When I began to introduce through this column a set of 15 Western pioneers and early explorers who encountered Buddhism, it was an innocent affair: to remind readers of some exceptional characters, the legacies they’ve left us, and my desire to show that cultural curiosity and personal, even spiritual, motivations mattered more to many of them than acceptance by the academy, or fame. These 15 can be easily referenced in my previous article “Messengers of Mind, Cultural Explorers and the Encounter with Buddhism, Part One: A Gallery of Explorers,” which can be used as a kind of glossary as I discuss this group generally and severally in this part two. Calling their lives complex is an understatement. What struck me was that most of them acted and lived in liminal spaces and places, even within themselves.
The list, which can easily be added to and subtracted from, includes dancers and artists because that is my interest and profession. To recap from part one: Giuseppe Tucci, Sven Hedin, Alexandra David-Neel, Ted Shawn, Tyra Kleen, G. I. Gurdjieff, Beryl de Zoete, Arthur Waley, Rolf De Mare, Claire Holt, Ernest Fenollosa, Rene de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Michael Aris, Lam Anagarika Govinda, and Nicholas Roerich. Each of these people is worth exploring individually on your own, through their own writings, writings about them, their art, their dances, and their lingering reputations.
Writing an article about them and their qualities can’t help but be general. One scholar pointed out that translator Arthur Waley, for all the paths he opened to China and Japan with his honorable translations of lofty literature, never went anywhere. He even refused invitations to visit; but preferred the Japan and China he had in his mind that served his still radiant translations. His translations of Japanese Noh plays are incredibly beautiful, as is Noh itself. Waley was an explorer of the mind, as indeed all of them were.
Courage, discipline, an openness to be changed by the unknown, and a respect for unknown religions characterizes much of their work. They were not there to conquer but to integrate. What is difficult for modern readers to appreciate is that the encounters were very often mutually uplifting. I could never figure out how exotic became a pejorative word. It simply means “from far away.” Indonesian dance was indeed exotic to Dutch travelers in the early 20th century and vice versa: Dutch people were exotic to Indonesians. These were times when anthropology didn’t exist: World Fairs did.
When reviewing Ted Shawn’s choreography for the 2,000 dancers in the 1912 D. W. Griffiths film Intolerance, in which the fall of Babylon is shown with nine different ritual dances, it is at once absurd and also, actually, not so off the mark. Roerich, the Russian painter, saw spiritualized landscapes and that is what he painted. He used color to imply spirituality in ways similar to how the modern painter Rothko did. It’s not well known, but Roerich created the sets and costumes and scenario for the groundbreaking ballet Le Sacre Du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe in 1913, working with composer Igor Stravinsky and dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. This ballet shook the ballet and art worlds to their foundations, depicting onstage an ancient ritual so powerful, archaic, and undeniable that Western assumptions, philosophies, and power structures truly met their match. The ballet is a symbol of how dynamic—even cataclysmic—a meeting of worlds can be. In fact, much of the work of these explorers boldly confronted the philosophical materialism of the West and challenged its supposed superiority.
The in-between is where these explorers worked. Michel Aris, a refined British scholar who worked in Bhutan and married into Southeast Asian royalty, had to navigate monastic secrecy, government suspicion, and royal patronage. He’s the epitome of a liminal life.
Academic scholarship is not the touchstone of these explorers’ authenticity. These people took real risks. Alexandra David-Neel was a criminal, illegally entering Lhasa, disguised as a male monk when it was forbidden. She sometimes dressed as a beggar to avoid being discovered. Her writing is dramatic like she was, and it was empathetic, respectful, in awe of what she witnessed. She popularized Buddhism with respect and admiration, not as something less than Western religions. Like other explorers who funded their work through speaking tours in between, they had to deliver captivating accounts.
There was usually financial uncertainty and institutional rejection. Some mortgaged their homes; Roerich sold paintings; and some gave talks. They were often poor. Others were funded by governments, and a long shadow of fascism follows two of my personal favorite writers, Guiseppe Tucci and Sven Hedin. They were explorer-scholars above all, whose brilliant work was later overshadowed by political affiliations with Mussolini and Hitler. But their contributions to knowledge—especially in fields such as ritual, art, dance, monasticism, metaphysics, cartography, and cultural contact—are significant and their works worth reading. It would require much more than this short article can manage to begin to explain the complexities and controversies of it all. No doubt their explorer legacies are compromised by their political behavior.
