Chapter Four Inventing the Concept of Celtic Buddhism: a Literary and Intellectual Tradition John L. Murphy Abstract This article examines mythical musings and scholarly arguments over whether Buddhism had entered ancient Ireland. Romantic-era antiquarians proposed that Buddhist missionaries transmitted the dharma to the "Western Isles"; Yeats and Joyce incorporated traces of Buddhist dispersion into their Irish responses. Archaeologists debated evidence from the Gundestrup cauldron which kindled the imagination of a few New Age pioneers. Later last century, countercultural dispersion of Buddhism settled into communal experiments creolising Tibetan approaches to dharma with Celtic influences. The blend of Buddhist spirituality and Celtic aesthetics further enriches Michel Houllebecq's The Elementary Particles as its protagonist taps into these cross-cultural energies. Introduction Answering his second autobiography's title, What the Curlew Said, the late John Moriarty (2007, 74) 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." This essay investigates the mythical 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. What simmers within a blend of decidedly arcane inventions and far-fetched arguments about any historical or constructed Buddhist presence in Celtic Ireland conjures up the ingredients of mythmaking mingling with the necessities for fact-checking. The countercultural movement hit Ireland more in the early-to-mid 1970s than the late 60s elsewhere in Western Europe and North America (Murphy 2008, 133-4). Only in 1977 did a Buddhist community begin in Dublin. Earlier, Buddhism's few Irish practitioners, native or immigrant, tended towards less eclectic, if perhaps inevitably idiosyncratic, incorporations of the dharma ("the eternal truth that Buddha realized, his verbal expression of that truth, and the phenomena or elements that comprise reality" - Trainor 2004, 238). While the presence of actual Buddhists in Ireland until very recently has been sparse, as Laurence Cox and Maria Griffin discuss (2009 and in this volume), an earlier countercultural undercurrent sifting eclectic, alternative beliefs may have lingered. Long before Buddhists came to Ireland, a handful of Irish wondered about Buddhism. Nearly two centuries ago, glimmers of how the Buddha lived within a real India began to emerge. Caught up in a Romantic quest to forge Indo-European connections, a Celtic search for origins widened (if by a doubtful detour) to take in the Buddhist presence, not as legend, but as chronicle. Erin wondered if it shared distant family ties with Aryan. Celtic languages became reacquainted, introduced by linguists such as William Jones, with Sanskrit and ancient India (Allen 2002; Almond 1988; Lennon 2004). Cox Email message to author, 29 June 2010. speculates how within Irish culture, "such a sensibility exists in Ireland in relation to Celtic myth in particular - at times in an oppositional form, whether that of oral tradition, hedge schoolmasters and Romantic opponents of established religion, at times in a thoroughly orthodox form, as transmitted by Anglo-Irish folklorists and later the national schools and processes of canonising the island's literary and archaeological 'heritage.' " Dharma practice did not yet exist, but a reception by Hibernophiles, antiquarians, and storytellers of classical, Mediterranean, and Asiatic motifs may have prepared the way for transmission of "pagan" messages, long before the arrival of Buddhists. Pro-Celtic proponents favoured an eastward tilt towards sources of wisdom hidden from London, Rome, or the rest of Europe. The urge to uncover truth beneath the surface of the Irish soil, within the Gaelic font flowing through redacted manuscripts and revived tale-tellers, mesmerised the Irish mentality away from the mainstream channels. The search for esoteric inspiration--linking Druidic speculation to Indic exploration--lured a few Romantic-era investigators, over two centuries ago, to burrow into the archaeological and historical evidence. 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 validation" 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 nineteenth century 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. (1894, 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 inspire New Age followers. In Irish we read of the Danaan King, Budh the red; of the Hill of Budh, Cnoc 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? (1894, 273) Bonwick's question would be insistently answered in the negative by scholars in the twentieth century. He himself admitted doubt (1894: 153). His inquiry, nonetheless, energised occult Theosophist and neo-pagan suppositions. Conventional scholarship denies New Age suggestions. Yet, works such as Bonwick's continue to be cited by esoterically aligned syncretists and Druidic reconstructionists outside the