By Sujata Nahar
28 Alexandra David-Neel
28
"That's where" —the drawing-room on N°9 Rue du Val de Grace —"I used to receive Madame David-Neel," said Mother. "We saw each other almost every evening."
In the first place, how did they get acquainted?
Mother was telling us in what a fierce fight she was engaged against those who hold on to the idea that 'spiritual life' means abandoning the earth and going off to some faraway Nirvana. "But I," she said, "I always reply with the story of Buddha. Just as he was about to enter into Nirvana, all of a sudden he saw that the earth must be changed —and he stayed back."
Then she described her first meeting with Alexandra David-Neel. "I remember. Once it happened with Mme David-Neel. It was very interesting. She
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came to deliver a lecture —I wasn't acquainted with her, it's there that I came to know her — at the Theosophical Society, I think.1 I don't quite remember. I attended the lecture; and while she was speaking I saw Buddha —I saw him clearly, not above her head, but a little to the side. He was present." A slow smile spread across her face. "Well then, after the lecture, I was introduced to her. I didn't know the sort of woman she was! So I said to her, 'Oh, Madam, during your speech, I saw Buddha there.'
"She answered me back," Mother took on an angry tone of voice, "'Impossible! Buddha went into Nirvana.'
Mother lifted her eyebrows, "Well-well-well . . ." and laughed.
"But he really was there, notwithstanding what she thought."
Alexandra David-Neel was born in Paris on 24 October 1868. Her father, Louis David, had taken a very active part in the coup d'état of 1851. He was exiled
1 After sixty years, Mother was of course not quite sure. It appears that Mme David-Neel gave only one lecture at Paris' Theosophical Society, and that was in 1947.
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to Belgium along with a great friend of his, Victor Hugo.
Ever since she was a little girl of five in Paris, Alexandra David wanted to "go beyond the garden gate in search of the Unknown." She began that search around the age of twenty-three, when she made her first overseas voyage —to India and Ceylon. And again when she roamed Indo-China for three years — from 1895 to 1897.
At the turn of the century she went to Tunis. There she met Philippe Neel, whom she married in 1904. Without the generosity of her husband she would hardly have been able to indulge in her passion for travel.
On the first page of David Neel's diary, dated 1 January 1911, is a note by her: "Began the year with a meeting of philosophical meditation at the Richards'."
Again, the same year, on February 3, she notes, "In the evening, at the Richards', strange and involuntary vision of my life ..."
Much later, in her book L'Inde où j'ai vécu (The India Where I Lived), Alexandra was to evoke the memory of those early days with Mirra. "I have
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the most pleasant recollections of the evenings spent with her in the small house she resided in on Rue du Val de Grace, in Paris, and of the walks we had together in the Bois de Boulogne. Neither she nor I could at the time have imagined the role she has today."
They went picnicking in the Bois de Boulogne and were greatly entertained by the first aeroplanes trying to take off. Watching the progress with interest, they would exclaim to each other, "Oh, look! This time it has gone up at least four metres.... Oh! Look! Look ..."
As their intimacy grew, Alexandra narrated to Mirra many adventures she had had during her peregrinations. From time to time, Mother regaled us with some of those stories.
"Mme David-Neel," said Mother, "was an intense woman and capable of profound meditation. Now, one day, she started walking while in meditation. It was in the open. She walked and walked for a long time with eyes closed. When at last she opened them she found herself in a strange place and turned to go home. She walked back, this time without shutting her eyes. After some time, at a certain distance, she
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saw a stream running right across. It was a fairly wide and deep stream. How had she gone over the stream? There had been nobody to help her take a boat. Obviously she had walked upon the water! This seems incredible," said Mother, "but Mme David-Neel would not fool anybody, nor would she deceive herself."
