Street Church where they were received by Archbishop Murray of Dublin. when Fr. Spratt died, the relics were hidden, and found in the 1950s/60s when they were placed on the altar and a shrine was constructed to house them.
Maybe we can blame Geoffrey Chaucer for the obsession that started with St. Valentine’s Day. They say that no record exists of romantic celebrations on Valentine’s Day prior to a poem Chaucer wrote around 1375. In his work “Parliament of Foules,” he links courtly love with the celebration of St. Valentine’s feast day–an association that didn’t exist until after his poem received widespread attention. The poem refers to February 14 as the day birds (and humans) come together to find a mate. When Chaucer wrote, “For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day / Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.”
So, relics are common to Buddists and Christians. Lama O used to tell us tales of people following relics of the Buddha all over India and Tibet. Relics are a thing. A no-thing. Surely they evoke too much attachment to liberate minds from suffering? What is wrong with a bit of suffering? It makes us wiser. Deeper. More know-ing of life. Maybe that is why I was never a good Buddhist. I was always chasing a dream or a notion, or overtaken by an emotion. I wasn’t detatched, as a good Buddhist should be. I wasn’t particularly good at prizing apart texts like the Prajñapāramitra. I liked staring at the green parakeets outside the windows in the Library in Dharamsala, as the lama taught us about laws of karma. I liked listening to the stories the cackling old ladies told me about the witch, the bang-mo, they’d seen on the bridge that winter in Spiti Valley. I liked the idea of finding my true divine soulmate, with whom I would rest on a mountaintop forever.
“If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life.”
– Pablo Neruda
The trap and the translation. Ya. Beautiful work. God, there's such a massive sync with something me and my friend were laughing about last night having this article appear in my inbox this morning...or maybe there's none, I'm just mistranslating one but anyway An Gaiste agus an aistriúchán will be today's words to learn and remember in Irish. Cheers Siofra.
You have such interesting stories! I am dipping a toe into Buddhism but with the previsor that probably I will fail to understand it as I fail to understand most things. It is a great practice at least to flex the muscle of the mind, and maybe be okay with understanding that there is a lot that you don't nor will ever comprehend! Many people don't dare to admit that!