Peripheral Visions

something intended as a reality test. Art that is reality-tested in this way is not allowed to reveal new realities or to foster in the observer the capacity to discover and construct new realities elsewhere. We are left vulnerable to a second order of reality testing, challenging the flexibility and adaptability of the society, the reality testing of evolution.
    If an observer labels a work of art as blasphemous or obscene, he is imposing a propriety test, in which some possible perception is to be unmentioned, not unknowable but unspeakable. When art is propriety-tested we lose the opportunity to look for another kind of propriety, the seemliness in the artist’s own vision, new kinds of harmony or proportion that seemed outrageous on first hearing. When any society protects itself by making large areas of experience unmentionable, using ignorance to control behavior, it takes on the risks of action in ignorance, like adolescents discovering sex with no awareness of its dangers or potential. Behavior is isolated from the effort to shape it into forms that can be shared.
    My mother, who came from Pennsylvania, used to say that the strongest form of disagreement the Quakers she grew up with would allow themselves was to say, “Friend, it never would have occurred to me quite that way.” Whatever the consensus finally forged by the group, there is a discipline implied in that phrase “it never would have occurred to me,” the suggestion that perhaps I could learn to let it occur to me. Perhaps even then I would reject it, but I would be enriched by having tasted a different view of the world.
    Walking through foreign streets as a tourist is refreshing, but once in a while something brings home to the visitor the differences in vision so sharply that the world is re-created. Japan has been for many Westerners a place where the sense of cultural difference is immediate, with little temptation to mask it with the illusion of superiority. In Bunraku puppetry, the puppeteer is fully visible on the stage. This cannot be because the Japanese audience is unable to see him but must offer a clue to a different map of the relationship between “reality” and “illusion.” In some Japanese gardens a guide or companion will explain that the garden demonstrates the Japanese love for nature, even as you see cables that pull branches into their appointed directions, the endless care taken to exclude every weed and keep the gravel paths just so: a different map of the relationship between “nature” and “artifice.” As we enter the era of virtual realities, it is well to remember that these will reflect not only the desires but also the assumptions of their creators. Yet all peoples—and all individuals—learn to understand the world by learning to invent it, and it is in the invented world that we must survive. Our best chance of survival lies in seeing and inventing that world as beautiful, inventing it with the precision of wonder.

Reflected Visions
    W AITING IN THE TRANSIT LOUNGE of the Athens airport, on my way back to Tehran from a trip to America, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks: tall, golden men with shaved heads and biceps bulging in deep-wine-colored robes. There was another man, not a monk, with them, a Caucasian, and he was interpreting for them at the service desk. When I drifted closer to listen in, I found that they were en route to Tehran also, in fact on my flight, and I decided to pick them up.
    When China invaded Tibet and broke up the great monastic communities, many of the monks fled to India. In the years that followed, the monks arrived at an understanding of their disaster that gave it meaning. Prior to that time, Tibetan Buddhism had been limited to Tibet, accessible only to those who traveled and stayed there, the esoteric teachings of an introverted community following its ancient spiritual practices over centuries. After the expulsion, the understanding grew that it was the responsibility of the Tibetan diaspora to make their tradition available to the world, that it was for this that they had had to leave their homes. Fundamental to the Buddhist expression of compassion is the image of the boddhisattva, the one who on reaching enlightenment chooses to continue to serve, helping other sentient beings along the way.
    This particular group, led by Tara Tulka Rimpoche, came from a tradition of ritual chanting in which each monk, entering the monastery in