Drawing From Life: Representing a Spiritual Tradition

Abstract

In the fourteenth century choir stalls of Chester Cathedral there is a wood carving of an elephant, or at least a fourteenth century woodcarver's attempt to represent one on the basis of hearsay and description. The beast has a trunk, but otherwise looks a lot like a horse, with a heavy body, or heavy for a horse. The ears are large, but only by the standards of horses, and it has a horse's legs and hooves. Acquaintance with real elephants would no doubt have helped, but the representation of unfamiliar spiritual traditions is more complicated. Acquaintance, even appropriation, can be vitiated by preconceptions. Sometimes the Christian template of the horse can obscure the outlines of the Buddhist elephant, and the legacy of a formerly dominant Western version of Christianity, which has surely compromised the availability of that tradition, still lingers in the popular (Western) mind. In its vulgar form it leads to the assumption that a 'religious person' has 'convictions', and is 'committed' to certain 'beliefs'.1 Contemporary Buddhists have resisted this imposition, and try to represent Buddhism in a way that reveals the error, insisting on the dominance of practice over belief. Unfortunately, contemporary Buddhists and contemporary Christians do not know each other very well, and distorting projections can go in both directions, unless we start to listen to each other's talk, as a preliminary, perhaps, to engaging one another in conversation.