academy. Bonwick's suppositions find supporters today on the Net. For example, "Buddhists and Druids in pre-Christian Britain and Ireland" http://www.aboutulverston.co.uk/celts/druids.htm originates from Ulverston, Cumbria. Near early medieval and Quaker sites, there rises the Manjushri shrine as the British centre of New Kadampa Tradition, a "new religious movement" affiliated with the Tibetan Buddhist Dorjé Shugden cult which has rapidly expanded in the West. About Ulverston website makes a pithy comparison from scant evidence. It assembles items that resemble each other and creates a causal chain which finds hints of transmission from East to West in the non-essentialist "process" philosophy of John Scotus Eriugena, an assertion of Caesar, missionaries from India's King Ashoka, and "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. The Gundestrup cauldron depicts, a few maverick interpreters 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. All this depends on considerable conjecture. Before an in-depth analysis of the cauldron's importance for any purported Celtic-Buddhist connection, I will review the hundred years before its 1891 Danish 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 (1834) 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 2005, 109-110; Murphy 2007, 4). 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 (cited by Waddell 2005, 110) 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." Joop Leersen (1996) 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. Yet, the modern Dutch academic who corrects that Trinity graduate may reveal their common quest: how far can one convincingly trace Indo into European? Leersen benefits from science that O'Brien lacked. 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. Recent assertions, it should be clarified, often rely not on coincidence but scholarship that linguists and archaeologists have gathered since the round tower debates. While 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 a historiographic pattern. This centripetal relegation of once-entertained ideas to the fringe endures electronically long after Petrie sent O'Brien to his early grave. Prolonged disputes separated scientists from speculative inquiry into the predecessors from the East who may have contacted their descendents far off in the West. This shift from the physical to the ethereal generated late-nineteenth century Theosophy. Pivoting next, Theosophists explored and 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, Joyce & Theosophy The Irish impact of Yeats, James Stephens, and "AE" (George Russell) upon such an endeavour reverberates (Guinness 2004; Lennon 2004). By the 1890s, Yeats outgrew Theosophy but took a New Age attraction into the Order of the Golden Dawn and then over a long career of his own intricate mythology. His mature writings incorporate Hindu and Japanese influences much more than Buddhism. Scattered references can be gleaned from his essays, memoirs, and one poem, but Buddhist attention in his belletristic work appears more anodyne than enlightening. However, "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" (1989, 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 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. One reference suggests cross-cultural "hidden meanings." In the 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 Celt by Saxon: "had they not lived in Asia until the Battle of the Boyne?" (1926, 133-4; 1962, 401; Rickard 1997, 99) Only with anglicisation did their Eastern roots wither. 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 Gotthold 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. As for Joyce, given his immersion into so much East as West, Oriental imagery flourishes. Like Yeats, he purchased titles on Theosophy; Joyce studied Eastern mysticism. In 1903, he reviewed as "A Suave Philosophy" Harold Fielding-Hall's The Soul of a People, an exposition of Burmese civilised courtesies (1989, 93-95; 2000, 67-68, 303). Still, Joyce's fictional treatments of Buddhism tally scarce. Dharma's Irish promoters were few, whether among Theosophical Dublin peers or Ireland's denominated adherents. The latter's comprehension of Buddhism, if Leopold Bloom can serve as an indicator of the average man on Westland Row in the time of "AE" 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 (1986, U 5.325-9). 