"Celtic Buddhism and the Gundestrup Cauldron"

(c) John L. Murphy

Answering his second autobiography's title, What the Curlew Said, the late John Moriarty
announced: "I think he didn't say anything at all but he said it in such a way that we have
now no need, nor had we ever, to import Zen Buddhism into Ireland. It was already here
before our people came here" (74). This essay investigates the mythopoetic musings and
scholarly arguments over whether Buddhism had ever entered Ireland. Examining
antiquarian assertions and archeological evidence gathered over two centuries, my article
will trace the evolution of “Celtic Buddhism,” from the Romantic-era round tower debate
through the Revival into countercultural revision and dharma re-Orientation today.

The Gundestrup Cauldron with its Danubian origin and enigmatic iconography will prove
a crucial exhibit for the case argued by those aligning Celtic with Buddhist contacts in
earlier times. This remains a controversial topic, relegated to the fringe. Relying less on
elusive data than abundant speculation, this debate over Eastern origins for Western
artifacts began after Sir William Jones' 1786 discovery of Sanskrit roots for Celtic
tongues. Pursuing such patterns, historians and folklorists clashed over the veracity of
ambitious claims made by subsequent investigators. Amateurs and professionals both
entered a toponomic terrain loaded with traps for such hunters.

Budh-Hills & Irish Buddhists

James Bonwick, an English-born Australian historian, in his 1894 Irish Druids and Old
Irish Religions anticipated arguments that still find credence among a few esoterically
inclined seekers of alternative spirituality and eclectic wisdom. He gathers evidence from
earlier antiquarians, however fanciful their claims. He stands between their eager
speculation and the scientific investigations that denounced ill-informed assertion.
Bonwick, halfway between post-Romantic Irish Orientalism and today’s New Age-
inspired esotericism, represents how arguments beyond what one proponent will call
“historical verification” still endure among those on the outskirts of the perceived
Celticist consensus. Such marginal beliefs persist after nearly two hundred years of
archaeological evidence assembled to halt wistful conjectures. Bonwick sifted through
the century's claims for Buddhist-Celtic contacts in early Ireland. Summarising the
divergence of the followers of the Buddha from the original teaching, Bonwick admitted
that the teachings had spread beyond their homeland, across all of Europe.

Buddhism is here a sort of sun-worship, and not aft the teaching of the Founder.
However pure the sentiments originally taught, and now professed in Esoteric
Buddhist and Theosophy, all travellers admit that ancient pagan ideas have come
through to the surface of Buddhism, and largely represent idolatrous action. Yet,
they who recognise in the Irish Towers the former presence of Buddhist
missionaries, fancy the buildings might have contained relics of Budh. H. O'Brien
regards the Sacred Tree of Budh to have been primarily a lingam, and secondarily
 a tree. He reads in the Irish Budh-gaya an allusion to generativeness. Forlong
looks upon the tower as a deposit for lingam articles in secret recesses. (in
original text 272)

Bonwick continues the associations suggested by Charles Vallancey and Henry O'Brien,
and countered by George Petrie, Tom Moore, and Thomas Davis. While Bonwick's tone
does appear more nuanced than earlier antiquarians, he does further their speculations. He
too seeks a more universal religion underlying its cultural diversity. This ecumenical
approach intersects with Theosophist blends of the "world's wisdom traditions" that
would in turn dominate their New Age followers.

In Irish we read of the Danaan King, Budh the red; of the Hill of Budh, Cnox
Buidhbh, in Tyrone; of other Budh hills in Mayo and Roscommon; and, in the
Book of Ballymote, of Fergus of the Fire of Budh. Buddhism was a great power
in remote ages; and, as Allanson Picton points out, "not so much in its
philosophical conclusions, as the feeling out of the soul towards an unlimited
loyalty to the infinite." Still, if Round Towers owe anything to Buddhism, why
are they only in Ireland? (in original text 273)

Bonwick's question would be insistently answered in the negative by scholars in the

While his conclusions have not withstood criticism, their ingenuity inspires our
contemporaries to contemplate wide-ranging syntheses marrying India with Ireland, and
yogis with druids. Bonwick locates place name cognates that, for all their accidental
coincidence-- alleged for not only Buddha but the Indo-Tibetan goddess Tara-- shadow an
Indo-European trail back to Sanskrit. He does admit that little foundation rests for what
will remain a neo-Druid undercurrent flowing against academic barriers: "Though there is
linguistic as well as other evidence of its presence in Ireland, it may be doubted if the
labours of the foreign missionaries had much acceptance with the rude Islanders."
However, Bonwick immediately follows with these observations:

Cnox Buidhbh, Budh's hill, is in Tyrone. A goddess of the Tuatha was called
Badhha. Budhbh, the Red, was a chief of the Danaans. Buddhist symbols are
found upon stones in Ireland. There are Hills of Budh in Mayo and Roscommon.
Fergus Budh or Bod was a prince of Brejea. He was Fergus of the fire of Budh.
Budh or Fiodh was the sacred tree. (in original text 153)

Bonwick returns later in his treatise to this issue. He repeats the data cited above. He
wonders. “Still, if Round Towers owe anything to Buddhism, why are they only in
Ireland?” (in original text 273) Bonwick’s suppositions find supporters today on the Net.
For example, "Buddhists and Druids in pre-Christian Britain and Ireland" originates
from a site promoting the Lake District charms of Ulverston, near Furness. The South
Cumbrian locale boasts early Christian, Quaker, and Tibetan Buddhist contributions to
religious promotion.

The website makes a pithy comparison from scant evidence. Non-essentialist "process"
philosophy finds echoes in Eriugena, an assertion of Caesar, missionaries from India’s
King Ashoka, or "Origen's statement that Buddhists and Druids co-existed in pre-
Christian Britain.” The references to Ashoka and Origen will be discussed when the
Gundestrup Cauldron gains attention later in this essay. Three historians have recently
proposed one iconographic feature traced back to China, ca. 600 CE, and as far west as
Devon and the Isle of Man along trade routes. Indians call the interlocking triple symbol
within a wheel “magatama”; Celts see three legs or three hares encircled as a triskele. The
Ulverston site at sums up the motif:
Buddha's bunnies - the three hares symbol: In the beautiful three hares triskelion,
the aspect of motion is especially apparent, emphasising that all phenomena arise
from the three dependencies and are thus inevitably impermanent and devoid of
any essence. This symbol was originally Buddhist, but is believed to have
travelled westwards along the silk routes and can be found in medieval church
ornamentation, where it probably symbolised a mystical interpretation of the Holy
Trinity. (“Druids”; see Chapman)
Some speculate if the term for the goddess Tara followed this route west. Tara's still-
debated place name comes from "Téa-Múr." This compound commemorates the raising
of a "rampart" over the buried princess Téa, according to the Lebor Gabála. (Murphy &
Moore 70) The place name derives from "hill" or "eminence" (Meehan 269). Other
connotations include "assembly hall" and "elevated place" (MacKillop 57). The word
“teamhair” shares with “temenos” in Greek and “templum” in Latin an ancient meaning
of sanctuary. A tenth-century commentator “opined that temair meant a great platform
from which there were fine views, and his explanation has gained popular currency”
(Halpin & Newman 341).
This connotation evolved into "spectacle" (Ó hÓgáin 129). This, along with "dark one"
(MacKillop 57), may suggest a tenuous connection from Hinduism. Perhaps a pattern
evolves similar to that tracing the three hares triskelion from China to Devon. The
genitive form "Teamhair" features one derivation from "raised elevated platform"-- as in
"stair." This upwardly mobile gaze may suggest an etymological consonance with "star."
Teamhair connotes, scholars concur, some sort of hill or perhaps elevated platform for
observation. Linking this to the notion of a heavenly body or divinity, on the other hand,
may stretch credulity.
Dharmacharni Purna discusses Tara’s derivation, but remains skeptical of any connection.
“There have been claims of Buddhist links with ancient Ireland, principally through the
Budh's hills in Tyrone and Mayo and particularly with the sacred Tara Hill in Meath, the
'centre of Druidical song and power, the seat of ancient royalty.' ‘Tara' is now an Irish
female name. . . . However, many of these links seem tenuous and may have nothing in
common with the Indian figure of Taaraa, other than the similarity of name.”
Similarly, the identification of Banba as goddess of not only fertility but war makes any
association with Buddha improbable; Banba albeit identifies with the plain of Meath
where Tara lies. (Ó Corráin & Maguire 28) "Banb," a young pig, "banabh," a suckling
pig, and "banban," a small pig, all connect through the name borne by Ireland's fertile
manifestation of the triple goddess of sovereignty over the land. (Dames 204)
Astarte, Easter, Eostre, and Esther all claim this astral heritage in their own goddess
manifestation within the stars and their cycles, the monthly pull of the tide and within
women. Can this etymology share Tara’s root meaning? Perhaps this word-hoard unlocks
a dimmed cognate for Irish with Indo-European through Sanskrit. Mainstream academics
dismiss claims such as Donald MacKenzie's making the Glasgow's patron saint Kentigern
a representation of Cernunnos that follows the pose of the meditating Buddha. Yet,
perhaps this posture and the teachings it signifies were transmitted by such a route that
parallels how words enshrine beliefs, how cultures repeat the image of the three hares.
This journey, centuries before the magatama turned triskele through three racing rabbits,
follows an iconographical and ideological journey that certain researchers discern also
upon a legendary silver-plated cauldron.
The Gundestrup Cauldron depicts, they argue, a yogic adept's sitting posture. This prized
object's iconography may display imagery brought along the Silk Road and the trade
routes to the West. The Celts could have received the image along with the instruction
and transmitted the yogic practice to the British Isles. This summarises Donald
MacKenzie's 1928 argument, and anticipates, if considerably altered, Timothy Taylor's
1992 thesis. This search across the Continent towards India did not often stretch as far as
Tibet or China. As Lennon's study documents, the tendency persisted for the Celtic
revivalists to follow the British towards the Aryan homeland, but very rarely towards, let
alone over, the Himalayas. One exception, a folklorist who by the few citing scholarly
predecessors for later "Celtic Buddhism" regularly surfaces in footnotes, was the Scots
journalist and folklorist MacKenzie.
Before an in-depth analysis of the cauldron’s importance for Celtic-Buddhist connection,
I will review the hundred years before its 1891 discovery, to show how British and Irish
antiquarians who preceded Bonwick and MacKenzie had contended against historians
and archaeologists over Indo-European links supposedly forged between the two cultures
and traditions.