Mother frequently suffered from bloodshot eyes. When that happened, instead of reading, she would pull out a grain from her vast granary and tell us a story. Thus, one day she told us one which she had heard. "I heard the story from Mme David-Neel," she said, "who, as maybe you know, is a well-known Buddhist, specially as she was the first woman to enter Lhasa. Her journey to Tibet was extremely perilous and thrilling, and she herself gave me an account of one of the incidents of this journey." In all probability, Mother heard it in Japan when they met again in 1917.
"She was travelling with a certain number of fellow-travellers forming a sort of caravan." She was bound for Lhasa, in Tibet. The caravan had to go through some forests. "And these forests are infested with tigers, some of whom become man-eaters . . . and
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when that happens, they are called 'Mr Tiger.'
"Late one evening, when they were in the thick of the forest — a forest they had to cross in order to set up camp in security —Mme David-Neel realized that it was the time for her meditation. Now, she used to meditate very regularly at a fixed hour, without fail. And as it was the meditation hour, she told her companions, 'Keep going; as for me, I shall sit here and do my meditation. When I have finished, I shall join you. Meanwhile, go on to the next stage and set up the camp.'
"One of the coolies told her, 'Oh, Madam! No. It's impossible, absolutely impossible.' He spoke in his own language, of course, but I must tell you that Mme David-Neel knew Tibetan like a Tibetan. 'It is quite impossible, "Mr Tiger" is there in the forest, and it is just the time for him to come out in search of his dinner. We cannot leave you and you can't stop here!' She answered that it did not at all matter to her, that the meditation was much more important to her than safety, and they could all withdraw and she would remain alone.
"Much against their will they went away, for it
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was impossible to reason with her —once she had decided on doing something, nothing could prevent her from doing it. They left and she sat down comfortably at the foot of a tree and entered into meditation. After a while she felt a somewhat unpleasant presence. She opened her eyes to see what it was . . . and three or four steps in front of her was Mr Tiger! His eyes full of covetousness. So, the good Buddhist that she was, she said, 'Good. If this is the way I shall attain Nirvana, very good. Only I must prepare to leave my body in a befitting manner, in the proper spirit.' And, not moving, not even trembling, she closed her eyes again and entered once more into meditation, a meditation which was a little deeper, intenser, detaching herself completely from the illusion of the world, ready to pass into Nirvana. Five minutes went by, ten minutes gone, half an hour passed —nothing happened. Then, as it was time for the meditation to be over, she opened her eyes ... no tiger there!
"Doubtless, seeing so immobile a body, he must have thought it was unfit for eating! For tigers, like all wild animals —except the hyena —don't attack and eat a dead body. So she found herself quite alone and
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out of danger. She went her way calmly; and, on reaching camp, told them, 'Here I am.'"
Mme David-Neel set out in August 1911 for the Far East. This time her journeys covered not only India, Ceylon, Burma, Indo-China, but also China, Japan, Mongolia and Korea. On her way to Lhasa during the journey from China to India, which she made entirely on foot, she explored vast tracts of Tibetan territory which no white traveller had crossed before her.
Philippe Neel died in 1941.
Alexandra passed away in her home, Samten Zong, in Digne, France, on 8 September 1969, at the age of a hundred and one.
Even in the early sixties she and Mother kept in touch with each other through letters.
However, what interests us most is that upon landing in India Alexandra went almost immediately to Pondicherry to meet Sri Aurobindo on the recommendation of her friends the Richards. Even decades later, she was to recall that "beautiful memory."
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Source:Mother's Chronicles > Alexandra David-Néel
Reminiscences of Alexandra David-Néel
"The room where we met contained only a table and two chairs that faced each other, on either side of the table. Sri Aurobindo was sitting in one of the chairs, his back to a wide-open window. Nothing could be seen through the window, neither building nor tree. The vast green sky of India filled it entirely like a screen on which the outline of the guru was traced. Was it a deliberately planned effect? I cannot say for sure that it was…"
"While Sri Aurobindo spoke with me, four young men stood by a corner of the table. Their attitude of adoration and ecstasy was extraordinary. Tall, robust, immobile, their eyes fixed on their master, they resembled a group of statues."