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 1899 Abbey Theatre début of Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, Stephen recalls the "catcalls and hisses and mocking cries" that rose "from his scattered fellow students." The last of seven: "We want no budding Buddhists" (2007, 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 catcall, 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 by 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 abandoned (1904-06) novel Stephen Hero (1963, 190) assumed of a woman in a black straw hat that she "has never heard of the name of Buddha", 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 (1995, 63) 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. The Japanese Joycean scholar Eishiro Ito (2003) delves into Joyce's sympathies with Buddhism. Ito pinpoints Joyce's composition of the Stephen Hero episode mentioned above to June 1905. He notes Joyce's conversation with Stuart Gilbert directing him towards Alfred Percy Sinnett's works on Buddhism. Ito follows biographer Richard Ellmann back to Joyce's dating in May 1901 of his copy of Henry Steele Olcott's 1881 A Buddhist Catechism. Colonel Olcott, along with Madame Helena Blavatsky, converted to Buddhism in Sri Lanka a year before he published his catechism. They were the first modern Westerners 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 (1959, vii-viii). Extrapolating from allusions within Ulysses based on Blavatsky's 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." Esoteric 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 Olcott, 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" (quoted by Fields 1992, 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 globalising dharma takes, practitioners usually integrate disparate influences, whether within the many Buddhist precedents or from dominant religious practices or psychological models. 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—by himself or through his characters—the dharma, and its connection with the Buddha. 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 how this angle of repose denotes that the Buddha attained nirvana after eating a donated but poisoned pork dish. 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 tangles 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" (1986, 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 interprets Molly's assumption that Buddhism outnumbered not only Jewish but Christian adherents 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 (Cunliffe 2008, 20) 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 pushed its own expansionist model backwards into how its subjects understood their own prehistory. Victorians and Edwardians promoted 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 for European enlightenment and origins. Bloom and Molly, Stephen Hero 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 diffusions 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 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 these 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, while researching Sanskrit and Indo-European cognates: he privately consulted Vallancey. After the 1891 discovery in a Jutland bog of the Gundestrup cauldron depicting a sitting male in what Donald MacKenzie deduced was the identical pose assumed by a yogi, he elaborated his argument. The engraved Celtic trophy, he announced in 1928's Buddhism in Pre-Christian Britain, offered proof that the dharma had spread from East to West. He relied on comparative studies; he merged Cernunnos with the Hindu and Buddhist deity Virupaksha, and he suggested that Celtic realms represented "Isles of the Blest." MacKenzie recalls the surmises of Francis Wilford, the third Briton to learn Sanskrit. In 1805 Wilford imagined his homeland as Buddhist and Brahmin "Sacred Isles of the West" (Almond 1998, 15; O'Halloran 2004, 50). Wilford (cited by Allen 2002, 65-67) assumed a "White Island" where "Stonehenge is evidently one of the temples of Boodh," for not until the 1840s did his successors distinguish the historical Buddha from Hindu contemporaries. As for slightly more probable Druid-Buddhist contact, MacKenzie suggests Galatian settlements in Asia Minor where Buddhist teachers and pilgrims from India and Parthia could have proselytized among Celts (1928, xix). As well as the Attic export from Greece by Roman 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 this diffusionist argument upon Kentigern, Glasgow's patron saint, as an oak-garlanded, horned-crowned tutelary deity appropriated from Druids. The Gundestrup cauldron strengthens his British-Buddhist bond. Upon the similarity of a cross-legged figure with yogic practice, 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 (1928, 42-45). MacKenzie explains, and this corresponds to later scholars' vaguer notion of a "Buddha-like pose," (Ellis 1994; Rutherford 1993, 85; 1995, 84) that the horned figure cannot be equated with the historical Shakyamuni Buddha. MacKenzie's reasoning appears muddled, but he applies a pre-Buddhist concept of cardinal points which influenced Siddhartha Gautama. Those converted by Parthian Buddhists, the Chinese, swayed 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 1992, 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 1994, 9). MacKenzie (1928, 50) hazards 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." 