ROUND TOWERS & REVIVALISTS
Henry O'Brien published The round towers of Ireland; or the mysteries of freemasonry, of
sabaism, and of budhism, now for the first time unveiled not long before his death in his
twenty-seventh year. The demise of this Kerry-born Trinity College graduate may have
been hastened by his second-place showing in an essay competition to explain the origin
of Ireland's round towers. In a contest begun by George Petrie in 1830, Petrie promoted a
rational explanation for these structures that had long captivated antiquarians. (Waddell
109-110; Murphy “Rooted”) Petrie sought to silence the romantics in and out of the
Royal Irish Academy who proposed a Phoenician or Oriental connection linking Celtic
worshipper with Asiatic adept.
Petrie won his own contest; he asserted that the edifices were Early Christian in era and
ecclesiastic in purpose. Petrie's own work would not be printed until 1846. O'Brien's
book, however, entered its second edition in the year it appeared, 1834. The subtitle had
been altered to "the history of the Tuath-de-Dananns for the first time being unveiled."
John Waddell dismisses O'Brien: "his vision of the round tower phenomenon is best
described as macrophallic." While O’Brien rejected the towers as fire temples, he did
follow the etymological lead of many in equating Iran with Erin, and argued that the
stone structures had been built by "the early Indian colonists of the country, in honour of
that fructifying principle of nature" (qtd. Waddell 110).
Joop Leersen sums up O'Brien's attempt. Leersen castigates O'Brien for his testy ravings.
Following his predecessor, Charles Vallancey, who posited a Phoenician origin for round
towers, O'Brien gains no respect from scholars. (Carew 41-42) Yet, the modern Dutch
academic who corrects that Trinity graduate may also reveal a common quest: how far
can one convincingly trace Indo to European? Leersen benefits from science that O'Brien
lacked. Both O'Brien and Leersen enter a shared realm when they look for Celtic origins,
one as a romanticist, one following Petrie into reason. O'Brien's theories-- while they may
merit the risible reaction of today's professors-- a century and a half before represented a
possible solution for the round towers. By joining Ireland with India, they prepared a path
for contemporary seekers. While today's "Celtic Buddhists" proclaim confidently their
invention, they rest their imaginative constructs upon romantic-era foundations.
As with Tara, for the unwary, the verbal proof beckoned. The round towers, O'Brien
contended, rested rhetorically on four pillars as premises. The towers resemble erect
penises. The place name Erin resembles that for Iran. That land engendered Irish
civilisation, and it also led the way east towards the land of pagodas, which resemble
erect penises. "Bod," the Irish word for penis, provides a cognate for the root within
"Buddhism."
Persians once practised a religion that O'Brien believed had been taught by Zoroaster,
known as Buddhism or Sabaism. The Sabaists, driven out of Iran, emigrated. They
arrived in Ireland as the "Tuath-De-Danaans." Their round towers adapted the pagodic
architecture. Additionally, the source of "bod" in sun as well as phallus, for O'Brien,
strengthened the bond between Zoroastrian fire-worship and sexually symbolic
structures. (Sutin 125) Leersen cautions us not to dabble in sympathetic acceptance of an
earlier age's pseudo-scholarly fables. O'Brien misguided himself, and died of insanity
after the scandal over the phallic imagery illustrated in his book led to euphemistically
cloaked outrage "in all the leading literary magazines" (Leersen 121). Thomas Moore in
the April 1834 Edinburgh Review mocked O'Brien. In Moore's letters and journals he
later "was to recall with mixed feelings that his review probably hastened O'Brien's
death" (Leersen 123) However O'Brien ranted, he did labor "before the definitive
establishment of the Indo-European frame of reference, which he anticipated to some
extent" (Leersen 119). Such glimmers of Eastern light that would illuminate the dim trails
leading to the insular borders and open coasts of the Western horizon will, at the close of
the nineteenth century, dawn into a Celtic revival-- kindled by poets such as Tom Moore--
that would dazzle the Gaelic twilight by a burst of renewed energy.
Discussing scientific progress that overshadows fantastic speculation, the legacy that
Celtic Revival and the accompanying search for Golden Boughs continues contention
sparked between that century's romanticism. Today, as in the past, scholars relegate those
who challenge academic conformity or devotional orthodoxy. Those who constitute a
countercultural resistance, all the same, continue to formulate their fanciful or peculiar
notions, in the small press, the arcane forum, and now on the Internet. Here, the minority
view and the unheralded chronicler persist in their efforts to change the opinions of the
majority. Rather than Thomas Kuhn's paradigmatic model wherein one widely accepted
explanation capitulates to another, Leersen distinguishes in these ideological skirmishes
what I label as a centripetal reaction.
He defines this as "a steady marginalization of older paradigms into progressively more
peripheral circles and towards a 'lunatic fringe' and away from the central institutions of
scholarly learning; so that 'outdated' paradigms may still influence and inform ideological
and cultural attitudes long after they have lost currency in serious scholarship." He credits
Samuel Ferguson with observing this process in 1845: "But follies are like fashions,
which, having once prevailed in the metropolis, usually run the round of the provinces"
(qtd. Leersen 250 n. 46). This flinging of the conventionally discarded hypothesis into the
outskirts, which Leerson compares to the creationist's exile from scholarship by
evolutionists within American education, can also account for the scattering of outmoded
archeological and antiquarian lore within New Age, neo-pagan, and eclectically spiritual
realms within print and on the Internet, over two hundred years after the Romantics.
One recent example will suffice, from the Metro Gael blog. It repeats, in a lengthy entry
on “The Celts and the Hindus,” antiquarian arguments for cognates between Indic and
Irish languages and cultures. Nevertheless, it diverges from O’Brien, if not Bonwick.
In a gloss on a manuscript in Wurzburg the word budh is used to denote a ‘point
of fire’ or the ‘planet Mercury’. Budh is also the word used in the Vedas to name
the planet Mercury. In the Sanas Chormaic, a tenth century Irish dictionary, the
word budh/bott is given as ‘Áine’s fire. Áine is a Celtic deity often associated
with the moon. We find boudi and budh in all Celtic languages. It is the root of the
Modern Irish word buachaint ‘to win’ and bua ‘victory’; its basic meaning is to be
victorious, elevated, exulted, enlightened ;it actually appears as boud, the verb ‘to
be’ in Breton. It is the meaning of the British warrior queen, Boadicea, who
revolted again Roman rule in AD 60. This would suggest that Buddhists
everywhere have at least some knowledge of Irish!
Recent excursions, it should be clarified, often rely less on sheer coincidence and more
on scholarship that linguists and archaeologists have gathered since the time of the round
tower debates. While the dangers of false etymologies and sheer coincidence along
parallel but separate cultural evolutionary patterns persist, the popularity of this model of
investigation by those often marginalised by the academy follows an historiographic
pattern. This relegation of once-entertained ideas to the fringe endures electronically long
after Petrie sent O’Brien to his early grave.
Joop Leersen distinguishes G.E. Lessing's model for history, temporally grounded in
narrative, from antiquarianism, spatially opposed in spectacle. (68) The need for linguists
and archeologists to ground their excavations within defensible parametres separated
their study from that of their imaginative and spiritually inspired peers. Yet, both camps
sought to extend the reach that the Celt as well as Briton could claim abroad. After Sir
William Jones announced in 1786 the relationship between Sanskrit and the languages
that would be called Indo-European, Orientalism thrived among officers of the East India
Company. Among them, Francis Wilford in 1805 asserted that the British Isles were the
"Sacred Isles of the West" for "followers both of Brahma and of Budd'ha" (qtd.
O'Halloran 50). Wilford and his peers stoked the dangerously imaginative conjectures of
such enthusiasts as Jones' grudging influence via Charles Vallancey. These psuedo-
intellectual concoctions of exotic Aryan origins for Celtic customs in turn stoked debate
between Petrie and O'Brien.
Prolonged disputes separated scientific from speculative inquiry into the predecessors
from the East who may have contacted their descendents far off in the West. British
autodidact Hargrave Jennings continued such a campaign; his 1858 The Indian Religions
or, Results of the Mysterious Buddhism marries Buddhism to "spiritual phallic worship"
(Sutin 175). This shift from the physical to the ethereal generated late-nineteenth-century
Theosophy. In turn, Theosophists explored and then revamped an “esoteric Buddhism” as
one of many non- and pre-Christian attempts to make better sense of the cosmos than the
dominant Western religions appeared to have done.
YEATS & BUDDHISM
The impact of Yeats, James Stephens, and AE (George Russell) upon such an endeavour
echoes beyond the confines of this essay; Theosophy within the Celtic Revival has
garnered much attention— not only from the marginal Other but the tenured Somebody.
(Brown 34-40; Ellmann 62-69; Foster 1:45-8; G. Harper; M. Harper; Lennon) Stephens
concocted in such novels as The Demi-Gods (1914) a blend of realism, fantasy, and
allegory that drew as much from Blavatsky as Blake and Nietzsche. (cf. Quintelli-Neary
137-8)
AE founded with Yeats and others in 1885 the Dublin Hermetic Society. Yeats’ move to
London and immersion into the occult two years later subsumed his earlier explorations
into the esoteric once limited to Ireland’s capital. In 1888, the year after he met Helena
Blavatsky, he joined the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, by then dominated
by her. In 1890, however, Yeats was asked to resign from the Society. He outgrew
Theosophy but took a New Age attraction to the exotic into the Order of the Golden
Dawn and then into a long career of his own intricate mythology. His mature writings
incorporate Hindu and then Japanese influences far more than Buddhist ideas. Scattered
references can be gleaned from his essays, memoirs, and one poem, but his inclusion of
Buddhism in his belletristic work proves often more anodyne than illuminating.
Nevertheless, taking Yeats for the Revival’s most influential model of blending the
Eastern vision into the Western tradition, his engagement with Buddhism itself can be
traced to a few noteworthy citations. His 1909 journal shows Yeats asserting: “If Christ or
Buddha or Socrates had written, they would have surrendered life for a logical process”
(Memoirs 139). This rejection of verification in print for the ethereal truths inherent in the
millennial and apocalyptic return envisioned by Yeats to a pre-Christian ethos cleansed of
the Church matches New Age proponents who seek a recovery of a “Western tradition,”
also nourished by Celtic and magical elements, but largely scoured of the stubborn stains
of Rome, Luther, and Moses.
