Andrew Harvey’s book, an impossible one to classify, is a record of this experience of the stripping away of the dry foliage of the familiar—its universities and books and studies, its complex relationships and exacting demands—till those condi¬tions are created in which ‘the golden wind’ can be revealed. He had felt that these condi¬tions did not exist in the known and crowded landscape of his life—born in Coimbatore, India, he was educated at Sherborne and Oxford, now is a Fellow of All Souls College, teaches in America and writes poetry—and that he needed to find the proper setting for the profound experience that he so intensely desired. Al¬though all through his life there had been hints, small obscure invitations—four photographs of Tibet in a ‘khaki-coloured’ encyclopaedia of his childhood; a trip with his father to Ajanta where the guide noticed the child’s inte¬rest in the painting of the stooped figure of a man hold¬ing a flower and told him it was the Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion, and gave him one of the dried flowers placed at its feet by pilgrims; the Khmer head of the Buddha at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; a Chinese painting of a butterfly alighting on a flower at an exhibition of Eastern art to which he felt drawn every afternoon for two weeks—these revelations of another art, another philo¬sophy, moved him so deeply that he was filled with a fear of it and chose not to respond either openly or immediately.
Nov-Dec 1983, volume 8, No 3