The Best Spiritual Writing 2010 by Zaleski Philip

Author:Zaleski, Philip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

The Snow Leopard is a liberating book, in fact, in part because it is not about ordinary goodness. It features some of the most transcendent, crystalline moments in modern prose, and yet it is, at every turn, about anger and pain and fear, and its protagonist is as impatient and far from Buddhist tolerance on his way down from his transcendent moments as on his way up. In that sense, it’s a journey into humanity, which Matthiessen is wise enough to see as lying on the other side of the mountains from sainthood (courage, as they say, refers not to the man who’s never scared, but to the one who’s scared and yet braves the challenge nevertheless). In all these regards, and as part of the doctrine of hard realism, it is only right that the door to the Crystal Monastery is locked when Matthiessen arrives, that the lama whom he has been longing to meet for so long turns out to be “the crippled monk who was curing the goat skin in yak butter and brains” that he walked past, and that it is only after the mists clear and his spirit, so he writes, is focused by the Crystal Mountain that “I feel mutilated, murderous; I am in a fury of dark energies, with no control at all on my short temper.”

It is in that context that the most powerful character in the book is the stealthy, unassimilable presence among the party known as Tukten. A Sherpa among the porters, a spirit that no one is entirely comfortable with, a man who has the feel of a sorcerer and is accused of being a thief, Tukten is the most slippery and unsettling presence in the mountains, whose air of threat sometimes seems more charged and intense than that of the elements themselves. And yet he is the author’s shadow, and, you could say, familiar. He is “somehow known to me, like a dim figure from another life,” and the two of them seem linked, always aware of where the other is. Milarepa, the great poet-saint of Tibet, was said once to have converted himself into a snow leopard to confound his enemies; reading Peter Matthiessen, we begin to suspect that a snow leopard like the one he hopes to see has chosen to turn himself into Tukten, who always remains solitary and unknowable, “the most mysterious of the great cats.” Matthiessen even calls Tukten—twice—“our evil monk,” the “our” perhaps the most unnerving word of all (“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” as Prospero says of Caliban).

Tukten appeals to Matthiessen, even perhaps teaches him (more than does the obviously wise but matter-of-fact lama of Shey) by taking everything in his stride, as the way things are; he will look unmoved, Matthiessen says, on “rape or resurrection.” Not the least of the charms of the book is how the author, who never gives himself the last word and who shows himself in all his foolishness and unfairness, is constantly

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