Welcome to our newsletter, dear readers,
Our first new library highlight this month is an excerpt from Sonorous Desert, a book about how the sounds of the desert—sounds like wind, water, thunder, animals, and even humans—shaped the development of Christian monasticism in the Middle East.
Reasons for choosing a monastic life naturally varied from person to person, and the geography, climate, and form of monasticism varied as well, but there was a common thread: a desire to “listen with the ear of the heart,” as Benedict of Nursia wrote in his influential sixth-century Monastic Rule.
• Our second new item is an article about pilgrimage mandalas (sankei mandara) associated with Japan’s most sacred Shinto temple, the sanctuary at Ise. These mandaras are pictorial maps, schematic visual travel guides that depict specific sites and their roads, bridges, and landscapes, as well as each site’s origin, its sacred rituals, and the pleasures to be enjoyed in the surrounding area. But additionally, rather than being mere guides and road maps, sankei mandara are highly constructed images, imbued with a numinous view of the landscape they represent.
The world that is visible to the pilgrim’s eye is shown as representing another world, one that is not visible to the eye but is present in the faith that guides the pilgrim’s wandering. The visible world brings together shrines, temples, and various sacred places as the world that is physically encountered by the living pilgrim. The invisible world is that of faith and esoteric interpretations where the two shrines are considered to represent different yet not separate aspects of the one Dainichi. Sun and moon hint, therefore, at the presence of a world that transcends present time and space
Ame no iwado, Mount Takakura
• And we complete our selection with “The Hoopoe on the Pulpit”, a chapter on the famous Persian mystical poem, the Conference of the Birds (Mantiq-ut-tayr). The author explains the centrality of speech in the poem, its transformative power and its limits, and how the hoopoe’s encouraging and chastening words provoke a journey towards an ineffable God who cannot be grasped in language: homiletic utterances push readers and listeners towards a realm that speech itself can never fully capture.
In response, the hoopoe narrates a series of parables… which illustrate the internal connection between God and the human heart. After the hoopoe finishes these narrations and commentary, Attar describes their impact on the assembled birds:
When the birds heard this speech, they traced back the ancient secrets.
They all found their relation to the Simorgh,
and that’s how they found a desire (raghbat) for wayfaring.
Due to this speech they all came to the path in empathy and agreement with each other.The hoopoe’s speech (sokhan), as the passage makes clear, is a powerful causal agent that works on the birds as they interpret it. By decoding its allegorical message, they learn how their innate connection to the Simorgh makes spiritual wayfaring possible, which sparks their desire and leads them to step up to the path, together.
