Places of the soul

“During a retreat I was overcome by fatigue and lent my head on my right hand, bending forward to do so. 
The image of Rodin’s Thinker flashed in my mind together with two bronze twenty centimetre-high book-ends, replicas of Rodin’s statue, which stood on a shelf in my parents’ home when I was a child. So far the imagery was quite routine. But then the quality of my sensations suddenly changed altogether”.

“I was no longer merely reminiscing, it was no longer a childhood memory, a faint recollection of by-gone years of which I had become aware of again. I was now actually there, with my querying childhood mind wondering why ever a thinker should be naked. For fifty years I’d utterly forgotten the episode, but then, to my great surprise, it all came back to me as if I were still my querying five-year old self. For a flashing moment my mind was raised up to another sphere of existence, free from the constrictions of time as we know it. I was elated by a blissful sense of timelessness”. My conversation with Giulia Niccolai started like this, with her telling me of this experience she had as a Buddhist nun. It’s a story that illustrates well how the meditative mind vagrantly moves about through time and space, coming across places and hitting upon moments of the past that appear under a new light and take on a different meaning.
“In nineteen years of up to three hours of meditation a day, and even twelve during retreats, similar revelations have come to me four or five times. Even if each time it’s happened my mind was “elsewhere”, in some physically inaccessible place, for instance underground in a rectangular snow-blanketed field next to a grain of wheat, deep down I’ve always felt that such moments of grace, such astonishing and exalted visions were nothing short of a gift bestowed upon me by the Lamas to make me aware of my level of spiritual attainment through a vivid sense-based experience”.
Giulia’s life has been rich and eventful. She has worked as a photographer, poet and writer. She was a co-founder of the literary circle “Gruppo 63″ in the sixties. Among her works are Harry’s Bar e altre poesie 1969-1980, a collection of poems published in 1981; 
Frisbees poesie da lanciare published in 1994; and Esoterico biliardo, to a certain extent an autobiographical collection published in 2001. In 1985 at the age of fifty, after an ictus that temporarily impaired her powers of speech, she started out on a spiritual journey under the guidance of Tenzin Gonpo, a Tibetan monk, that was to lead her to become a Buddhist nun in 1990. For a while she ceased writing poetry. “Up to then my writing was always subject to acknowledgment. I yearned for critical approval. Thanks to meditation I came to realise that such expectations are a snare set up by the ego and a seedbed of unhappiness. I was thus able to overcome such a limited outlook with its misguided desire for endorsement and resume writing. To me writing is now prevalently a way for bringing my ideas into focus. The choice of diction and vocabulary, foregrounding “this” rather than “that”, allows me to live through an experience over again, to return “on the scene” so to speak, and to appreciate it in a deeper and more meaningful way”. Just as in mediation, then! “In Buddhism the seat of the word lies in the throat. That of the mind, instead, is not lodged in the brain, as we in the West tend to believe, but in the heart, so as to avoid the divisions between rationality and emotion. Well then, after so many years of words getting stuck in the throat, when I write now I always strive to swallow down hard on them so that they may well up fully fledged from the heart”.
Places and personal experiences figure high in Giulia’s poetry and writings, but when she turns to talking of meditation her lead theme is “space”. “To refer to location necessarily entails speaking of a physical presence. There are no physical coordinates on the other hand to the realms of consciousness. According to the Eastern view consciousness moves freely in boundless space, in a timeless void without any inherent existence”. It’s a difficult concept for us Westerners to grasp! Let me try and explain it with an example. 
I was once afforded a precious insight into the Eastern concept of space in Japan. I was visiting one of the largest and most important shrines in Kyoto, the Sanjusangen do. It’s famous for its 1001 Bodhisattva statues. `Bodhisattva’ is a Sanskrit word meaning `being 
whose essence is wisdom’. The gilded wooden statues are the Temples great attraction. One metre sixty-six centimetres tall, the statues are arranged in ten compact rows. Like everyone else I was standing and listening attentively to the guide, a Zen Buddhist monk who was telling us the story of the place in English. I was especially caught by his statement that the Temple’s name, Sunju-san, means `thirty-three’. I wondered what the number 33 could possibly have to do with the 1001 statues. `As you can see ‘, the monk went on, `the ceiling above this hall is held up by thirty-five columns. That makes thirty-three empty spaces between the columns’. It was then I realised the philosophical implications of the Temple being named after the number of empty spaces, that is after what was not there. It epitomised the typically Zen outlook, which is never exclusive but always inclusive. We, visitors to the Shrine eight hundred years after its erection, had in a way 
been accounted for and accommodated within its precincts right from its very conception thanks to the room left for us in the empty spaces between the columns”.

Interview by Anna Adriani