A PRECIOUS CARGO
A Precious Cargo
Second in a four-part series of interviews with Michael Acton
When I meet Michael for our second interview, I’m expecting to hear all about Master Li and Master Liu, his two main teachers of Taiji Quan and Qi Gong. But as I launch into my first question about Michael’s time in China, he shakes his head. “We’ll come back to that,” he says.
The story instead leads to Dharamsala in northern India, and over the course of the next two hours, Michael describes an intense and unexpected experience which plunged him deep into the world of art, meditation and religious imagery, profoundly affecting the course of his practice of Taiji Quan.
In 1988 Michael travelled to Dharamsala together with his partner Suzie, and both became increasingly involved in the community of Tibetan exiles, teaching and helping out in various ways. But when Michael was invited to the Dalai Lama’s palace to drink tea, he had no idea he would be commissioned to produce a thangka [Tibetan Buddhist painting] of Buddhist figure Shantarakshita, nor quite what this would involve.
“It was more than just ‘here’s a picture, copy it and make us a painting’… They introduced me to a thangka painter… a sort of a guide, he showed me stuff, images, pictures of old thangkas. So the idea was that somehow my mind would be influenced by this, not by directly telling me. That somehow I’d be able to manifest these qualities because they were a natural condition of the human state, and that by being exposed to them, what came out of me would be a deep connection to the cultural relevance of Shantarakshita. It was a responsibility.”
To complete the painting, Michael was given books to study, shown ancient thangkas depicting Shantarakshita, and taught how to meditate on them. I ask what were the qualities of this figure, which he needed to manifest in the painting?
“Somebody who carries a precious cargo. A teaching that can be spread out to other people. That’s how I see the great Buddhist teachers.”
Michael explains the historical role of Shantarakshita in bringing Buddhism from northern India to Tibet, and I prompt further, asking what Shantarakshita would be like, if we were to meet him today?
“He’s a teacher. So he would carry all the reserve of knowledge and the delicate, structured manner of delivery, but also the surprise delivery that is not always the way of what one expects… the obscurity of delivering precious knowledge that can’t always be understood in clear sight, it sometimes is revealed in other ways. So a good teacher like Shantarakshita would be somebody who knows how to deliver to individuals, to people who already have an inclination in that direction, and also how to deliver as a broad teaching… So he must have been quite a remarkable character on lots of levels. He was sent from the great university of Nalanda in India so there may have been hundreds with him, or he may have gone on his own with a donkey, or more like a yak! I think he would have been fascinating.”
I’m reminded of Michael’s own particular ability to meet different characters and energies in his classes, and ask how this period in Dharamsala affected and influenced him.
“The evolution of myself as a person who gave consideration to forms of meditation changed significantly, because of the manner of meditation through the painting and through the imaging. I discovered, in a sense, the power of religious imagery, and the process of harnessing that creative energy into a strict religious motif was very powerful in the thangka tradition, and is very powerful in the Tibetan imaging tradition. In my life as a practitioner now, I put a lot of store in the fact that I was in that position at that time with those particular monks, and doing that particular practice of painting these images, because the power they created was enormous for me and I had not come across that in the same way before. It was very focused, very energised, very elevated in lots of ways, and so I had experiences which I didn’t think I was likely to have in a lifetime.”
Having safely delivered the painting to the Dalai Lama’s palace, soon afterwards Michael received another commission, this time to paint Nagarjuna, a Buddhist philosopher credited with recovering esoteric wisdom teachings from the nagas, mythical serpents guarding the treasures of the deep.
“They brought another thangka to the room and it was very beautiful. It was big, set in a wonderful scroll, and a couple of monks turned up carrying a lock-up metal wardrobe. They put it into the room and said, would you mind locking this thangka up when you go out? So I said no problem, and they hung it from a hook on the ceiling. They said we thought maybe this thangka would help you. So I stared at this picture and meditated on it for a long time, and I read something about the seventy stanzas of Nagarjuna; the root teachings on emptiness for the primary sect of the Dalai Lama, so they’re very important teachings. Very complicated, the metaphysics of it is extraordinary… you’d imagine from the way I talk that these two paintings were masterpieces! They probably weren’t, but somehow they emerged as significant pieces in my world and they became pieces in the throne room of Namgyal Temple. So they got what they asked for. I made the paintings. And I got a lot more than I expected, an enormous amount of something other than just somebody who painted a couple of pictures for them.”