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 (Collis 2003, 184). Not that contemporary interpreters accept MacKenzie's claims for the cauldron as a Buddhist iconographic discovery, but an elongated resemblance back to Indic and trans-Asiatic features may endure. It "shows archaic Greek and Oriental influence," Myles Dillon and Nora Chadwick (1967, 26) claimed. Elephants and dolphins may decorate its panels. A Transdanubian hypothesis for the trophy's manufacture may move the cauldron closer to the Asian exposure towards which MacKenzie fancifully sought to edge Druidism. Dillon highlighted an easterly perspective: "The general resemblance between the Cernunnos panel and the Mohenjodaro seal (now in the New Delhi Museum) is such that one can hardly doubt their common origin" (as quoted by Ellis 1994, 123-4). Timothy Taylor, an art historian specialising in the Thracian-Dacian milieu, revived claims of an Indic connection for the cauldron. He refines an 1895 hypothesis that the cauldron originated from the Altaic region; Taylor (1992, 86) locates the trail of its influences along a four-thousand-mile route from Northern India to the Balkans. 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 (1995a, 165) admits "oriental influences are undoubtedly present," if overshadowed by the Celtic imagery. Garrett Olmsted (1976) opined that the cauldron anticipated the narrative of the Táin Bó Cuailnge ("The Cattle Raid of Cooley") but this counterargument has not convinced most within the academy. Even the cauldron's "Celtic" elements elude verification. More tendentious yogic, and by extension Hindu or Buddhist, identification for the horned figure depends on the context within which his nimble posture can be understood. Green suggests a simpler reason for the horned figure's sitting stance. Diodorus and Athenaeus (first century BCE) 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 context most Celticists accept for the horned man's depiction (Green 1986, 195-7; Green 1992, 60-61, 109; MacCana 1970, 44-47). However, scholars struggle to comprehend how Celts commemorated Cernunnos (Bober 1951; Green 1995b, 475, 480; Hutton 1991, 217; MacKillop 2005, 19). Perhaps the cauldron engraves him as a shaman in a lotus position, with antlers affixed to his head. (Taylor later claimed that Cernunnos as "the Celtic translation of Indian tantric practice" devolved into the Devil of Christian iconography, macrophallically distended with his horns extended, as a consort of witches - as cited in Ryan & Jethá 2010, 341 n.8; see also Kelly 1964, 203-05; Ross 1986, 126; Russell 1984, 63, 70; Stanford 1996, 96-97.) Lacking knowledge of how the cauldron, its plates found dismantled in a Danish marsh, was meant to be assembled, scholars face challenges (Davidson 1993, 25-31). Taylor (1992) conjectures 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 (Glob 1969, 178; Murphy 2009, 16). Clearly, the mix of Celtic with non-Celtic motifs remains a feature of the Gundestrup cauldron that, absent of comparative parallels, puzzles experts. Origen, Druids, Buddhists Certainly, many speculations remain that archaeology alone cannot verify. MacKenzie's citation of a single verse begins his study; upon it he supports his book. A single sentence from 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 mid-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" (cited in MacKenzie 1928, v). Daisaku Ikeda, former president of the 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]" (cited in Ikeda 1977, 69). Missionary endeavours of Soka Gakkai seek an attenuated precedent. Imagination hints what we cannot prove. Origen's theology with its notions of apocastasis--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; cited in Batchelor 1994, 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 (Cox and Griffin 2009, 96). That we find within what survives of his writings extant a challenging array of opinions that we may never wholly comprehend cannot be blamed on their author. 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. Buddhism Settles in Ireland Laurence Cox and Maria Griffin's article in this volume enlivens historical and sociological aspects of Irish Buddhism. Its first established sangha, or community, Samyedzong, came to Dublin in 1977 (Cox & Griffin 2009, 108). While Samyedzong's newsletter The Well (1995-99) emphasised dharma, a few articles addressed Celtic and Irish connections. The healing spring near the centre, once the place for celebration on Midsummer's Eve, now represented a place for renewal. The ancient bronze bell excavated there was copied to hang by the well-waters of patron St. John the Baptist, whose feast is June 24th; venerable symbols of Christian monastic bell and Tibetan dorjé striker unify two holy