Discovering One Thousand Buddhas

Few recent news items have attracted more attention than the implosion of the Titan submersible. Every aspect of the venture has now been raked over, including the nature of the venture itself. While some were quick to dismiss those on board as obscenely wealthy tourists, others jumped to their defence, declaring them to be bold adventurers pushing the boundaries of human exploration and knowledge. Clearly, exploration is moving from the surface of our planet to the deepest oceans or into space.

My musings are prompted by The Library of Lost Horizons, Trevor Hay’s tenth book. During the time of Covid when he was trapped at home in Melbourne, a city locked down more than any other, Hay’s greatest journeys took him up or down stairs to find an elusive volume in his large collection of antiquarian books. Although he admits his travelling days are now over, he remains fascinated by travel and the genre of travel writing.

Hay speaks fluent Mandarin and since 1975 has journeyed widely to study Chinese literature, theatre and folklore. His library holds a multitude of forgotten stories from travellers along Silk Roads in remotest Asia. In The Library of Lost Horizons, Hay recounts stories garnered from the many archaeologists, ethnographers, scientists, historians, anthropologists and inveterate dreamers who passed through deserts and harsh mountain passes to the soaring peaks and mysterious valleys of Tibet and on to fabled Shangri-La. He adds reflections arising from his own last trip to Dunhuang and the remarkable “Caves of the Thousand Buddhas” on the edge of the Gobi Desert.

Hay is an old China hand whose life in books began early. At Port Adelaide Primary School, his teacher, Miss Arkwright, found him rather inattentive, easily distracted by his “too vivid” imagination. Hay concedes that as a child he knew little of Asia apart from the “Story of the Willow Pattern Plate”, travels of Sinbad the Sailor and Rupert Bear and one film, The Thief of Bagdad. Later, he was captivated by Biggles in the Gobi: A Further Adventure of Detective Air-Inspector Bigglesworth and his Air Police. The young Hay’s growing fascination with remote or lost civilisations was then sharpened by C.W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves and Scholars (1949) which outlines, like a fabulous adventure, the history of archaeology, from Schliemann’s discovery of Troy to the excitement of George Smith finding ancient clay tablets describing the biblical flood. The Adelaide Advertiser called Gods, Graves and Scholars a “superb” book that “unrolls the vast and enthralling panorama of the past before astonished and wondering eyes”.

Hay and I are of an age, born just a few months apart. As I grew up in South Australia, one of my early guides to the mysterious East was Biggles in the Orient (1944). Then at some point in the 1950s, my Uncle Jock gave me a copy of Gods, Graves and Scholars, with a scrawl in green pencil on the title page, “To David on his birthday, hoping it is not too dry”. On reading Ceram, I was hooked. Soon after, the work of the brilliant French orientalist Jean-François Champollion, who translated the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone, stirred my imagination.

Although Hay’s paths never crossed mine, I now find that our tracks were strikingly similar. In 1964, we found our way to the University of Adelaide on teaching scholarships after secondary schooling at state high schools. The university presented us with a striking array of learned, sometimes eccentric teachers. We were both impressed by our lecturer in Chinese History, Dr John Frodsham. Hay experienced his “oracular moment” as Frodsham spoke of those marvellous things called “oracle bones”. I remember more clearly Frodsham’s melodious speaking voice and how his very beautiful Chinese wife once gatecrashed a tutorial class wearing a red cheong-sam—a very unusual sight for the Adelaide of the 1960s. I later learned of Frodsham’s considerable reputation as a translator of Tang poetry.

For a young man growing up in the 1960s, Adelaide and its history seemed to offer little that could stir the imagination. Although Colonel William Light was repeatedly praised as the city’s founder, we never heard that he was of mixed-race heritage, with a Portuguese Eurasian mother. In Adelaide’s then largely Anglo environment we heard nothing of the local Kaurna language, customs or stories. Some stirrings of change appeared around the mid-1960s when the History Department introduced its first semester-length course on Australian history, while over in the English Department Dr Brian Elliott struggled to convince his colleagues that there was such a thing as Australian literature. If not British, then remote Latin, Greek, Egyptian and to a lesser extent, Asian histories seemed to monopolise all the really big stories.

