San Francisco Journal, Day Nine

 7/7/2006

I had a slightly disturbing dream in which I was attempting to review the photos on my camera, and the ones I liked the most (artwork) were all gone.  I also dreamed about walking on a sidewalk in San Francisco, maybe in the same dream.

I returned to the Asian Art Museum, thus disregarding my itinerary this morning because that’s what I felt like doing.  I not only got through the Indian and Persian galleries as planned, but I also got to the Korean art I missed before and to most of the Chinese art on the second floor. 

The Indian exhibit taught me new things about the Buddha.  As a Buddhist practitioner of insight meditation, I was well aware that the Buddha was Indian and lived twenty-five hundred years ago.  But the placards gave rather more information about his life, including a list of eight significant places…some of which are part of the tour I’d love to go to in India, called In the Footsteps of the Buddha.  Next to an elephant image, I read a caption explaining the story of the Buddha gently subduing a rampaging elephant, and the placard explained that it is a metaphor for taming animal-like passions, which is to say for keeping violent inclinations under country and acting nonviolently instead.  But the only animal that drops bombs and builds nuclear weapons is the human animal, and these are very unnatural actions that result from ignorance, greed, and hatred.

The Indian galleries were particularly arresting, and I learned a lot about Hinduism, Indian Buddhism, and Jainism.  The latter is a gentle religion founded by Mahavira, a contemporary of the Buddha, and it is very similar to Buddhism and emphasizes meditation and nonviolence.  Buddhism branched off Hinduism (the Buddha was a Hindu, in other words), and these three major Indian religions are related and have similarities; you could say they’re interconnected.  In art, they all use such images as lotus thrones (that is, Buddhas and deities look as if they’re sitting on lily pads), wheels, halos, and wild cats.

The exhibit on Indian Hindu art triggered my curiosity about Hindu goddesses and mythology.  A great thing about the insight meditation that I practice is that it has nothing to do with deities; it’s about buddha-nature, the inner goodness that we all have and with which we need to get in touch.  However, I have been a Neopagan since long before I discovered Buddhism, and to me deities are metaphors, archetypes, and role models.  I find goddess mythology fascinating and inspiring no matter what the origin, whether Hindu or Celtic or whatever.   At the Asian Art Museum, the artwork and accompanying placards teach quite a bit about Hindu deities, and more than anything it peaks my curiosity to learn more.  For instance, I saw a long carving of goddesses in a row, the Seven Mother Goddesses, and I saw images of Durga the demon slayer.

In the Korean exhibit I learned that Buddhism is very significant to their culture.  The placards gave a basic but of course androcentric history of Buddhism in Korea.  A Chinese priest or monk introduced it to their country and they took a liking to Buddhism, and despite some persecution or at least strong discouragement from emperors between the fourteenth and early twentieth centuries, Buddhism continues to thrive in Korea…presumably just South Korea.

I went to the museum shop and finally got a book on Siamese (Thai) art.  (I should probably mention that I like to say “Siam” because that’s what the Buddhist peace activist Sulak Severaksa calls his country; he says that “Thailand” is an imperialist name.) 

I went out when the museum was about to close, and I stopped at one of the kiosks in U. N. Plaza, where I was mesmerized by beads.  I spotted a box of dzi beads and knew I had to buy some.  I also got a good price on coral beads to go with the dzi.  Before I came to San Francisco, I never saw these traditional Tibetan beads available to buy in person rather than out of a Firemountain Gems (www.firemountaingems.com) catalog.  Dzi beads are made of agate or some other brown stone and decorated with traditional symbols such as eyes or swastikas, an ancient sun symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism, and the indigenous Tibetan religion of Bon (never mind that to Westerners, Adolf Hitler ruined it).

From there I walked to Van Ness Avenue, and I got my ticket to see Valhalla at the American Conservatory Theater.  I saw the play this evening, and Valhalla is a hysterically funny and campy play with two related storylines, one of them about King Ludwig II of Bavaria, and the other about a gay guy from mid twentieth century Texas.  Actually, it was about truth, beauty, and dreams, and about being yourself.  Ludwig would have been appalled, not because of the above themes, but because he was extremely ashamed and neurotic about being homosexual, and the play was very open about it and also made him very open about it.  Also, the play portrayed Sophie as hunchbacked, which struck me as odd; I’ve seen photos of Ludwig and her, and they both were beautiful, and I certainly didn’t see any hump.  It would have been mentioned in the biographies, I’m sure.  I think the real reason nobody wanted to marry her while her mom showed her off to kings and princes all over Europe was because she was a notorious flirt, and because her mom was probably too pushy about marrying her off and therefore ironically discouraged suitors.  A hump was an obvious physical flaw, which may be why the play did it, to simplify things, since plays are very visual.