“The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” (1919) portrays “on the grey rock of Cashel”
on one side a Sphinx and the other “A Buddha, hand at rest./ Hand lifted up that blest”
(188:19-20). “Right between the two” up on Cashel a dancing girl plays, personifying
hope for a renewed, decidedly pantheistic, Ireland. The speaker sees this from “Cormac’s
ruined house.” The mediaeval chapel built by the Irish king crumbles. Perhaps in this
apparition “in the mind’s eye” witnesses Christianity finally annihilated. The Buddha
here represents the heart’s open portal to the exotic and Asiatic realms which gave birth,
in Yeats’ view, to a pre-Christian, pantheistic triumph of the true Celtic temperament.
Such dispersion across half the globe to end at a culture’s beginning finds a more
nuanced, and arguably ambiguous, expression in a late poem. Composed when Yeats was
an invalid, it may convey the force that he felt crushed by in the collision of ideas, the
desperate mobility of aesthetic liberation beyond the limits of either Western perception
or Eastern conception. “The Statues,” in 1938, follows the evolution of concepts of the
beautiful as they travel from Greek origins through Alexander’s conquests of Persia
towards the East. At the battle of Salamis, the Greeks repel “[a]ll Asiatic vague
immensities” (362.12). However, one image persists even in rational triumph over the
irrational. “Empty eye-balls knew/ That knowledge increases unreality, that/ Mirror on
mirror mirrored is all the show./ When gong and conch declare the hour to bless/
Grimalkin crawls towards Buddha’s emptiness” (362: 20-24)
This poem, typically for Yeats, compresses its lesson. Helen Vendler explicates that with
Alexander’s empire, “Greek statues came to India,” where “they influenced statues of the
Buddha. Within Buddhism, the forms of the Greek statues came to one cultural terminus;
and that cultural dark of the moon is marked as such by the presence of a witch’s
familiar” (Howes 96). Therefore, shadows cast from the East may overwhelm Western
defenses. What had been for the younger Yeats a source of freedom may for the later poet
turn a chilly revenant, a haunted token of the madness of the mage. This transmission by
images and icons which brings sinister Grimalkin from the west into Buddha’s void has
already been debated by antiquarians and archaeologists of the nineteenth century. As
will be discussed later in this article, scattered evidence of such artistic impacts across all
of Eurasia have been recovered, both in the time of Yeats and since then-- with the
assistance of a science that was lacking for his time and with data which at the Revival
remained unknown or at odds with the occult leanings of his esoteric cabals.
Near his death, in On the Boiler, Yeats asserts similarly the superiority of Pythagoras’
aesthetics and Phideas’ sculpture. He elaborated: “Europe was not born with Greek
galleys defeated the Persian galleys at Salamis, but when the Doric studios sent out those
broad-backed marble statues against the multiform, vague, expressive Asiatic sea, they
gave to the sexual instinct of Europe its goal, its fixed type.” (37) Whether in poetry or
prose, Yeats challenges comprehension. He appears to reverse his earlier life’s direction,
looking towards the Indo-Gangetic plain and then to the Japanese Noh plays no longer for
sustenance and imitation, but as “hordes” with gongs or conches signalling “vague”
threat as again war edged west, this time augmented by pan-Asian menace.
Proportion trumps formlessness. In this, Yeats sought security against the “emptiness is
form, form is emptiness” heart of the dharma. R. F. Foster holds that the both “The
Statues” and the sour tone of the reactionary reflections collected as On the Boiler share a
xenophobia caused by India’s campaign for democracy and Asia’s barbaric despots. (2:
616-17) Yeats in this critique now simmers with hatred and disgust at an Eastern realm he
once worshipped. Oriental emptiness indeed warps into twisted form before him. This
“vague” apparition conjures up the phrase of one expert on Yeats’s use of the occult: the
bard “is to be found slouching towards Byzantium more often than living there, we might
say” (M. Harper 145). The exotic East that Yeats feared at his life’s end he once
celebrated. The horizons where the Buddha represented a replacement and a reversion for
the cathedral at Cashel assumed near his death darkness, stones from his oncoming void.
Earlier, in the 1924 introduction to The Cat and the Moon and Certain Plays, Yeats
explained his confidence in the Indo-Irish mentality that for storytelling peasants had
endured up to the final defeat of the Celt by the Saxon: "had they not lived in Asia until
the Battle of the Boyne?" (Explorations 401; qtd. Rickard 99) This surmise has without
textual attribution also been cited often as: “before the Battle of the Boyne, Ireland
belonged to Asia” (Kiberd 252). Whatever the rendering, Yeats makes his point. Only
with the anglicisation of the Irish did their Eastern roots wither.
The road less travelled by scholars but ventured onto by a few wanderers, leading not
back to the Hindu but the Buddhist for a Celtic connection, has veered occasionally into
the latter realm for such exchanges as Yeats and the Theosophists might have
contemplated, if not charted. Joseph Lennon in Irish Orientalism examines thoroughly
and accessibly the Revival within the Asian contexts of the past few hundred years. Still,
neither Buddhism nor Buddha appears in his index. (Petrie does, but not O'Brien.)
Certainly, the Theosophists exemplify the syncretic New Age approach towards the East.
They blend karma, reincarnation, and nirvana; they mix astral travel, the occult, and
spiritualism. One of the first two Western converts to Buddhism in modern times was
Yeats’ own brief mentor, Helena Blavatsky, who made her profession in Sri Lanka along
with Henry Olcott in 1880. They were founding members of the Theosophical Society.
Blavatsky heedlessly if ambitiously blended Hindu with Buddhist theology, hermetic and
mystical lore. She sprinkled scientific “proof” to sustain Theosophical beliefs; unlike
many cults, hers persists—in India and across the West—twelve decades after her death.
Similarly, a book from a friend of Yeats and Russell stays in print long after its 1913
début. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W.Y. Evans-Wentz links reincarnation to
faerie domains surviving in Connemara's misty mountains. This hefty investigation into
such realms preceded his version of what he, cashing in on the King Tut craze, retitled
The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Raised by Theosophists, Evans-Wentz, appending his
mother's surname as his nom-de-plume, claimed that his Welsh English mother had been
"gifted in the telling of fairy tales." This will not be the last time that an investigator
furthering East-West ties will credit his knack for insight to a Celtic maternal lineage.
JAMES JOYCE & BUDDHA
As for Joyce, given his abundance of references to so much East as well as West, Oriental
imagery appears. Like Yeats, he purchased titles on Theosophy; he studied Eastern
mysticism. Still, references explicitly to Buddhism tally up to relatively few. In his
review of H. Fielding-Hall's A Suave Philosophy (1903), Joyce hesitates. Is Buddhism a
philosophy? He favours this British expatriate who from Burma acclaims Buddhism for
its peace of mind and wise simplicity. (CW 94) Of another proponent of an alternative
belief system, Ernest Renan, Joyce remarks approvingly of that controversial biographer
of Jesus as "himself a Breton Celt" (CW 160) In Stephen Hero, the protagonist ponders
whether Renan's account, as literature, betters the gospels when relating Jesus' death.
Stephen passes a woman, likely soliciting his favors, in a "black straw hat." He reckons
that she'd never believe "that Jesus was a maniac." He elaborates to himself that she "has
never heard of the name of Buddha but Buddha's character seems to have been superior
to that of Jesus with respect to unaffected sanctity." Stephen admits: "Renan's Jesus is a
trifle Buddhistic but the fierce eaters and drinkers of the western world would never
worship such a figure. Blood will have blood" (Joyce SH 189-90). Preferring Buddhism
with its "wise passive philosophy," he approves its aversion to whatever is "inimical to
human peace" (CW 159). Yet, such cultural differentiation reached its limits. Lennon
lessens any Joycean identification with theories pumping up Celts to deflate the cultural
competition. Joyce’s 1907 Trieste lecture, "Ireland Land of Saints and Sages," by its very
title let alone the speaker's spurious claims to ally with Vallancey's farrago of origin
myths, should give us pause. Lennon reckons Joyce's use of the discredited antiquarian as
likely "more strategic than sincere" (208; cf. 420 n. 2 to Cullingford 138). Joyce tried to
distinguish his interpretation from what he believed Renan's tendency to rely upon the
exceptionalism of the Celtic genius, or genus. (Barry 315 n. 58)
Such a need by many to separate Ireland from the rest of Europe, let alone Britain, may
not have been as dramatically absent from Joyce as he himself imagined. Yet, like Renan,
Joyce and many other writers unwittingly may have played into a counter-reaction to
orthodoxy of another sect. The New Age advocates gained inspiration from Revivalists
who sensed along the Breton, Welsh, Scots, and Irish fringes a fulfillment of Celtic traits
that had survived the advent of Christian power and Continental colonisation. New Age
proponents conceived a Celtic temperament somehow superior to a British sensibility.
Along with Yeats and AE, they boasted of a triumph found not in history but in myth, not
Lessing's time-based but the Romantic spatially situated advantage. Round Towers,
looming with sexual potency and exotic provenance, served as a synecdoche for Ireland's
supposed removal from taints of European rationality and imperial domination. This
separation of the Celt and the elevation of the Irish will endure among many promoters
who seek to tie the island to even more remote lands farther away than Phoenicia, all the
way across Eurasia.
These promoters comprise a minority, whether among Leersen's scholarly peers or
Ireland's religious adherents. The latter's comprehension of Buddhism, if Leopold Bloom
can serve as an indicator of the average man on Dublin's street in the time of Russell and
Yeats, may have been scanty. "Buddha their God lying on his side in a museum. Taking it
easy with his hand under his cheek. Josssticks burning. Not like Ecce Homo." This, for
Bloom pondering a notice on the door of All Hallows by John Conmee S.J. on St. Peter
Claver S.J. meant, after typical elaboration by Bloom, that missionaries of whatever
version of Christianity claimed itself "the true religion" would meet resistance. "Wonder
how they explain it to the heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium." Christianity
propounded "rank heresy" in the logic of ecumenical appeal. (U 5.325-29)
For those less likely to countenance their version of Christianity as heresy than Stephen
Dedalus, his recollections damn their lack of Hibernian tolerance. Joyce himself attended
the scene that his character remembers. At the Abbey début of Yeats's The Countess
Cathleen, Stephen recalls the "catcalls and hisses and mocking cries" that rose "from his
scattered fellowstudents." The last of seven: "We want no budding buddhists" (P 5.1859).