I ask Michael how he actually did it – how did this visualising, this meditating on the thangka work?
“I stared at it, I captured the image of it, closed my eyes, kept looking at it, capturing it, bringing it in. And slowly the image emerged in the painting. It wasn’t the same as in the thangka but I started seeing a person that I could manifest as a picture… I’d always been interested in Renaissance painting when I was young, that process, the symbolism in it, and how it was used to communicate power and religious structures and esoteric meaning, so I felt in a sense, for me, doing those paintings was an extraordinary arrival at a childhood ambition, to make some paintings that had a meaning in a religious and cultural context – which turned out to be Tibetan, not Christian! I was interested in that kind of use of imagery and symbolism to represent spiritual things. Yearnings, needs, achievements. Spiritual teachings. Directions, signposts, and they were actually acting as signposts for me as well if you like, so they became very important as an influence for my future as I carried on.”
Throughout this intense period of meditation, art, visualisation and studying the verses on emptiness, Michael continued practicing his Taiji Quan. I wonder aloud whether these practices connected up, feeding into each other in some way?
“Absolutely. Both practices were running together. The meditational practice, and the painting. It was a complete immersion, if you like, of the religious expression of the motif, the image I was supposed to represent… and at the same time I was practicing the Taiji all the time, early in the morning, also in the late afternoon, so I was doing a lot of that, but mostly form, also with the meditation, as well as a sitting meditation… so they did tie in, in the sense that they didn’t seem to be in any way different to each other, there was a unity about them that seemed to bind together readily. There was no conflict of interest between the two methods, one from China, one from Tibet, it didn’t seem to matter. And the longer I was there, the more one became the other, in a sense. So there was a harmonising of a lot of that. Looking back on it, my Taiji practice was very immature at that stage. I thought it was more than it was, and then I realised it wasn’t very much and a lot of it was… I’d not misunderstood, because I hadn’t been exposed consistently to deep teaching of Taiji at that point from somebody who understood it on a very deep level, and I learned that later when I got to China, but I had exposure enough to know that the pool was very deep and I was still only on the surface. It created a situation where I thought, I’ve got to know more about this. I can’t know about everything, there’s not enough time. But I can learn more about this, and this relationship that was blending, between the meditational practice and the Taiji.”
As we discuss Michael’s increasing commitment to Taiji Quan, I pause to ask whether today, art is still a part of his path?
“Absolutely, for sure. I used to think that I was going to be an artist, and then I realised that being an artist was not just being an artist, it was having a different, a way of realising some thing. Realising something.”
So you do see yourself as an artist then? I prompt.
“I can’t imagine not being. So in a sense Taiji is also an art, and it’s still evolving, it’s still inadequate in lots of ways, when it brushes up against difficulties in life it doesn’t always make you feel good. It doesn’t always come out right, it’s like pushing hands…”
Michael navigates away from the binary of my question – Taiji Quan or art – suggesting that resolution comes through integrating both forms of practice and expression at a deep level.
“In the learning of a Kung Fu, and I think this is true with all martial arts, all of those physical and mental skills that border in their maturity on the level of an almost semi-spiritual practice, in the way that they’ve evolved in Japan and China and places, that are part of the literature and classicism of pure martial arts, I think all of them move in that direction, and they’re all revelatory for people to understand things, in the same way that writing is, in the same way that becoming an artist is, in producing works that people use as reflective tools for penetrating insights, as ways of understanding themselves and their engagement with the world around them, all their history and all their potential future, all the past, all the present… So it’s a creative path, in a sense, if you take it that way.”
I do, and the concept of Taiji as an art and a creative path appeals to me. Reflecting on Michael’s encounter with teachers from past times and mythical realms suggests that the process of teaching and learning can transcend time and space, moving us towards the concept of transmission, which I’m keen to ask him about. But the next batch of students is about to arrive in the studio, and again, we are out of time. I will have to wait for our third meeting to finally travel to China and meet Master Li. The moment when, Michael tells me, his real Taiji Quan journey began.
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Interview by Esther Cann, member of the Wu Shi Taiji Quan and Qi Gong Association