British Buddhist

PEAKS AND LAMAS--Marco Pallis--Knopf ($5).

When Marco Pallis first went to India in 1933 he was mainly interested in climbing mountains. He climbed some. He also debunked the notion that Europeans can scale the great Indian peaks only with the help of platoons of native porters. In his spare time he drank buttered tea and, with a companion, played Bach's Two-part Inventions on viols.

As a traveler, Pallis is almost a total-recaller. As a travel-writer, he is far too liable to such desperate yawns as "I must not take leave of Leh without mentioning yet another kind friend. . . ." Indeed, Peaks and Lamas is a museum piece of what might be described as the official prose of the English gentleman. But even his rectory-crumpets-and-cold-cambric-tea manner cannot utterly defeat the notable materials of his second passage to India.

On his second trip, in 1936, Pallis still bowed politely to a few peaks; but by that time he was far more interested in Tibetan art and in the mysteries of Tibetan Buddhism. No insulated tripper but a careful student of language and custom, he visited one Buddhist monastery after another in the borderland provinces of Sikkim and Ladak, seeking always Lamas, teachers, of the utmost excellence, and bringing always the conventional offering: unmounted precious stones.

In some places he encountered tepidity, mediocrity, downright corruption. The much-touristed monastery at Himi was particularly disenchanting: the food and water were noisome, ferocious dogs snarled (chained) in the courtyard, inestimable works of art disintegrated in the corridors, the abbot was a fool for such gadgets as bicycle bells and dry-cell batteries, all of them out of commission. But Marco Pallis did find four good & great men, to whom he dedicates his book. From one he learned the traditions and processes of Tibetan painting. With the others he debated on war, on compassion, on the relative merits of Christianity and Buddhism, on such problems as the possibility of an animal's attaining Buddhahood without first passing through the human phase. From them he learned, and through them he was profoundly drawn toward that subtle, serenely intricate theology which traces all evil to the pig (Ignorance), the cock (Ego, Desire), the serpent (Anger); which insists: ""The cruelty of the tyrant is as worthy of pity as the groans of the slave."

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