In Hay’s most autobiographical work, Letters from a Floating Life (2017), we learn that having completed his national service, Hay declined to sign up for further duty in Vietnam but commenced his own lifelong search for Asia. In 1965, I too was conscripted and faced the prospect of service in Vietnam, a country I knew nothing about. As described in Not Dark: A Personal History (2011), I passed the army medical, in large part because, not wanting to admit the shame of extremely bad eyesight, I did what I always did—sidled up to the eye chart and learned it off by heart before taking the test. I remained a conscript throughout my post-graduate years, doing my PhD at the ANU, and was unable to travel overseas until the Whitlam government put an end to conscription in 1972.

Through much of the 1970s, Hay convinced himself that Chairman Mao was a progressive thinker liberating his people. In 1975 and again in 1976, he made his first trips to China as part of a “foreign expert delegation”, returning in 1981 to teach in Nanjing. His students were among the first to return to formal education following the Cultural Revolution. One, Fang Xiangshu, co-author of East Wind, West Wind (1992), who became a lifelong friend, introduced Hay to the beguiling mysteries of classical Chinese poetry. Hay was soon captivated by China, a country that haunts him still: “for nearly fifty years I have been in love with a much older woman. She likes to be called Han. Sometimes she will answer to Tang.” He continued to be drawn to her languages and cultures as he collected books “about the places that have contributed to the formation of her character”. The Library of Lost Horizons takes you into the world of these books.

Many of the books in which Hay takes such delight are about Tibet. He was introduced to this mountain kingdom, not by an ancient text but via a sensational hoax. The hoax was The Third Eye (1959) by “Lobsang Rampa”, who was really Cyril Hoskin, a plumber from Plympton, Devon. Five hundred thousand copies of The Third Eye were sold in its first two years. The occult mysteries of Tibet had become such a powerful idea in the Western imagination that there was absolutely no need for Hoskin to have travelled to the country—Tibet had visited him.

This can also be said for a little-known Australian writer in whom I have taken some interest, Reginald Kirby, a padre in the RAAF during the Second World War. In Stranded Nation (2019), I discuss Kirby’s bizarre but historically fascinating novel, Assignment to Japan, published by the NSW Bookstall Company in 1945. Kirby’s heroine, Cynthea Maddison, daughter of an English peer, is reincarnated in Tibet as the Lotus of Shiroh, the new Lama of the East, supported by the Brotherhood of the Three Dragons. Like Hoskin, Kirby was a fluent exponent of allegedly Tibetan spiritualist mumbo-jumbo. A far more serious Australian work, based on actual experience, was High Valley (1949) by Charmian Clift and George Johnston, where convincing details of Tibetan life and landscapes were drawn from Johnston’s highly regarded work Journey Through Tomorrow (1947) which describes his extensive travels in Tibet.

Why does Hay mention Biggles, Lobsang Rampa or the Willow Pattern plate? He suggests that the books or exotic objects that open our minds to new worlds during childhood need not come from high literature or art. Reflecting on his many readings of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), Hay wonders how it is that a novel he can now barely live without did not impress him at first. In his early years, his literary training told him that Lost Horizon was not a book to be taken seriously. A lifetime later, he queries this dismissive attitude and the rigidity of the many academic disciplines on which he built his career. He is pleased that he can now bring to Lost Horizon a “blend of imagination and perspective that wasn’t there on first reading”. This new view came to him only after a lifetime of study and experience.

Hay also wonders why some books sink from sight. Take for example, Pearl Buck, whose accounts of life in rural China in the 1930s, notably The Good Earth (1931) won her Pulitzer and Nobel prizes and great acclaim. That is, until she fell foul of everyone. Chinese students disliked hearing about China’s backwardness, Communist Party leaders denounced her failure to celebrate their achievements, and Christian missionaries were affronted by her attacks on their condescension. In 1972, Buck was dropped from the entourage accompanying Nixon on his historic China visit. In recent years, feminists have ignored her, and her literary reputation has collapsed. Hay now takes a kinder view of Buck’s writing and worries about the modern difficulty of seeing China in all its three dimensions—“old, changing, and new”.