I am aware of how the dance world has attacked Ted Shawn in favor of trendy concepts, without at all understanding him, the age in which he lived, or what it meant to create dance documentations during the twilight of the Asian kingdoms. His exuberant approach is noted, but not the courage and philosophical insights he provided dance as an art. This has given me a sympathy for others who have been similarly and wrongly disparaged. Shawn was a visionary. The dance festival he founded in the Berkshires, Jacob’s Pillow, is the oldest dance festival in the world. It is considered an honor to perform there. Happily, I was research fellow at Jacob’s Pillow one year and had access to all of Shawn’s work. His life is like 10 lives, for all the wacky outfits he wore in Asia, or, perhaps because of them.
Beryl de Zoete, Tyra Kleen, and even Claire Holt were dismissed by academia, their work being called “feminine,” unworthy of anthropology, dabbling in mysticism (an unfit subject), and primitive art. Gurdjieff and Roerich, who was an artist, were spiritual seekers, lovers of metaphysics and philosophy, and sought for paths and practices of wisdom, particularly initiate traditions. These men each characterized their journeys as inner journeys, metaphysical searches. Both have been called charlatans, something I can’t understand. One was a painter whose work speaks clearly on its own and has stood the test of time; the other was a spiritual teacher looking for better techniques than the West could offer. Neither was trying to be something they weren’t. Their modalities of work were mostly in artistic forms. Spiritual quest is personal; guided more by ineffable experiences than by logic. How can it be anything other?
Ernest Fenollosa, Rene Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Arthur Waley, and Michael Aris weretranslators and literary bridge builders. These men were great scholars, but Waley never had a “real job” and it was often pointed out. He worked for the British Museum and then for himself, living in Bloomsbury, unmarried to his life partner, Beryl de Zoete. Nevertheless, he changed the global literary establishment by presenting Japanese and Chinese literature as noble, wise, and beautiful—not backward, as most of the West considered Asia at that time. Waley never doubted the importance of de Zoete’s work. Fenollosa, a poet at heart, art historian, and scholar, wrote the monumental Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, proposing an entirely original way of understanding and classifying art through “cultural epochs.” It was a brilliant, original, and embracing theory. He was one of the first to use a universal theory—cultural epochs—to discuss Asian art.
Ted Shawn, Beryl de Zoete, Clair Holt, and Rolf De Mare were dancers who understood and explored form as embodied philosophy, living scripture, and danced repositories of spiritual and historical thought. In retrospect, we see these artist-explorers as ahead of their time in pursuing embodied knowledge as essential to Asian cultures, a topic gaining more attention these days. Alexandra David-Neel, Tyra Kleen, Beryl de Zoete were radically independent women. These women, even the wealthy Tyra Kleen, were risk-takers in every sense because they had a sense of themselves. Breaking conventions, respectably, was what they did.
This short article cannot do justice to even one of these amazing individuals. It would be a fool’s errand to try. There are many different views of these pioneers beyond mine—some admiring, some highly critical. I encourage you to explore those among them who speak to you. Let me leave you with the thought that beyond what they might have misunderstood, done wrong, or illegally, they were courageous risk-taking pioneers, driven by a profound curiosity of what they did not know. And they paid a price to learn what they learned, to become what they became. They were changed by their explorations. Whatever else, Guiseppe Tucci was a pioneer among Westerner scholars suffering from altitude sickness that nearly killed him a couple times. Brave and big, Sven Hedin confessed that the one time he thought he would die was when he was attacked by a pack of wild dogs. Alexandra David-Neel wrote that one reason she learned the ways of Tibetan mystics was so that she would not die of cold and hunger, living off barley paste and yak-butter tea.
To my mind, they are eccentrics, well out of the ordinary, busy on their own paths of personal searching. They were rootless except within themselves, liminal, between worlds, even changing worlds, and in that space where uncertainty brings creativity and insight, they were right at home. The world would be poorer without them and their lives should not be forgotten, nor their work disparaged. They believed in a world of wonder and connection, attributes that would serve us well in today’s fragmented world.
