The Story of a Wall Painting

“The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world.  See each thing in this world as a moment of time.”

“Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one another.  The way-seeking mind arises in this moment.  A way-seeking moment arises in this mind.  It is the same with practice and with attaining the way.”

“Thus, the self, setting itself out in array sees itself.  This is the understanding that the self is time.”

-DOGEN ZENJI

And as such, time being or being time is constantly breathing in and out, incessantly reconfiguring cloudland, not made of substance – only in the continuity of its trajectory.  Moments of it we remember as meaningful.  But all moments are that, and no moments are that. 

In March 1972, I moved to France to become a volunteer in a home for socially handicapped children, the Institut Camille Blaisot in Caen, Normandy.  Two months later I rented an apartment in the old center of the city.  It was a 16^th or 17^th century building with no right angle anywhere to be found, a winding staircase, made of solid granite blocks, and slightly undulating walls throughout – one of the few houses of its kind that had survived intact the 6-week battle between Nazi and allied forces in and around Caen in 1944. 

My neighbors were Alain and Nadine Roussel, living on the second floor whereas I lived on the third.  Nadine worked as a teacher where I worked.  But we had more in common than the workplace.  I had just recently come back from my first trip from India and Nepal, and so had Nadine’s husband Alain, a year before me.

We got close.  We had so many stories to share, usually over bottles of beer and wine that seemed to keep uncorking themselves all of their own.  But we never passed out drunk.  We were just deliriously perky.  Conversation just kept flowing – and to this day, I feel that one needs to speak French with gusto to really appreciate this particular kind of flow.  No other language seems to be so enamored with its own sound of nonchalant, self-assertive perfection, full of itself in best and worst possible ways.  By the way, it was taken for granted that I spoke it fluently too, free of any German accent that is.  As the standard phrase went, “You cannot speak French like everybody else, can you?  Ah, but no, you should”.

In short, we were vibrant, vivacious, expressive 20-somethings, quite unafraid and did not censor – neither our thoughts nor our words.  Young people today seem so much more guarded, self-conscious about the image they present and their impact on others.  This trend will get worse in the days to come too, due to pernicious social media impact, and the increasing pressure it creates to ever more conform.

My apartment had two rooms, all of mixed usage.  For example, the toilet was behind a curtain (no door) in the much larger living cum bedroom (not too far from the dining table).  There was no shower; the only washbasin was located near the window overlooking the backyard.  For showers and baths we went to the nearby campus of Caen University.  The kitchen space was mostly empty, and of course had three whitewashed walls.  Cooking utensils were at a bare minimum.  There was only one cupboard and a 2-flame gas stove.  Later we got the luxury of a n oven and started making pizzas.

One night, we specifically remembered that these whitewashed walls had nothing on it.  We sat, the four of us, Alain, Nadine, Susy and myself around the dining table of their apartment.  For some inexplicable reasons we started discussing the Evans-Wentz translation of the “Tibetan Book of Liberation”, a Padmasambhava terma text.  Alain owned the French version; I went upstairs to get the German edition.  I don’t remember the actual content of the conversation, only that at one instant Alain noticed the beautiful frontispiece in color of a Padmasambhava thangka in the German book, voicing regret that the French edition did not have it.

Then I probably remarked that a large-scale painting like this would look great on the whitewashed wall on the far end of the kitchen space, which was half separated from the front part of the room by the large old cupboard hosting our plates and pots and pans.  Alain spontaneously voiced great enthusiasm for the idea. 

It was early September; his semester would start in late October.  So, he would have the time to launch himself into a crazy venture like this.  He just said something to the effect of, “Let’s do it”.  Which came unexpected.  I had simply voiced an idea and not given a thought to putting it into action.  He grabbed it and ran with it.  For me the actual doing was still a mystery.   Therefore, I enquired how we would go about it.  He said, “The easiest would be, if we had a clear line drawing of Padmasambhava and created a grid of 1cm squares under it and the we divide the wall into 10cm pencil lined squares.  It’s a piece of cake to transfer one to the other.  The grid will make sure that the proportions stay correct.”

At which point I ran upstairs again to fetch the Tibetan rice paper print from over my bed of the trikaya of Amitabha, Avilokiteshvara and Padmasambhava.  I had bought this on the last days of my Kathmandu visit, and it was based on a drawing by the then Khamtrul Rinpoche.  I showed it to Alain, and he judged it the perfect Padmasambhava for our purpose.  The color scheme we decided to copy from the German edition of the Eventz-Wentz book.  Alain would draw the central figure and I would take care of the decorative artwork surrounding it.  Drawing a life size human shape appeared too daunting to me, and way beyond my meager artistic skills.

So it was decided, and so it was done.

The end product of our combined efforts, completed by mid-October 1972, must have been the first life size Padmasambhava on a wall in a French house.   It, of course, looked much more vibrantly alive than the reproduction shown here, made from an old slide from which almost all its color has faded out.  The only thing that neither Alain nor I dared to do was, to give eyes to Padmasambhava.  We were so happy with the mural, and so afraid of ruining it all by making a mistake while painting the eyes.

I guess the eyes of Padmasambhava only came to France, when Dudjom Rinpoche settled there partially, in 1973.

In my early twenties, I didn’t know anything about traditional pujas or other kinds of formal practice.  I remember how we offered incense every once in a while.  In general we really loved the image.  We worshipped it even, like one adores a lover or a really good friend.  It assumed the role of a perfect, silent companion, a protector of sorts.  Each time when I opened the apartment door, my eyes usually wandered first to gaze for a second at Padmasambhava.   Starting in December, when we started to have several guests in a row, we put a second mattress in the cubicle-like space in front it – and there we also made some wild love, some nights and on Sundays.  But there never arose a feeling that the Lotus Born Guru would have minded.  Then around Christmas ’72, I was initiated into Transcendental Meditation Maharishi Mahesh Yogi style, and sometimes meditated in front of the image.  It was a good place, our time in Normandy very happy and harmonious.

In August 1973 we left.   My time as a volunteer had come to an end.  I remember that Susy and I lit two full packets of incense and bowed before the image before closing the door for good. 

But was it ever closed? 

What is open?  What is closed?  What is past?  What is present?  What do our ordinary, linear minds really know – beyond how to help us navigate through the everyday maze of conventionality?     

 And what do we know about the ramifications of painting a Padmasambhava on a kitchen wall?  What had we called into being?  Does it continue to call us, beckon us?  - There is no definite answer to these questions that bears scrutiny.  Yet it is important to ask them – and leave them unanswered. 

I met Alain and Nadine for the last time only two years after I had left Caen, in the summer of 1975.  Writing this, I now wish they were well.  And if they have passed on, which they might, considering the number of Gitanes and Gauloises ‘papier mais’ they were smoking per day, I wish that Padmasambhava would have remembered them, and they would have remembered him.  He has certainly never left me, not even when I planned on leaving him.