"At one point, wishing to ask Sri Aurobindo certain personal questions, I felt I would like to be alone with him. I don’t know whether he read my thoughts or whether he felt the same way as I, but all at once, without his having said a word or made a gesture, all four disciples trooped out in a single movement, stiff, silent, like robots drawn by invisible wires."
Adyar-Madras, 27 November 1911
In the evening I had a conversation with a Hindu about whom I may have never spoken to you, since I have not been in correspondence with him, but know him only through the good opinion of friends. I spent two wonderful hours reviewing the ancient philosophical ideas of India with a man of rare intelligence. He belongs to that uncommon category that I so much admire, the reasonable mystics. I am truly grateful to the friends who advised me to visit this man. He thinks with such clarity, there is such lucidness in his reasoning, such lustre in his eyes, that he leaves one with the impression of having contemplated the genius of India such as one dreams it to be after reading the noblest pages of Hindu philosophy.
Adyar, Madras, 19 December 1911
"…One of these days I’m going to write to that Hindu of Pondicherry I mentioned earlier. He has a keen power of analysis, and a critical turn of mind… Calling his attention to the experiments he himself is conducting with careful and meticulous control, I will ask him: “Am I entering samadhi, am I really touching Nirvana, or is it just fatigue, or perhaps my sensations are being dulled by age? … Are my indifference, my beatitude, of a transcendental kind, or is it only torpor, the beginning of my decline?” … I imagine that the question will make him laugh, as he laughed so sweetly the day I told him, in regard to something similar: “One reaches a point where one no longer knows whether one is becoming prodigiously wise, or taking leave of one’s senses…"
[Calcutta on 14 February 1912]
…This morning I went to Government House. I am going to be given a set of letters of introduction and recommendations which will continue to facilitate access to many things and many people. Of course it was known, here too, that I had been to Pondicherry and seen Aurobindo Ghose. I had no idea he was such an important man. If I had known, I would have tried to make him speak on politics to see what sort of political ideas would germinate in the brain of a Vedantic mystic. But though I knew he had been involved in a political trial, I did not know the precise reason. This morning the private secretary to the Viceroy told me, “I think he considers our civilisation, our education and all our modern progress to be godless, and therefore condemns them.” This may very well be. Hindus look at the world from a different angle than we do. If our interview had not been limited to a few hours at twilight. In the monastic house in Pondicherry, I might have picked his brain and discovered where the cracks in our Western materialistic civilisation lie…But it may be that I owe a beautiful memory to my being insufficiently informed about him—false and illusory, no doubt, like most beautiful memories: the vast empty room, the window open on the mauve sky of the evening, and Aurobindo Ghose and I speaking of the supreme Brahman, the eternal existence, and for a moment crossing the threshold of the Beyond, where life and death cease, and living the dream of the Upanishads…
Source:[English translations of extracts & letters from] L'Inde où j'ai vécu & Journal de voyage: lettres à son mariby Alexandra David-Néel
Also read Mother's Chronicles > Two Beautiful Hours
More references to Alexandra David-Néel >>
By Georges van Vrekhem
In the meantime Mirra came to be on friendly terms with an extraordinary woman, Alexandra David-Néel. She may have met her for the first time when Madame David-Néel was giving a talk on Buddhism at the Guimet Museum, a place that crops up time and again in the lives of the Westerners who played a part in the discovery of the East. ‘The Paris of the fin de siècle discovers Asia in the footsteps of the Goncourt Brothers who were the very first to give the starting signal for the run on Japanese prints, Buddhas in jade, silk fans embroidered with melancholic sunsets seen through branches of blossoming plum trees … And in Paris, Asia had its temple: the Guimet Museum.’ 19 This museum was familiar to Mirra. She had visited it many times, and, even when still a little girl, had had an unexpected contact with one of the mummies there and with certain artefacts used by Egyptian royalty.