I stress that this populist aversion culminates a string of objections: Ireland's libel;
German manufacture presumably by Protestants and Jews; blasphemy; a boast that "We
never sold our faith!"; another unverifiable claim that "No Irish woman ever did it!"; and,
significantly, "We want no amateur atheists."
Now, while the alliteration may account more for the context than the common crowd's
content, the cries do escalate to emulate the outburst of mockery. Irish womanhood and
fidelity defend themselves against slanders and libels of dishonour, foreign-made objects,
two usual sins spoken against the holy and against its trade, a third besmirching chastity,
and finally a fear of unbelief, if from those presumably free of freethinking as a
profession. Buddhism ends a litany that may be casually tossed off like a brickbat, but
nonetheless by its exoticism it climaxes the rabble's xenophobia. The crowd’s most
distant and most improbable fear now shadows Dublin’s limelight. Joyce had attended
this 1899 premiere from Yeats, one of Ireland's most notorious dabblers in the New Age
and the occult.
Such populist ignorance permeates Dublin, according to Joyce. Stephen in Joyce's
fragmented early novel assumed in the woman in the black straw hat what well may have
been a common prejudice. The appeal of the Orient for the intellectual was unlikely to be
found among everyday people, at least in a more sophisticated fashion than the bazaar
masked as "Araby." While Vincent Cheng emphasises that Joyce "was an amateur atheist
and Buddhist sympathizer," the extent to which his work or life can further elucidate his
interest in the Western emanation of this Eastern-based philosophy appears limited to a
few particular instances. (63)
The Japanese Joycean scholar Eishiro Ito delves into Joyce's sympathies with Buddhism.
Ito pinpoints Joyce's composition of the Stephen Hero episode discussed above to June
1905. He notes Joyce's conversation with Stuart Gilbert directing him towards Alfred
Percy Sinnett's works on Buddhism. Ito follows Richard Ellmann back to Joyce's dating
in May 1901 of his copy of Henry Olcott's 1881 A Buddhist Catechism. Olcott, along
with Madame Blavatsky, converted to Buddhism in Sri Lanka a year before he published
his catechism. They were the first Westerners that we know of in recent times to have
publicly professed their refuge in the dharma.
Sinnett, as part of Blavatsky's circle of expatriate friends in India, became her biographer.
Gilbert cites, in his discussions of karma, metempsychosis, and repetition in Joyce's
fiction, Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism and Growth of the Soul. These titles, Ito surmises,
had been referred to indirectly by Joyce in his conversations with Gilbert. (Gilbert vii-
viii) Extrapolating from allusions within Ulysses based on Blavatsky's syncretic but
partially erroneous beliefs, Ito conjectures that "Joyce's inclination towards Theosophy
and Eastern mysticism may have been short-lived. Joyce presumably could not
distinguish Theravada Buddhism from Mahayana, nor did he know that Ceylon's
Buddhism belongs to Theravada and Thibet's to Mahayana Buddhism."
Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism, compiled as Theosophist set-text, favoured its titular
adjective over its noun. A British editor in India when he met Blavatsky and Ollcott,
Sinnett popularised Esoteric Buddhism as a Tibetan corrective for the Sinhalese
“exoteric” practice that had devolved into ritual observance and moral dicta. Sinnett and
Theosophists promoted a recovered “philosophy” of a Himalayan cadre of “Adepts”
which included Brahmins along with Buddhists— and as one master teacher Gautama
himself—in a long line of those who passed along occult secrets of the “inner penetralia”
which drew the core of the dharma into contact with the truth of other faiths. Therefore
what Sinnett propagandised as “esoteric Buddhism” emerged from Olcott’s pioneering
synthesis, an ideal of the Master Adepts as “pre-Vedic Buddhists” (qtd. Fields 97-98).
Such a removal of Buddhist purity and New Age flexibility to the mountains around Tibet
would persist, in the invention of “Celtic Buddhism” a century later, as an origin myth, a
creation story, that Western adherents would freely adapt and ornament.
Olcott and Blavatsky may have converted to Buddhism in Sri Lanka, but upon its truths
they constructed their own syncretic interpretation. Westerners since then have continued
their example; whatever forms Western dharma takes, practioners usually integrate
disparate influences, whether within the many Buddhist precedents or from dominant
religious practices or psychological models. “Our Buddhism,” Olcott elaborated in his
1880 diary, “was that of the Master-Adept Gautama Buddha, which was identically the
Wisdom Religion of the Aryan Upanishads, and the soul of all the ancient world faiths,
Our Buddhism was, in a word, not a creed but a philosophy” (qtd. Fields 97)
Joyce, by relying on Sinnett, probably developed —as Yeats and his circle would from
the same sources—a broader if biased understanding of Buddhism than traditionally
taught in the East. Perhaps confusion set in when Joyce came to interpret—himself or
through his characters—the dharma, and its connection with the Buddha himself. The
statue of the reclining Buddha has been traced by Ito to one presented to the National
Museum of Ireland in 1891. Bloom would have seen this. Correcting Bloom's common
misconception that by "taking it easy," the figure's posture represents idleness, Ito
reminds us that such an angle of repose denotes that the Buddha attained nirvana soon
after eating a pork dish that rendered his stomach incurable! His final instructions to his
disciples were given from this position, and, as Olcott notes, he then bid them farewell.
Other mentions of Buddhism and its founder in Ulysses entangle Stephen within Celtic
Revival discourse. Dedalus wraps himself up in Theosophical and karmic theories. A
simpler discussion that returns to the topic under consideration emanates from Molly's
reverie: "breathing with his hand on his nose like that Indian god he took me to show one
wet Sunday in the museum in Kildare street all yellow in a pinafore lying on his side on
his hand with his ten toes sticking out that he said was a bigger religion than the jews and
Our Lords both put together all over Asia imitating him as hes always imitating
everybody" (U 18.1200-05). Through textual analysis, Ito concludes that Joyce added
Bloom's recall of the statue from the museum after that of Molly’s recollection. Ito also
reminds us that Molly's assumption that Buddhism outnumbered not only Jewish but
Christian adherents derives from misinformation within Blavatsky's account. This
miscalculation, Ito hints, plays neatly into Western colonial inflation. Such tallies copied
from imperial estimates may have been publicised by interpreting mediators such as
Olcott and Blavatsky.
Their promotional assumption, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, depended
on the "ex oriente lux" ideal. This archeological and ideological hypothesis, as Barry
Cunliffe has recently related, encouraged invasionist interpretations of how change
followed conquest, and how culture changed through the impress of the sword and the
press of massive migration. The British Empire helped push its own expansionist model
backwards into how its subjects understood their own prehistory. (Europe 20) The
Victorians and Edwardians sought this will-to-power ideal. Eastern religions and peoples
proved the movers that shook westwards. Petrie and O'Brien, Blavatsky and Olcott
emerged from such a mindset. In a sort of mystic colonialism, they proclaimed the
wonders of the Orient beyond Britain and America for European enlightenment and
origins. Bloom and Molly, Stephen and the woman in the black straw hat (if not perhaps
their clever artificer) may have all agreed: the sacred East illuminated their Western Isles.
THE GUNDESTRUP CAULDRON & MACKENZIE
Such enlightenment, for a Scots folklorist and journalist who had long tracked the path of
the world’s mythologies, could be traced by a few clues that proved Celts contacted
Buddhists, through their common use of shamans, druids, and yogis or bards. The wonder
of Theosophists and a few fictional or real Dubliners also fueled often self-taught
mythological historians such as Bonwick and his successors. As with O’Brien, they may
lurk on the margins of academia, but similar outliers today still cite their texts, following
the “centripetal model.” The tenured ignore these books as pseudo-scholarship, but a few
in the academic community re-examine long-discredited or obscured testimony for traces
of truth today. Sir William Jones did so, after all, when privately consulting Vallancey.
Excited by the 1891 discovery in a Jutland bog of the Gundestrup Cauldron with its
sitting male in what Donald MacKenzie deduced was the identical pose assumed by a
yogi, he elaborated his argument. The Celtic trophy engraved, he announced, proof that
the dharma had spread from the East to the West. MacKenzie, author of previous
investigations into world mythology, produced his 1928 book, Buddhism in Pre-Christian
Britain. Somewhat ironically considering the last meal of the Buddha, this pioneering
scribe earned his greatest fame for his assertion of "the Highland pork taboo." In a 1920
lecture to the Celtic Congress in Edinburgh, MacKenzie ambitiously traced this aversion
to back to the importation of a pork-eating prohibition into pre-Roman Scotland by Celtic
mercenaries influenced by the Anatolian cult of Attis.
MacKenzie published widely about Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Asian, and Celtic
mythology. The scope of Buddhism, part of which had preceded book-form as a
monograph for the American Journal of Archeology, shared his panoramic perception.
After his works on pre-Columbian American mythology, prehistoric Britain, and classical
civilization, MacKenzie applied his knowledge to reversing what he saw as academic
opposition to his diffusionist suppositions. He relied on comparative studies; he tied
Cernunnos to the Hindu and Buddhist god Virupaksha, and he suggested that the Celtic
realms represented the "Isles of the Blest." MacKenzie recalls the surmises of Francis
Wilmore, who over a century before had imagined his homeland as Buddhist and
Brahmin "Sacred Isles of the West."
As for Druid-Buddhist contact, MacKenzie offers the Galatian settlements in Asia Minor
as a probable center where Buddhist teachers and pilgrims from India and Parthia could
well have proselytized among the Celts. (xix) As well as the Attic export by mercenaries
of the "Highland pork taboo" to Alba, Origen's claims of Druidic incorporation of
Buddhist concepts could have spread through adepts into Britannia. MacKenzie bases his
argument upon Kentigern, patron of Glasgow, as an oak-garlanded, horned-crowned
tutelary deity appropriated by Christians from Druids. The Gundestrup Cauldron
strengthens his British-Buddhist theory. Upon the similarity of the cross-legged figure
with yogic practice, and confirmed by the resemblance of the ram-headed snake that this
antlered figure grasps to a Hindu "Naga" or serpent deity, MacKenzie's case rests. (42-45)
MacKenzie explains, and this corresponds to later scholars' notion of a "Buddha-like
pose," that the horned figure cannot be equated with the historical Buddha himself.
MacKenzie’s reasoning appears muddled, but he applies a pre-Buddhist concept of
cardinal points which influenced Siddhartha Gautama. Those converted by the Parthian
Buddhists, the Chinese, leaned towards the Western direction as they searched for an
earthly paradise. Amida (or Amitabha), the "Celestial Buddha-field" set to the western
compass, may have influenced a "Cult of the West" surviving within the missionary
efforts credited to the Indian emperor Ashoka. He sent emissaries to the rulers of Egypt,
Syria, Epirus, Cyrene, and Macedonia around 250 BCE.