The appeal of Shangri-La for Hay does not lie in the prospect of locating the precise geographies of hidden valleys and mountain peaks but in the unresolvable mysteries that gather around tales of Tibet. Similar imaginative forces take him into the unknowable and shifting spaces of the Gobi, the Lop and the Taklamakan deserts and on to Dunhuang and its caves. My desert reflections were found closer to home in books from the 1890s when Australian adventure writers were fascinated by the “emptiness” of their continent, and as W. Carlton Dawe put it in The Golden Lake, the “weird and terrific beauty” of its deserts. Following the tracks of early explorers, these writers imagined that in Australian deserts one might find lost tribes of pygmies, secret mountains of gold, watchful bunyip guards or a cruel giantess. They proposed strange links to lost continents. In 1902, the novelist Rosa Campbell Praed saw Australia as the lost continent of ancient Lemuria, long believed sunk under the Indian Ocean. In the 1940s, the poet A.D. Hope, despairing of the “second-rate” Europeans of urban Australia, turned to the arid interior in a belief that “from deserts the prophets come”.

The Silk Roads, linking the “vast cultural network” and long-vanished empires of China, India, Persia, Greece, Rome and Byzantium, have long fascinated Hay. The Library of Lost Horizons introduces the reader to a “bewildering pageant” of vanished peoples: Parthians, Saka-Scythians, Tanguts, Sogdians, Khotans, Khojas and Kalmyks and the complexity of their belief systems—Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Taoism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Confucianism. I grew up with stories of the violent Huns, a nomadic tribe of warriors on horseback who brought fear into the heart of Europe. From The Library of Lost Horizons I learn that these nomadic pastoralist people from Central Asia may have been the Turkic-Mongolian Xiongnu or the Indo-European Yuezhi. Tales of dreadful Huns may have sparked my long interest in Australian stories of Asian invasion, a subject I address in Anxious Nation (1999).

Hay stresses not so much the diversity of the ancient cultures and modern ethnic minority groups of Central Asia but the “enormous legacy of intercultural encounters” that have occurred over centuries along the Silk Roads. He tells the story of Xuanzang, a seventh-century Chinese monk who carried Buddhist texts back from India, six hundred years before the voyages of Ser Marco Polo. Journeying through his book collection, Hay brings us accounts of writers inspired by this ancient monk. In 1911, the sinologist Lancelot Cranmer-Byng asked his readers to “Take the Master’s tattered robes, let the winds of Gobi whistle through your sleeve”. Struggle until “you crawl like an ant and cling like a fly to the roof of the world”. Sun Shuyun, as a child growing up during the Cultural Revolution, treasured a comic-strip story of the monk’s journey and explores its cultural significance in Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud (2003). Mishi Saran, a much-travelled writer, re-enacts an ancient pilgrimage in Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang (2005). I recall the Japanese television series Monkey, based on the Chinese classic about Xuanzang, Journey to the West. In the 1980s, two small Walker daughters followed the magical journeys of the monk Tripitaka and his helpers Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy and Horse. This was their “Willow Pattern” moment finding the mysterious East.

Hay describes the “Cave of a Thousand Buddhas” near Dunhuang as a “warren of ancient cliff-hewn temples” containing over 2000 painted statues and thousands of murals and frescos telling countless stories from a wealth of cultural and religious traditions. Some date back to the fourth century AD. In 1907, the Hungarian explorer, ethnographer and linguist Marc Aurel Stein, who made the Indian origins of Buddhism known internationally, discovered among the Dunhuang caves the most famous cave of them all—number seventeen, the Library Cave, in which “a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly ten feet” had been sealed away. When intensively studied, they were found to encompass writings in seventeen languages and twenty-four ancient scripts. In Ruins of Desert Cathay (1912) Stein described removing many of these precious manuscripts from the site “by the cartload” including his rarest find, The Diamond Sutra, the earliest dated printed book. Stein’s great act of pillage and that of the Europeans who followed him occurred when the Qing Dynasty was on the verge of collapse and had little capacity to preserve China’s cultural heritage.