Mirra had already been practising Buddhism in the minister’s box at the opera. This time, while listening to Madame David-Néel, who was a convinced and practising Buddhist, she saw the Buddha present near the speaker, ‘not above the head but a little to the side.’ When the talk was over and Mirra told Madame David-Néel about her vision, she received the indignant repartee that such a thing was impossible because the Buddha had gone to Nirvana. All the same, both ladies came to respect each other’s qualities and soon were friends.
Alexandra David-Néel was born near Paris in 1868. Her father, Louis David, was a friend of Victor Hugo and he too, just like the great writer, had been banished for his anti-government stance. As a consequence Alexandra grew up in Brussels, educated by a bigoted mother and in sanctimonious nuns’ schools. In revolt against such stifling surroundings, she became an anti-conformist and an ascetic, an inborn trait that made it impossible to punish her in any way. She also seemed driven by an urge to depart for faraway places and went on several escapades, but each time she had to return home for lack of money.
In 1888, when old enough to go her own way, we find her in the London which Max Théon and Alma had recently left. There Alexandra became a member of the rapidly expanding Theosophical Society, the movement that opened up the eastern religion to the West. A year later she studied Sanskrit in Paris with professors from the Collège de France. She also improved her knowledge of English, took music and singing lessons, and inevitably discovered the Guimet Museum, where she often prostrated herself in front of the Buddha statues, so that the place became really a kind of a temple to her. She read extensively in the religious literature of the East, deepened her knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita, the Rig Veda, the Dhammapada and other essential texts, and discovered her vocation as an orientalist and a Buddhist. Her biographer, Jean Chalon, points out: ‘For Alexandra Buddhism was not a religion but a philosophy.’
In 1892 she travelled to Ceylon and visited Colombo, then Madurai, Benares and Darjeeling on the subcontinent. As a member of the Theosophical Society she had no trouble finding friends and shelter. And she always saw to it that her handbag was stuffed with letters of recommendation from well-known or highly-placed people.
Then Alexandra’s life took an astonishing turn, for we next find her at the Hanoi Opera, in what was then still called Indochina, where in 1895 she became the première chanteuse under the pseudonym Alexandra Myrial! In 1897 she sang in Paris, but without the success she had hoped for, two years later at the Athens Opera, and, at the turn of the century, at the Tunis Opera. Of this last Opera she became the manager and married a railway engineer, Philippe Néel, of British origin. But Alexandra was also an ardent feminist and would never allow the shackles of marriage to press too deeply into her flesh, although we owe to that relationship many interesting letters addressed to her dear, generous ‘Mouchy,’ as she called her husband.
The very intelligent Alexandra, now Madame David-Néel, was also active as a journalist and gave talks about all new and progressive topics: socialism, feminism, eastern religions in general and Buddhism in particular. And this was how Mirra met her. For a while they saw each other almost every day, sat together for ‘philosophical meditations,’ and went for walks in the Bois de Boulogne, where some of the first aeroplanes, grasshopper-like, rose with sputtering engines a few feet into the air and landed – in most cases – less elegantly than the way the ladies and gentlemen sat down on the grass to admire them.
There are frequent short notes in Alexandra’s diary concerning her friendship with Mirra, of the kind ‘dinner with the Richards’ or, on 1 January 1911: ‘Started the year in a session of philosophical meditation at the Richards.’ Although a ‘philosophical’ Buddhist and therefore logically an atheist, Alexandra was also interested in occultism. Putting some of her reading and travelling experiences together, she had by mental formation tried to create a ‘mahatma’ – mahatmas91 were ‘in’ at the time – and succeeded in doing so. But then her mahatma never left her alone and became such a botheration to Alexandra that she tried to get rid of him by all possible means, though in vain. Finally, she had to confide in Mirra, the occult expert, and received the necessary advice to reabsorb into herself the mental formation which the troublesome mahatma was.