Historians claim that this Greek mission met with little or no success. (Fields 10)
Advocates of the esoteric tradition differ, insisting upon an underground chain of
transmission of the dharma. No Western sources are extant that corroborate the westerly
arrival of this reforming king's envoys. (Batchelor 9) Tibetan Buddhists later would
follow a similar route from Altaic fastnesses into Central Asia; as late as 1291, a
monastery survived in Persia. (Laird 116) MacKenzie avers that Ashoka's emissaries
reached Celtic regions where "Cernunnos became transformed into the Western Buddha
with attributes similar to the Hindu Virupashka, the 'Guardian' or 'King' of the West" (50).
From the Hellenistic sphere of influence entered by Ashoka's missionaries, the Druids
took the dharma into the North and further West. Herne the Hunter, the horned stag-
seeker, survived in English folklore within The Merry Wives of Windsor. Kentigern
guarded Glasgow as a Christianised tutelary, displacing Cernunnos but keeping the
company of stags, wolves, and bulls as he worked wonders of fertility. MacKenzie then
explores issues related to "fasting to the devil" on hunger strike, metempsychosis,
dragons, Mithraism, Manichaeism, "culture drifts to Far East and America," the Western
Isles in St. Brendan and Buddhism, and "Britain as the Isle of the Dead." These may
range very far afield, but in passing Robert Thurman makes similar cross-cultural
recognitions between the gem-like boughs festooning otherworldly branches in his recent
meditative treatise, The Jewel Tree of Tibet. He states: "The bodhi tree was the original
wish-granting gem tree" (10). MacKenzie finds prototypical imagery "of the Celtic Isles
with their trees of silver and golden fruit, their honey and wine and ale," taken to these
northwestern regions by a long train of tellers traced back to Hindu, Buddhist, and
Babylonian origin. (157)
RECENT RESEARCH ON THE CAULDRON
Archeologists who examined MacKenzie’s prime example of the Gundestrup Cauldron in
the 1980s leaned towards the assertion that the silver trophy bowl-- found in 1891 Jutland
and dated variously from 200 BCE-400 CE-- originates in the Lower Danubian region. A
second proposition tilted towards a Gaulic origin, closer to that which MacKenzie
favored, based on earlier research. Some scholars entertain the notion that the cauldron
had been carted off from the Danube to Gaul before being pirated off to Jutland. A Gallic
origin, however, appears dubious; metallurgical studies have shifted its making towards
south-eastern Europe. Its origin along a well-travelled corridor instead of within the
Western Celtic heartland does not substantially alter the theory upon which MacKenzie
labored to form a coherent account of how the dharma may have come to the Western
Isles. Nor does a Danubian origin change fundamentally his hypothesis that a Buddhist
practice arrived to influence the meditative stance of certain Celtic believers. The
Transdanubian hypothesis may, in fact, move the cauldron closer to the Asian exposure
towards which MacKenzie sought to edge Druidism.
Timothy Taylor, an art-historian specialising in the Thracian-Dacian milieu, revived
claims of an Indic connection for the cauldron. In 1992, Taylor asserted: "A shared
pictorial and technical tradition stretched from India to Thrace, where the cauldron was
made, and thence to Denmark. Yogic rituals, for example, can be inferred from the poses
of an antler-bearing man on the cauldron and of an ox-headed figure on a seal impress
from the Indian city of Mohenjo-Daro" (89). Taylor and certain Indian scholars favour
interpretations that identify elephants among the beasts portrayed. The fact that they are
distorted can be blamed on diffusion and the loss of accuracy, akin to a chain of gossipers
obscuring an oral tale’s original meaning. Taylor judges that this elephant image attests to
a familiarity with the ideas brought along with goods on trade routes linking the Danube
and Black Sea with Eurasian peoples. The Gundestrup cauldron for this academic
contingent combines Indic with Celtic designs.
Taylor also diminishes the maleness of the horned figure who sits among reindeer and
more exotic beasts. Most scholars regard the dress as a trousered and shirted male, but
Taylor sees a transvestite. He situates the personified man into the same fluid presentation
as shown on a Mohenjo-Daro seal from 4000 BCE. This pairing fits Indus Valley clothes
of a female upon a male. Unlike others shown on the cauldron, the horned figure lacks a
beard or breasts, and so falls into an uncertain gender manifestation. Therefore, contrary
to the prevailing scholarly consensus, for Taylor, this sitting or squatting cross-legged
posture of the antlered man designates not only Cernunnos, the Celtic horned god
commonly found in this stance in Gaulish iconography. The figure demonstrates (as
MacKenzie had insisted) a yogic adept. Shiva also displays this sexual ambiguity, and
also rests in this fashion.
Furthermore, as with Shiva, the androgynous figure rests with one heel against the
perineum, a pose of hatha yoga channeling erotic energy. Taylor associates the much-
debated elephant scene with the "lustration, or ritual bathing, of Lakshmi, the Hindu
goddess of good fortune" (87). He refines an 1895 hypothesis that the cauldron originated
from the Altaic region; Taylor locates the trail of its influences along a four-thousand-
mile route from Northern India to the Balkans.
Taylor also proposes that this silver cauldron may have been made not far away. The clue
of figures wearing shoelaces localises their provenance; such sartorial innovation ties
those shod to Thracian footwear fashion. Their smiths "either in Transylvania or the
adjacent lower Danube basin" probably created their masterwork (86). These artisans
plied their priestly craft along the commercial corridor shared with Romany and other
metalworkers who left India for the West. Frequently the target of "freebooters" such as
Cimbri as well as merchants, this caravan route may have been attacked by Celts and
Germans at the time of the cauldron's forging. These similarities encourage Taylor to
extend the earlier chain of imagery explicated on the cauldron. While Mohenjo-Daro and
Dacia-Thracia may have been distant in time and place from one another, they shared the
ritual constraints of stereotypic Indo-European imagery. He traces the cauldron's images--
if not its manufacture-- along the shamanic Siberian and the tantric Buddhist inspirations
that may have flowed out with traders from Central Asia along the peninsular spine that
aligned Europe to the greater continent, along geographical lines that led to cultural links
commemorated on this enigmatic work of art.
Dismissing Taylor's argument, Miranda Green admits "oriental influences are
undoubtably present," if overshadowed by the Celtic imagery. (Celtic 165) Any yogic,
and by extension Hindu or Buddhist, identification for the horned figure depends on the
context within which his posture can be understood. Bonwick claimed a century before:
"The Buddhist form of the Crucifixion, so different from anything in early Christian art,
is another singular feature. In the Tower of Donoughmore, Meath county, is one of these
sculptures; as Brash describes-- 'very diminutive rude figure with extended arms, and legs
crossed'" (273 in original text). Those sympathetic to paganism today seek persistent
Eastern influences in particular Celtic figures. Peter Berresford Ellis notes under an
enamel figure: "Many Celtic deities, like their Indo-European Hindu counterparts, are
depicted in Buddha-like postures" similar to the cauldron (insert 11). MacKillop captions
Cernunnos on the cauldron as "in the conventional half-lotus pose" (plate 8) Such
attributions may reflect a shift in scholarly consensus. (MacCana 44-47; MacKillop xviii)
Green suggests a simpler reason for the horned figure's sitting stance. Diodorus and
Athenaeus in the first century before Christ related to their Roman audiences how the
Gauls, lacking chairs, usually sat on the floor. Cernunnos, customarily shown as on the
cauldron's inner plate "A" with snake in one hand and among stags, and also depicted
often as he is here amidst a menagerie of creatures, fits the customary context most
Celticists accept for the horned man's depiction. (Green Dictionary 60-61; 109; MacCana
44-47). However, as little is known of Cernunnos, perhaps a shaman in a lotus position,
with antlers affixed to his head, may instead be celebrated. (MacKillop 19)
Lacking even knowledge of how the cauldron, its plates found dismantled in the marsh,
was meant to be assembled, scholars face enormous challenges in explaining
Gundestrup's find. The Táin Bó Cuailnge has been proposed as one academic's analogy
for the tale its plates tell. (Olmsted) Not all of its symbols align with Celtic parallels.
Placing its origins within another martial clash, Anders Bergquist joins Taylor in
conjecturing that the Cimbri looted the cauldron in a raid on the Scordisi. This would
have been around present-day Northern Bulgaria or Southern Romania, deep into middle-
lower Danubian Celtic-Thracian territory, around 150-118 BCE. (cf. Glob 178) Clearly,
the mix of Celtic with non-Celtic motifs remains a feature of the Gundestrup cauldron
that, absent of comparative parallels, continues to challenge experts.
Later investigations in the laboratory favour a Thracian or Dacian provenance for the
trophy. Earlier scholars, identifying the antlered figure with Cernunnos, suggested a
Gallic origin. While the cauldron may have been taken as booty into Gaul, it does not
seem to have originated there. The Cimbri, the "Cimmerian" tribe around today's
northernmost tip of Denmark, carried it off from southeastern Europe. They buried the
trophy in what became a Jutland peat bog. (Green "Gods" 470) The story of how the
cauldron came across the continent may be told from hints in Roman chronicles, biased
and partial as this only surviving source may be.
Teutones and Cimbri about 120 BCE thundered down from Denmark, through Moravia to
the Danube valley. They followed the river through the Carpathian Basin to its
confluence with the Sava. Here, they pushed the Scordisci, a Celtic tribe, back into
Macedonia. The horde turned west. They attacked Noricum, along the southern ridges of
the Alps, in 113 BCE. They then veered away from the Po Valley and harried Iberia and
Gaul. Finally, in the last decade of the second century BCE, the Romans managed to halt
the Cimbri and Teutones. (Cunliffe Europe 369-70) The path the Cimbri took towards
Thracia had already long led North Sea tribes south to raid and trade along the Danube
into the steppes of Eastern Europe. John Collis reminds us that since 4000 BCE, "exotic
items" have been imported into Denmark from the lower Danube. (Collis 184) Another
archeologist suggests that the Gundestrup cauldron found its way north-- as a gift from a
leader of the Thracian Triballoi for a Celtic Scordisci ruler-- along such a route. (Cunliffe
Ancient 124-25; Europe 334)
Two later Viking finds demonstrate even longer journeys for two germane treasures.
