The union of nothing and compassion: a spousal contingency

They are followers, above all, of tantric ritual and contemplation, and at the end the abbot leads me, as if in challenge, to two statues in towering em-brace. Here is the white-painted Buddha Vajrasattva - shiny, crude, abstract. In his circling arms clings a sinuous consort, her legs hooked around his waist, their loins intermeshed. This is not sex as humans know it, but a marriage of symbols .. The abbot says, 'This is the union of nothing and compassion.'

'Nothing?'

'The god is nothing. He realises nothingness .. she is compassion. She completes him.'

In New Hampshire, the youth 

climb Mt Washington. It would 

be false to conceive of the 

quality of their exertion with-

out this avidity for completion. 

Max Hastings, in his almost des-

perately outstanding new history 

of the second world war, repeat-

edly cites commanders' reliance

on this existential motivation, 

on all sides of the matter, as 

their 'ace in the hole' for or-

dering the impossible.

This quality, of an avidity for

completion, is an element of these

beings which (we have repeatedly

observed) places them in a fun-

damentally distinct moral posi-

tion. We don't expect the geni-

us of the feminine to be toler-

ated in our partisan discourse;

and for this complaisance the

shame is distributed equally

upon everyone. But we do ex-

pect the experience of the mas-

culine to inform the mature at

last. In this election campaign,

New Hampshire youth have not 

been granted that yet, and we

do not hold our breath that they

will be.

But there are people over 35 

who read this page, and they 

will know what it means when

our pretenders to leadership

stand on public rostrums and

demand more war, more inequal-

ity, more contempt for fact,

more waste of our young and

of our world, without their

exercise of mentoring respon-

sibility. To these readers, 

it would amount to an aban-
donment of our climb.

Colin Thubron

To a Mountain in Tibet

Chatto & Windus, 2010©

Max Hastings

All Hell Let Loose

  The World at War, 1939-45

Harper Press, 2011©