‘Madame David-Néel was an intense woman and capable of profound meditation,’ said the Mother. And she gave an example. On her journey to the north of the Indian subcontinent, while her bearers were setting up camp, Alexandra went for a walk and became absorbed in meditation. Later on, returning to her surface consciousness, she found that she had strayed a long way from the camp and began to walk back – until she stood in front of a river. As the camp was definitely on the other side of it, she could only conclude, to her astonishment, that she must have crossed it while in concentration and unaware of her surroundings. She must have walked on water.
Another anecdote the Mother heard from Alexandra was of how one day she was sitting in meditation in front of a tree. When she opened her eyes she thought at first, probably because of the sunlight sifting through the trees, that she saw a heap of dry leaves. Then she thought that a zebra (!) was standing in front of her. But when her eyes adapted to the light she saw, at a short distance, a tiger of a respectable size fixing his interested gaze on her. As a true Buddhist, she distanced herself from everything life represented and withdrew within, ready for any eventuality. When after some time nothing happened, she opened her eyes again and saw that the tiger was gone. (Jean Chalon, showing an uncommonly penetrating insight into tiger psychology, writes: ‘Vexed for having been taken for a heap of dead leaves and for a zebra, traumatized by the profound immobility of the woman he thought would be a tasty prey, the tiger fled to hide his shame deep in the jungle.’)
Madame David-Néel would write in her book L’Inde où j’ai vécu (the India where I have lived): ‘I have the best possible memories of the evenings spent with her [Mirra] in the small house she inhabited in the Rue du Val-de-Grâce in Paris, and of the walks together in the Bois de Boulogne. Neither she nor I myself could at that time have imagined the place she occupies today.’ And she would characterize Mirra as ‘a woman of distinction, an intellectual of a mystic tendency, of Levantine origin and French education.’ And Jean Chalon comments: ‘It stirs the imagination, that tête-a-tête of the future Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the future amazon of the Himalayas on the first day of 1911.’ 20
For Madame David-Néel had still a long way to go. In that very same year she left on a journey from which she would only return in 1925. In November she met Aurobindo Ghose in Pondicherry. On 10 or 11 January she met with the tiger which fled so shamefully into the jungle of Kapilavasthu, Nepal. In 1914 she engaged a young Sikkimese lama, renamed him Albert’ and kept him with her for the rest of his life. Tibet was a forbidden territory and closely watched. Frustrated in her effort to reach Lhasa – for the time being, that is – she turned her back on it and travelled via Rangoon to Japan, which she hated intensely.
Then she journeyed on via Korea to China, was caught there in the civil war, and spent the first several months in the lama monastery of Kum-Bum, then three years in the deserts of Szechwan. At last she entered Lhasa, in January 1924. She thought nobody had noticed that a foreign national had entered the forbidden territory and its holy capital, for she spoke the language like a Tibetan and had disguised herself well. Nonetheless she had given herself away, for a spy found it suspect that she took a bath, and not only once but every day. Luckily, the official to whom he reported this bizarre fact paid no attention to it, maybe because he found it too incredible to be true.
After an absence of fourteen years she met ‘Mouchy’ again; he had faithfully sent her the money which had enabled her to make that fantastic journey. Madame David-Néel became a celebrity. She had a house built in Digne, in the south of France, and went to live there with Albert. The house was called ‘Samten Dzong,’ meaning ‘Fortress of Meditation’ in Tibetan. But she still dreamed of journeying beyond the horizon, and again went to China, where she had to remain from 1937 till 1944, trapped by the Second World War. She wrote several books, all of which are still being reprinted and read to the present day. Madame David-Néel died in her Fortress of Meditation in 1969, a full century old.
Source:'The Mother - The Story of Her Life'By Georges van Vrekhem
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