Helgö is an island in Lake Mälaren near Stockholm. A trading and manufacturing center,
founded around 200 CE, it lay at the northern terminus of a long corridor of exchange.
Baltic and Byzantine commerce flowed along this channel. (Quinn 156-57) So did Viking
plunder. Items excavated in 1954 dating between the sixth and eighth centuries include: a
Coptic ladle, a bishop's crozier made in Ireland, and a bronze statue inlaid with silver
eyes of the Buddha, from Northern India. (Cunliffe Europe 435-6; Wilson 167)
A second object resembles an Indo-European stance associated with yogic postures taken
by Celtic deities. Ward Rutherford lists representations of Cernunnos "seated in the so-
called buddhic posture of the Celts" (45; cf. MacCana 44-47). An enamel escutcheon of
Irish or Scottish origin, based on its design (sea-buried about 800 CE off Oseberg on the
west Oslo fjord) shows a squinty-eyed, cross-legged figure, with his limbs tucked under
him, heels held fast by his hands. (Wilson 164; Graham-Campbell & Kidd 27) Peter
Berresford Ellis captions this enamel as in a "Buddha-like" pose. Scholars associate,
rather than assert, identification between Buddha and these chance remnants of the trade
routes that joined Europe with Asia.
An additional object minted in 150 BCE, a coin depicting Menander I (who ruled much
of present-day northwest India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), was found in Tenby, Wales in
1880. Legend has it Menander, a Greek military leader born in Bactria, converted-- as the
first “Westerner”-- to Buddhism. (Fields 15-16) His claim as "king and saviour" on one
side of the coin was inscribed in Greek; Athena graced the reverse with the same
inscription in the Indian language of Prakrit. Athena in an identical pose dominated a
statue in Macedonia's capital. The coin took two centuries to be carried along whatever
mercantile road ended at what is now the coast of Pembrokeshire. (Morgan) Far afield
and random as such evidence remains, I note these artifacts as tangential proof of North
Atlantic connections stretching, however distant or diminished, towards Asian and
Buddhist contact.
Whatever turmoil brought the cauldron to Gundestrup, the object was interred near the
North Sea years after its manufacture far to the south. Taylor does not insist that Cimbri
carted the cauldron north, but raiders or traders did. It was buried long after its birth.
Celticists prefer a date for the cauldron's creation around the first or second century BCE.
Vencelas Krupa narrows this to 50 BCE, after the defeat of the Danubian Celts. (229) X-
radiography, isotope analysis, and DNA testing of beeswax residue found on the cauldron
suggest to a 2005 Danish team of scientists that the object originated later, during the
Roman Iron Age of the first four centuries CE. Its date of internment eludes experts. The
team cautions against placing it within one iconographical framework or cultural milieu.
They stress the cauldron's considerably complex imagery and probable origin within
imperial trading networks. (Nielsen 53-54)
Those not expert in Iron Age archeology or Indo-European art regard the cauldron as a
template for Buddhist foundations upon which Celtic beliefs can be reconstructed-- if not
factually, than mythically. Neo-pagans and New Agers, no less than at the turn of the last
century, at the move into the third millennium seek to illuminate past shadows with
present light as shed by trans-cultural expression and alternative spirituality. These
academically tenuous searches rely upon a citation within MacKenzie.
ORIGEN, DRUIDS, BUDDHISTS:
Certainly, many speculations remain that archeology alone cannot verify. MacKenzie's
citation of single verse begins his study; upon it he supports his book. The comment of
Origen that Buddhists influenced Britannic druidry may be a slender foundation upon
which, as MacKenzie labored, to construct a syncretic structure that joins Buddhists with
Celts in pre-Christian Britain. Origen asserted in his third-century commentary on
Ezekiel how that land had "long been pre-disposed to" the tenets of Christianity, "through
the doctrines of the Druids and the Buddhists, who had already inculcated the Unity of
the Godhead" (qtd. MacKenzie v). Daisaku Ikeda, former president of the controversial
Soka Gakkai lay Buddhist movement, provides an alternate version: “In that island
[Britain], the Druid priests and Buddhists spread teachings concerning the oneness of
God, and for that reason the inhabitants are already inclined toward it [Christianity]. (74;
qtd. Fields 18). The missionary endeavour of Soka Gakkai seeks an attenuated precedent.
The context for this intriguing quote may be impossible for us to satisfyingly reclaim.
Out of twenty-five "volumes" elucidating Ezekiel which his biographer Eusebius records
-- or twenty-nine as tallied by his translator Jerome-- only a fragment from Origen's
twenty-first is extant. By 244, in Athens he would have completed his exegesis of
Ezekiel. (Crouzel 39, 31)
Imagination hints what we cannot prove. Origen's theology with its notions of apocastasis
or a universal restoration of all creation at the end of time, its conception of souls without
beginning or end having been formed in this life by their previous actions in other lives,
and his controversial suggestion that no man may merit eternal damnation place him
within contexts that align well with Eastern influences and Buddhist beliefs. He was
taught by Clement of Alexandria, who in the Stromata or Miscellanies counted Druids
and Buddhists among those who promulgated philosophies that influenced the Greeks; he
also listed certain Indians who "obey the precepts of Boutta" (1: 15; qtd. Batchelor 27).
Origen's birth in Alexandria, his education under Clement, and his travels about the
Mediterranean may have brought Origen into contact with many intellectual and spiritual
currents as far away as the Celtic realm. That we find within what survives of his writings
a challenging array of opinions that we may never wholly comprehend cannot be blamed
on their author.
Most of Origen's many works had been destroyed after the condemnations of Emperor
Justinian; his complex thought combined with its incomplete presentation offers
formidable difficulties for subsequent researchers. Henri Crouzel warns that Origen's
"thought is full of internal tensions and no text yields his thought precisely on a given
point” (49). Origen may well, considering his work we have lost, have commented upon
Buddhism and Druidism elsewhere. However, most of his transcriptions have perished no
less irretrievably than his homilies. The intriguing reference cited by MacKenzie and
often repeated in discussions of Buddhism's early Western transmission lingers
enigmatically, given that our sources for Druidism themselves rest on equally fragmented
and imperially biased sources.
Similarly, for any Druidic affinities with Buddhist dharma, the fragmentary remnants of
whatever the Celts believed prevent facile confidence that we know what they thought.
Peter Berresford Ellis introduces the Gundestrup bowl: ""Modern observers associate the
cauldron with the Druids." (insert 1) He cites, without precise attribution, another version
of Origen's assertions which MacKenzie includes. Britain's Druids had "worshipped the
one god. . . previous to the coming of Christ" (qtd. 114). They, according to Origen, had
"long been predisposed to Christianity"-- rather than MacKenzie's placing the
predisposition within personified Britannia herself. However, Ellis stays within scholarly
convention: monotheistic beliefs lack any corroboration among Druids, based on the lack
of evidence, romantics to the contrary.
Likewise, James MacKillop carefully distinguishes Julius Caesar's attestation that Druids
espoused a belief in the transmigration and rebirth of souls as apart from any clear
transmission to modern mystical concepts of reincarnation. The scholar shifts ancient
Druidic notions closer to the Pythagorean idea of metempsychosis. MacKillop denies any
"reliable documentation" in support of "the speculation that the druid was a Celtic
equivalent of the shaman of North Asia and among native North Americans" (27). The
shaman heals with magic, as a medium in ecstasy, aided perhaps by chemical means. He
brings about good or evil; the druid counted mediation with the gods among many roles.
Still, acknowledging the dangers of suggestion, the single hint that MacKillop admits of
any shamanic shadow upon druidic practice remains, in light of MacKenzie's own
ambitious perceptions, tempting. "The only shard of evidence for a link with shamanism
is the pierced antler, perhaps used as a headdress, found at a fourth-century AD Roman
bath-site in what is now Hertfordshire.”
BUDDHISM IN IRELAND TODAY
Shamans and Druids, in the New Age imagination, do not always respect an excavator's
triangulated boundaries. Popular synthesists, following neo-pagan inquirers, encouraged
crossover of Celtic with not only Hindu influences-- these being accepted after two
centuries of study by linguists as well as archeologists charting Indo-European
diffusions-- but Buddhist ideas. These connections may not rest on solid fact, but these
ecumenical longings speak of shifting mores. Theosophists inspired a search in the West
for the wisdom of the East over a century ago; this search still beckons those dissatisfied
with the dominant Jewish and Christian paradigm. This transcendental current slowly
lured a few seekers, often of Western and Northern European backgrounds, into a search
for their ancestral roots, beyond genealogy into rebirth. Metempsychosis and
reincarnation blended with Hindu spirituality and Buddhist dharma.
In this regressive quest, those of European descent have sought a connection with their
distant past. For a few, the ancient Celtic continuum that united diverse peoples through
language and culture impels them towards what, on the farthest isle in the West of
Ireland, Inis Mór, one native captured as “Cuing Ghnais”: bonds of traditions from
thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away commemorated in Gaelic:
"An fear a chaith splanc ón tine chnámh/ Isteach i ngarraí an doras/ Níorbh eol dó athair
an ghnimh a rinne;/ Ach chomhlion cuing ghnáis,/ A rinne aon chine amháin/ De chlann
aon fhóid anall/ Ón Ind go dtí An Sruthán" (115).
Translated as "The Yoke of Custom": "The man who cast an ember from the bonfire/ Into
the garden outside his door/ Didn't know the father of his deed;/ But he fulfilled the
dictate of a custom/ That made one clan/ Of all the tillers of the soil/ From India to
Sruthán" (116).
Máirtín Ó Direáin’s poetic observation about the ancestral ties that unwittingly bound
Irish with Indian found a complementary audience. The oldest extant Indo-European
vernacular carries Sanskrit’s echo across Eurasia to its edge. At this Celtic fringe,
countercultural devotees have in later decades established Buddhist retreats along western
Irish shores. Two in Cork occupy a former Gaeltacht: one marginalised culture grafts
anew through Indo-European hybrids.
As elsewhere in the West this past half century, various schools of Buddhism started
meditation centers in Ireland. Unlike the Scottish Lowlands where near Ekdalemuir the
Samyé Ling monastery stands as Europe's largest temple (outside of the remote frontier
of Buddhist Kalmykia), Irish practitioners gravitate towards smaller sites in city and
countryside. As of 2005, twenty-three centers exist in the Republic with seven more
across the border. (Howard 65) Ireland lacks a Scottish equivalent to the Holy Island of
St. Molaise, which Samyé Ling— co-founded in Dumfriesshire by Tibetan refugee and
iconoclastic guru Chögyam Trungpa (Fields 282)-- bought for a monastic community in
1972. The "Dzogchen Beara" Rigpa hospice centre on that legendary peninsula of Co.
Cork serves as another, if more modest, coastal foundation with Celtic resonance.
