Monday 15 January, 2007

Faith

If you buy the most recent (Dec/Jan) edition of Meanjin on Faith, you'll find an article by me on writing about buddhism. 'I have been struck by the repetition of the tropes Tibetan Buddhists use when describing their individual stories. If you have seen Martin Scorcese's beautiful film Kundun you'll know the kind of thing I mean: small boys living in isolated areas who are presented with a series of tests in the attempt to establish whether they are a tulku (reincarnation) of a recently deceased senior Buddhist monk. This ritual of the objects is centuries old and when the story of the items placed before a boy is told it can sound frightfully repetitive. At first I found these repetitions simplistic, as if they denied the individual at the centre of them the complexity of their own narrative, but then I found that such stories gathered a mythological force, an impersonal iconoclasm, the more often they were told. I came to see that what lay behind such generic tellings was deeply personal. The story being told was about the point when a Lama's new body met his former life, the moment where he stepped into a story a thousand years old and turned it into his own.'

And yes, that's me on the cover.

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