When Hay visits the site, all that is left is just “a hole in the wall of another cave”. He goes to his library to find what others have seen. In The Gobi Desert (1950) the missionary Mildred Cable recalls Dunhuang. In 1926 she had looked up at “the great façade, pierced with innumerable openings”. In 1948 an American woman, Irene Vincent, took some of the earliest photographs in colour of the caves. In The Sacred Oasis: Caves of the Thousand Buddhas of Tun Huang (1953) she paints word pictures, noting how some Buddhist depictions of paradise were “so cunningly painted that the onlooker, standing in the half-light, has the sensation of being himself half-submerged in the lotus pools before the divinities”. Turning to my own bookshelves I find that Mildred and her friend Francesca French visited Australasia and India in 1946 to attend a centennial meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society, as described in Journey with a Purpose (1950). They liked Australia’s native animals: “Everyone is delighted by the friendliness of the little Kaola [sic] bear whose skin when stuffed makes a perfect plaything for a young child.”

During my visits to China, I got to the Gobi Desert, but not to the caves at Dunhuang. I was swept away when I saw the enormous Buddhist statues at Datong in Shanxi. Among my many other travels, I enjoyed those that went north into Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang Province where I explored the cities of Hohhot, Harbin, Chifeng and Mudanjiang. There I thought less about the Silk Roads and Central Asia and rather more about Russia, Siberia, Japan and Korea and the ancient histories of the Mongols and Manchu. It was not the desert but rather the vast grasslands and the great rivers—the Mudan, the Amur and the Sungari—that intrigued me. Dominic Ziegler writes of them in Black Dragon River (2015). The history of these northern regions is that of the Tumut, Chahar and Daur, or the Northern Yuan, Khitan Liao and Jurchen Jin dynasties. In 2017, I visited the magnificent Wudangzhao Monastery, an immense Tibetan Buddhist temple near Baotou which has been called “the Potala Palace on the Grassland”.

Most of my trips in northern China were made with my good friend the translator Li Yao. After translating my book Not Dark Yet into Chinese, he persuaded me to embark on a history of his own family told in parallel with my own. Li Yao and I are of similar age, both roosters by the Chinese zodiac. But whereas I spent my early years in uneventful Adelaide, as a young man Li Yao and his family faced the hardships and terrors of the Cultural Revolution. Our stories are told in Happy Together: Bridging the Australia-China Divide (2022).

For some time, I have studied Australia’s responses to the rise of Asia. The many books discussed in The Library of Lost Horizons show us how rich Asia’s past has been. Yet in Australia, from the late nineteenth century, it has been the threat of Asia that has compelled our attention. In 1890, Melbourne Punch ran a story called “The Decline and Fall of the Australian Empire: A Chapter of Future History”. A large force of Chinese land in northern Australia and drive south, devastating all before them. The colonists fight bravely but before long Melbourne is over-run and the standard of Emperor Hang Chow floats over the Victorian Parliament. Could there be a more exciting sort of story to tell about Asia? Down to the present, geopolitical anxieties have led to persistent fears that Australia will have an Asian rather than a European future. These fears simultaneously excite and distract us, limiting our curiosity about Asia’s past. The question I end with is: How do we address legitimate geopolitical concerns while encouraging curiosity and a deeper understanding of Asian histories and cultures?

The Library of Lost Horizons: An Antiquarian Voyage
by Trevor Hay
Arden, 2023, 262 pages, $44

David Walker is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. His books include Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939 (1999), Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region (2019) and, with Li Yao: Happy Together: Bridging the Australia-China Divide (2022). From 2013 to 2016 he was the inaugural BHP Chair of Australian Studies at Peking University, Beijing.