The percentage of those defining themselves as Buddhist remains small in the Republic,
if on or slightly above the average for European countries, at 0.15 to 0.20% of those
polled. About eight thousand Irish chose the religious category of Buddhist in the 2006
census; in 2001, those in Northern Ireland numbered over five hundred. How many of
those surveyed come from ethnic communities or as immigrants, as contrasted with
converts, cannot be ascertained exactly from this data.
Martin Baumann in 1997 estimated about a third of the 180,000 Buddhists then in Great
Britain to be of European ancestry. (198) Two-thirds of the nearly one million Buddhists
in Europe are Asian immigrants. (Mitchell 360) The 2006 Irish census reported that “80
per cent of Chinese said they had ‘no religion’, by far the highest per cent of any group,
while 6 per cent said Buddhist and 1 in 20 indicated Catholic” (“On Census Day”).
Those reporting as Buddhists in the Republic overall may have more than doubled since
the previous enumeration.
James Coleman reckons about a fifth of Buddhists in Western nations may be from
European backgrounds; yet those adapting "dharma" teaching and affiliating with a
"sangha" community-- if not an amount easily transferable for statisticians-- grow
exponentially, especially among well-educated, left-leaning, wealthy and mostly white
converts and fellow travellers along the way to enlightenment. (19-20) Extrapolation into
how many Irish or Scots practitioners come from Catholic as opposed to Protestant
backgrounds may not have been attempted yet. Coleman by comparison finds that while
Jews appear in the U.S. over five times more likely to be attracted to Buddhism, those
from Catholic upbringings "are virtually identical" with the overall percentage of
American Catholics; Protestant upbringings account for less likely involvement. (192)
Precision eludes statisticians, due to the blurred nature of how "new Buddhists" may
choose their own definition. The casual manner in which Westerners often associate
themselves with the dharma, rather than as formal members of the sangha, complicates
enumeration. Many who attend formally Buddhist centres have not registered themselves
officially as Buddhist. Westerners integrate Buddhism frequently while remaining aligned
to a non-conforming agnosticism, New Age or neo-pagan spirituality, or a flexibly
observed version of a dominant monotheism.
INVENTING CELTIC BUDDHISM
Alternatives to Christianity inspired countercultural descendents of Celtic speakers back
into a shared past that they perceived may nourish energies in ways no historian can
prove. These “psychonauts” launch their Anglo-Americanised spirits towards those of
less assimilated souls-- via the revelations of yogic practitioners as far away as the
Himalayas. Their trajectories may, as with the new Buddhists in other Western nations,
merge traditions and practices no less ambitiously than Round Tower advocates and
Theosophists. Dissatisfied with priests or ministers, some countercultural harbingers seek
meaning in the Western Isles, but within a transmission of Eastern methods of discipline
and meditation into a reception aligned for an Anglo-Celtic initiate.
Samuel Beckett in Murphy (1938) poked fun at one quondam Dubliner going native.
Miss Counihan pursues the eponymous protagonist to London, “an address in Gower
Street where she was on no account to be disturbed.” There she “cowered as happy as the
night was short, in the midst of Indians, Cyprians, Japanese, Chinese, Siamese, and
clergymen.” Soon she meets a fakir, in the literal sense of the word: “Little by little she
sucked up to a Hindu polyhistor of dubious caste.” Before he’s sent (within a few
sentences) to the gas-oven, this practitioner of prana confides: “I want to be up in the air.”
(195-96) John Calder, Beckett’s publisher, nevertheless, in Murphy himself sees
“Beckett’s most Buddhist creation” (6). The search for nirvana that quiets the longing to
transcend reality or even its negation pulls along many Beckett characters, trapped in
their unnamed “samsara.”
In his later prose trilogy, and “closed space” texts of the mid-1960s, Beckett enters this
“flatlining” realm. There, narrators report their death or dying. They articulate
inexpressible ends to consciousness reported from the other side of nirvana or extinction,
impossible as these narrative demands may seem. (cf. Ackerley & Gontarski 99)
The exotic in the Dublin that Murphy and Miss Counihan fled in the fictional 1930s held
little truck for Buddhism or the New Age, compared to London. No Irish Buddhist centre
appears to have been established before Samyé Ling started a branch in Kilmainham,
Dublin city. Yet, John Banville’s “Benjamin Black”-attributed The Silver Swan (2008)
dramatises the allure of a “half-Indian” healer who sets up an outwardly dingy, interiorly
fragrant consulting shop” in Dublin’s Adelaide Road as “Dr. Hakeem Kreutz.” His sign
offers “Spiritual Healing,” although the woman who falls for his charms barely registers
the term. (106) His assailant will first think the “Buddhist” doctor will not strike back;
Kreutz resists, causing his attacker to wonder then if the doctor is “some sort of Buddhist
who could put up with pain” (223). The 1950s confusion of Buddhist with any other
Asian-inspired minister is telling; the doctor himself professes a blurred Islamic mélange.
This Sufi healer will be unmasked as the son of a Wolverhampton grocery owner. His
name cloaks a “crooked cross.” Yet for such as the Indian Theosophical Society, this
symbol-- anciently predating its Nazi taint by its twisted display-- proclaims the
venerable Hindu comfort of this solar sign. (Dasa) Into the 1960s, Dublin had “[The]
Swastika Laundry” on Shelbourne Road, Ballsbridge, named for what was at its 1912
founding a good-luck sign. Heinrich Böll’s Irish Journal recorded his surprise encounter
with one of its trucks. (21-22) A life-affirming sun-symbol, also used by Buddhists, it
turned into Brigid’s cross or the triskele farther west. (Evans 268) Like the three hares,
the provenance and distribution of such venerable artifacts in art and ritual demonstrates
the dispersion, and distortion, of Indo-European tradition across the continent.
Dr. Kreutz stands for a recognizable if more pacific type who found a small clientele even
earlier than mid-century Ireland. Pamela Travers, creator of Mary Poppins, in her youth
found an interest in Zen; she embraced Theosophy. She attended séances with Yeats, later
adopting a son of his first biographer. A resident of Ireland in the 1920s and 30s, she had
a relationship for a decade until his death with AE, George Russell, who encouraged her
to write fantasy novels.
Fantasy energised Celtic-Asian content. In June 1961, the first Silver Age Marvel comic
superhero appeared; under a Tibetan lama’s tutelage, Harvard-trained Anthony Druid
became “Dr. Druid,” blending Celtic lore with Buddhist powers. He later starred, if only
for four issues, in his own 2007 series. (“Religion”) Fantastic, colourful representations
of Celtic art infused by Hokusai, Alphonse Mucha, Asian hues and psychedelic tinges
charged the graphics of Jim Fitzpatrick. In the aptly named “Tara Telephone” ensemble,
the broadsheet “The Book of Invasions,” and the 1970s folk-rock of Horslips, mythic
retellings of the Fianna filtered through comic-book superheroes and Asian exoticism as
Dublin’s hippies brewed their complex cross-cultural blend. (Murphy “Horslips”) From
the early 1960s Derek Bell, Belfast native and late harpist of the Chieftains, professed an
eccentric Buddhism. Within this Celtic and Anglo-American counterculture, spurred on
by poets, Beats, artists, and musicians such as Donovan Leitch-- the Scots-born pop
troubadour proclaiming himself while living in Ireland after the Aquarian Age's dimming
a "Celtic Buddhist"—a few bohemians from Western Isles sought Eastern gurus.
Chögyam Trungpa has been credited with urging his follower and attendant for seven
years, John Riley Perks, to link Celtic culture with Buddhist spirituality. Trungpa
advocated that a non-Buddhist culture needed to pierce its own familarity with its
inherited imagery; a Westerner seeking enlightenment might better relate to the Tibetan
panoply if it integrated Celtic portrayals of powerful deities and wise figures. This
"transparency" that led a Westerner not to recognize the hidden nature-- the illusory
reality of one's underlying cultural biases-- might be attained by blending Eastern
discipline with Western imagery. The "Celtic Buddhism" website defines this quest: "The
archetypal deities of ancient Europe still exist in many peoples' psyche or mind." Perks
believes that “these energies are actually based on or emanate tremendous compassion
which has become overlaid with habitual clingings and fixations. The stripping away of
this neurotic sludge is the starting point of Celtic Buddhist practice" ("Celtic Buddhism").
Another member, Thom Kilts, shares his own frustration with the pretension and
privilege indulged in by many Western Buddhists, the outrageous behaviour of Trungpa,
and his own skepticism as a Celtic Christian chaplain who trained as a Buddhist. He
compares Tibetan and Celtic eclecticism. He reminds doubters that Tibetan practices
proliferated in isolation after being imported from India; Celtic practices on islands and
coastal fringes flourished apart from the imperial and religious turmoil that wiped out
Celtic and Buddhist devotions in their places of origin. Kilts teaches how "the Buddha
confirms the lineage of Celtic Buddhism as a lineage rooted and interlaced with the
earth" (Kilts). He urges a flexible understanding of what "Celtic Buddhism" will become,
and channels its fluidity to the freedom from dogma that both the Buddha and early Celts
nurtured in the formative years of their beliefs.
Perks resisted this synthesis when his guru first discussed it during the 1970s. While
Perks makes an aside in his autobiographical account that his mother was "a Wicca
spiritual healer" around the time he was born in 1934 in Kent, his story offers little
insight into his early understanding of any Celtic or pagan roots. (3) You never even learn
why his middle name is Riley, although this may or not be pertinent. As a boy, he did
identify with a Welsh schoolmaster in playful anti-Saxon alliances, on the other hand.
(However, Perks promises a sequel about "Celtic Buddhism.") After a peripatetic career,
young Perks wound up in New England. As with many seekers that sociologist James
Coleman has studied among "new Buddhists," Perks fit the type: a Western free spirit
who sought resolution for "some kind of nagging spiritual dissatisfaction" (208). While
Perks took on his service to his guru as a lark, the game turned serious. He spent the
countercultural decades as Trungpa's valet-factotum and his student.
