Fearless Rider

Yahne Le Toumelin

The Western world, as any world, is in distress. Due to the proliferating media, chaos is more obvious and the people notice that there is a"crisis". As a consequence, everybody gets restless and intellectuals and artists, mentally restless, get tired. They get exhausted in their space, which shrinks and is speeded up by a nihilist stress where the pessimism of the absurd, of the sinister and of the horrible cannot even go further down.

While it is just a matter of making an inner revolution!This would be the key - one would just have to find the door.

The heart revolution is imagining another viewpoint for our thought. In 1968, as I was becoming a Buddhist nun, my paintings proclaimed in the streets: "Hurrah for the Heart Revolution!" and "Free creative imagination!" Therefore, how fortunate I am to have been able to offer Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche my modest means at the service of his creativity.

Alas, generally the contortions of confusion get frozen in motion and depression. Here, I trust the vitality of Rinpoche's magnificent energy and his capacity of embracing the limitless to liberate what Freud said about depression: " a delirium of pettiness".

Guo Ruoxu, a great Chinese painter (1074), wrote that painting is an "imprint left by the heart". As Rinpoche is not paralyzed by the concepts of our times, he has now in his hands the technique that I gained by painting for 70 years (travelling through the 20th century and its fashions) . Watch it! Such technique allows the magic of images to take place and lets the inspiration "Windhorse" run wild through the infinite fields of phenomena.

It is such an honour to uncover the “skillful means” of painting to such a rider as Kongtrül Rinpoche: there he goes at full speed through the suburbs of concepts, blowing them up, sustained by the good wind of breath, this “lung” which is an object of terror for the practitioners of still meditation. Giddee up! How enchanting it is to be free in images! Here is the recipe of this technique, which was known by the German School of the XVth century (Grunewald and Altdorfer):

1) On a very white canvas or a very white piece of paper,light is awaiting the artist with assurance.

2) The artist covers this light with the colours suggested every instant by the kind Dhyani-buddhas, the Five of the Divine Hand, unlimited suppliers.

3) Dissolution (as in alchemy after coagulation). Return to the unstained source of light resting behind forms and colours. Take off, remove, erase, find back the basis and richness of the primordial revelation.

In this way, put and then remove, and then rest in “what is happening”on the canvas - this is the delight of a forever fresh and bewildering nature.

In reality, if one is simply present, any form and any colour is good to be seen and dissolved.

Isn't this process of painting similar to the process of meditation? Infinite numbers of phenomena appear – thank you, Impermanence!They disappear in a joyful phantasmagoria devoid of any reference, perfectly innocent! Free of any attachment. Amazed at the overabundant generosity ofLife.

Thank you Rinpoche, you whose imprint of the thumb is already so precious.

Apply your ten fingers (bravo!) and their gestures born from the breath of your Noble Heart in these pictorial plays.

May these pictorial plays unveil the imprint of your manifestation and reveal the beauty of the Pure Lands, and their clarity and their peace.

Written by an old nun, whose English is poor, with help of her hermit neighbour.

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