Perks and others practiced Buddhism in the 1960s in Vermont. Chögyam Trungpa, after
co-founding Samyé Ling in Scotland in 1967, met Perks in America. Perks accompanied
Trungpa as a member of his unpredictable Shambhala entourage during many of his
worldwide peregrinations during the Age of Aquarius and at Naropa Institute, where
Trungpa's "crazy wisdom" version of inculcating the dharma earned him notoriety. In
1989, after years of being harangued by Chögyam Trungpa, Perks "registered the name
Celtic Buddhism as a nonprofit organization" (213). Soon he called himself "the
Venerable Seoinaidh, which is Gaelic for Johnny," began to give talks, and met others
intrigued by the juxtaposition that he embodied.
Despite ridicule from many critics and skepticism from many Tibetan Buddhists, he has
established himself from first a Nova Scotia inn and now a Letterkenny retreat as the
transmitter of a new lineage, christened in honor of Chögyam Trungpa's famously
unorthodox example as "Crazy Heart." A lineage links "an unbroken line of successive
teachers through which the Buddhist teachings are transmitted" (G. Coleman 483). A
Tibetan lineage can be compared to an episcopal line of succession. It enables Perks,
once confirmed by Trungpa, in turn to train and ordain others as lineage holders within
this branch of the sangha, or group of practitioners. These empowered instructors claim
descent from generations of "aware" adepts. Dharma-heirs originate with those inspired
at the foot of the Buddha under his bo tree. They affirm enlightenment through dharma.
“Celtic Buddhist” dharma integrates shamanism with meditation. It mixes Tibetan
methods with Vipassana approaches chosen by many Westerners for their affinity with
psychotherapy. Prajnaparamitra, the Heart Sutra, remains their core practice. (Perks 215)
ENVISIONING CELTIC BUDDHISM
Perks narrates his visualizations during one such "deity yoga" meditation. He sees the
goddesses Brigid and Danu, the queen Morrigan, and the North Briton chieftainess
Cartimandua among Celtic manifestations, alongside the medieval Beguine Marguerite
Porete, a Chinese bodhisattva, a Tibetan fiery deity, and an Indian yogini. His diverse
encounter aligns with those which Tibetan Buddhist teachers advise for Westerners.
Gurus counsel that those from other spiritual practices or cultural traditions should and
must learn to recognize the forms that emanate from one's practice as those who will be
most easily acknowledged not only in the relatively calm circumstances of this life's
meditation, but those who will be most reliably sought within the probably terrifying
"bardo" passages through one's afterlife.
Perks admits that the Celtic visions emanate as "another cultural aspect" connected to
Tibetan, African, and Asian representations. He does not attempt to pinpoint where the
two concepts of "Celt" and "Buddha" will meet. He concludes his autobiography with the
admission: "Personally, I have no fixed or clear idea about how Celtic Buddhism will
finally manifest" (216). This lineage dismisses "historical validations" as the only
verification of ultimate meaning for the seeker. After all, Buddhism by its nature chides
its followers to overcome the necessity for the concrete. For Perks’ disciple, Bill Burns,
the "thangka" painting-- a Tibetan wall tapestry-- conveys the visual emergence of the
empowerment meditations described by Trungpa’s new dharma-heir. The artist proposes
that "the combination of the open approach of Buddhism and the existing mandala of
Celticism mixed together is Celtic Buddhism" (Burns).
That mandala's maker elaborates how "the Celts favored a view close to a nature
mysticism that sees God or some sacred essence in nature. Still, here we are in the 21st
century, all fishing for the salmon of knowledge, either sticking our hands into the
swirling waters and hoping to come up with 'the fish' or casting about in the still pools
and estuaries waiting for a bite. A wonderful vision to imagine is catching a wonderful
vision.” Bill Burns relates how “Celtic Buddhism is an intermingling of the open-
heartedness of Buddhism and the open-endedness of the spiritual quest with the
integration of living the mythic journey. There is a possibility of encountering the
goddesses that we imagine as external forces. In Buddhism, these things are no longer
separate, they are actual contrivances employed in the transformation of psycho-spiritual
energies.”
A mandala turns the practitioner’s personal archetypes into an outward illustration of
one's interior psyche. The circle frames a void; images within depict one’s illusions. By
meditation, one develops and then destroys one's attachment to these images, so as to
prepare for the entrance into emptiness. Burns incorporates a centrepiece of a blond
Buddha on the lotus seat-- with Cernunnos as the deer and Blodeuwedd as the flower-
faced Welsh beauty-- into a Book of Kells-patterned array of Tibetan icons. The Buddha
is based on the Kells St. Matthew. A tree-of-life motif, common to both Himalayan and
Hibernian traditions, connects various elements.
For Perks, his extended lotus-sutra vision also brings him a cow that transforms before
his inner sight into the deity Cernunnos. "He is young, sixteen, with the velvet horns of a
stag upon his head." While his story makes no mention of Gundestrup’s trophy and little
about any culturally Celtic knowledge outside of this one "dreaming reality" interlude,
the appearance of this iconic Cernunnos among Perks' vision and Burns' repertoire of
guiding figures does imaginatively bring the Celtic Buddhist back to MacKenzie's central
argument for the strongest link in the chain that tethers the two nouns and the two
cultures. It also complements Taylor's conclusion. He places the Gundestrup treasure
within the magical tradition akin to Siberian shamanism and tantric yoga as a relevant
context. There, we may be more open than our forebears, to a reorientation of the
cauldron’s meaning beyond gender boundaries, cultural conventions, or anthropological
stereotypes. Even if the "pictorial narrative" eludes us, the cauldron’s "problem itself, like
certain mathematical conundrums, may prove more valuable than its solution" (89).
MICHEL’S BOOK OF KELLS MANDALA
The intricate web that wraps precise calculation into mystical yearning threads a tapestry
that may be as durable within the self as it is invisible to the observer. On this premise,
French author and Irish resident Michel Houllebecq produced his 1998 novel of ideas,
The Elementary Particles. Molecular biologist Michel Djerzinski, seeking a revolutionary
paradigm shift in genetic engineering, emigrates to Ireland to work at a Galway think
tank. In 2005, inspired by millennial shifts towards global transformation, he ponders
how, after materialism breaks down the divine barrier supposedly preventing us from
humanist freedom, people can avoid doubt and distress in a European society vacated by
faith. Haunted by alienation and consumerism, Michel searches for scientific liberation
from the limits of our decaying shells. He yearns for human-based experiences that
interweave among us to bond us together no less than DNA does an organism.
On the verge of biological breakthrough, Michel Djerzinski late in 2005 visits the Book
of Kells display in Dublin. The narrator inserts Giraldus Cambrensis' 1185 description of
the illustrated concordance. "One might not see the subtleties, whereas all is subtlety"
(qtd. 250). Michel lays the foundations, after his encounter at Trinity College with the
book, for "a new philosophy of space. Just as the world of Tibetan Buddhism is
inseparable from the prolonged contemplation of the infinite circular forms of mandalas,"
or as one can understand Democritus by watching sunlight bursting down upon a Greek
island's white stones, "so one comes closer to the thinking of Djerzinski by studying the
infinite architecture of cross and spiral, which are the basic ornamental forms used in the
Book of Kells," the narrator observes. (250-251) Love overcomes distance, and
interwoven within our cells Michel unlocks the patterns that overcome death.
Living near Clifden, Michel meditates upon his secular epiphany as he perambulates
along the Sky Road. After sending off his final manuscripts at the Galway central post
office, he disappears. No body was found, so "rumors sprang up that he had gone to live
in Asia, probably in Tibet, to compare his work with Buddhist teachings." The narrator
denies this suggestion. No trace of Michel leaving Ireland can be found, and "the
drawings on the last pages of his notebook, which some had interpreted as mandalas,
were later found to be combinations of Celtic symbols much like those in the Book of
Kells" (252-53).
Instead, the narrator concludes, Michel likely died in Ireland, choosing his death. "Many
witnesses attest to his fascination with this distant edge of the Western world, constantly
bathed in a soft shifting light, where he liked to walk, where, as he wrote in one of his last
notes, 'the sky, the sea and the light converge.' We now believe that Michel Djerzinski
went into the sea" (253). Like past liberators who returned to the sky or the elements,
Michel leaves humankind with a legacy. Yet, his gift rests not in dogma or deity, but
within all living things. He unlocks the molecular trigger that allows infinite copying of
cells without mutation or disturbance. Immortality arrives for those alive in the twenty-
first century. While Jews, Christians, and Muslims deride Djerzinski's discovery, as well
as many humanists, one cohort from "revealed religion" demurs. Buddhists noted "that all
of the Buddha's teachings were founded on the awareness of the three impediments of old
age, sickness and death, and that the Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would
not necessarily have rejected a technical solution" (258).
Here, spiraling back to the Isles of the Blest, crossing Buddha's Western re-orientation,
this introduction to the concept of "Celtic Buddhism" cycles back to where it began.
Petrie and O'Brien, Theosophists and Joyce, Crazy Heart lineage holders and Celticists--
not to mention many archaeologists-- contend over what that unexpected combination of
cultural concepts creates. Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, and, in Dharmakaya, Paula
Meehan all integrate Buddhist themes into their poetry; they attest to what Ben Howard
poses as a new Zen koan. Why has the dharma come to Ireland? “In the true spirit of Zen,
one might answer ‘Galway Bay’ or ‘the Rock of Cashel’” (74).
Provocatively, Michel walks into that bay after his DNA breakthrough culminates his
life’s meaning; Cashel for Yeats reveals where Michael Robartes’ double vision of a
joyful girl appears between Sphinx and blessing Buddha. Perhaps at last, unlike at the
premiere of The Countess Cathleen, Yeats’ vision of a transformed Irish spirit may come
to pass a century later for the Irish, dissatisfied with conformity and consumerism.
Exactly two hundred years separate Francis Wilmore's idea of Buddha’s “Sacred Isles of
the West” resting in the Celtic fringe from Michel Djerzinski's ideal. Both conceptions
seek to free people from enslavement to passing desire in aging bodies. For MacKenzie,
the shores of Britain suggested the land of the dead. For Michel, the Irish coast invites his
death, but his discovery liberates by a genetic miracle immortality for those who remain
behind.
The missing link between a factual "Celtic" tie with historical "Buddhism" eludes
academic reasoning. Yet, for a fictional French scientist in Galway or a faction of Celtic
practitioners in Letterkenny, the bond between the two terms remains perhaps as
insubstantial and inviting as the story on the Gundestrup Cauldron. There any factual
solution retreats. It illustrates where storytelling returns to enrich our search for meaning.
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