practices. Bríona NicDhiarmada (1996, 6) compared the fundamental concepts of Sanskrit Sukhā-duḥkhā with Irish cognates sochar-dochar. She examined how "good-space/bad-space" revealed Indo-European kinship. Pairings elucidate this etymology better than "relying only on the English words pleasure and pain." I will elaborate. These terms refer to the "bliss or joy" opposed to the "uneasiness or dissatisfaction" that Buddhism strives to make a practitioner aware of, to confront, to comprehend. The historical Buddha urged his listeners to learn the "Noble Truths" of duḥkhā so as to free themselves from the spell of the transitory and the impermanent. This quest impels the unsettled seeker to recognize illusion, to overcome the limits of even these verbal and conceptual dichotomies. Reflection, for any sangha, therefore becomes imperative. She wrote of starting a retreat, Tearmann Milarepa, in the Barrow Valley, where cross-channel ties between Ulster, Holy Island, and Leighlin could create Molaise Centre for inter-faith dialogue, peacemaking, and post-Good Friday Agreement reconciliation. A fresh, non-Christian, and non-sectarian approach embodied "our own 'otherness' " for pluralist, tolerant, and accommodating welcome. "We feel that as a religious minority, and one with no historical baggage within Irish society, we can challenge ideas of 'us' and 'them' or 'us' and 'other', " NicDhiarmada (O'Neill 1998, 17) explained. That same year, 1998, Ireland's president Mary McAleese visited Samyedzong. She praised its joining of traditions; its site near Kilmainham Well connects a modern Buddhist with a mediaeval Celtic sanctuary, near a monastic foundation of St. Maighnean (ca. 600). Inventing "Celtic Buddhism" Kagyu Samyé Dzong's Scottish motherhouse in turn runs a retreat centre on Holy Island, home to St. Molaise, Maighnean's comrade. Samyé Ling in Dumfriesshire, at Eskdalemuir, was co-founded in 1967 by Tibetan refugee lamas Akong Rinpoche and Chögyam Trungpa. Trungpa has been credited with urging his butler for eight years, John Riley Perks, to link Celtic culture with Buddhist spirituality. Trungpa advocated that a non-Buddhist culture needed to pierce its own familiarity 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 misled a Westerner not to recognize one's hidden nature - the illusory reality of one's underlying cultural biases - might be attained by blending Eastern discipline with Western imagery. The Celtic Buddhism.org 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" (Burns 2010a). Another member, Thom Kilts, shares his own frustration with pretension and privilege indulged in by many Western Buddhists, the confounding 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 (2008) teaches how "the Buddha confirms the lineage of Celtic Buddhism as a lineage rooted and interlaced with the earth." 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 (2004, 3) identifies in his autobiographical account his mother as "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. 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. He sought alongside many "new Buddhists" (J. Coleman 2001, 208) resolution for "some kind of nagging spiritual dissatisfaction." 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 in 1970. Perks accompanied Trungpa as valet of his liveried Shambhala entourage during many of his peregrinations during the Age of Aquarius and at Colorado's Naropa Institute, where Trungpa's "crazy wisdom" version of inculcating the dharma earned him notoriety. In 1989, after years of being nagged by Chögyam Trungpa, Perks (2004, 213) "registered the name Celtic Buddhism as a nonprofit organization." Soon he called himself "the Venerable Seonaidh, which is Gaelic for Johnny," began to give talks, and met others intrigued by the juxtaposition that he embodied. A Celtic Buddhist community began with Perks at a Nova Scotia inn, then a Letterkenny retreat - shared with the Irish College of Druids - and now a Vermont foundation, AnaDaire. There Glen Ard Abbey (2010) combines "the models set forth by the early Christian monks, the Franciscans, the Desert Fathers, and early Zen and Tibetan monasticism." Perks names himself as the transmitter of Buddhism's "youngest lineage," christened in honor of Chögyam Trungpa's unorthodox example as "Crazy Heart." A lineage links "an unbroken line of successive teachers through which the Buddhist teachings are transmitted" (G. Coleman 2006, 483). A Tibetan lineage parallels an episcopal line of succession. It enables Perks, once confirmed by Trungpa, in to train and ordain lineage holders within this branch of the sangha, or community of practitioners. The legitimacy of Perks' claim, Tibetologist Burkhard Scherer (2010) Scherer, Burkhard. "Re: inventing Celtic Buddhism", e-mail to author, 21 February, 2010. avers, may be in doubt. "There is no indication that Trungpa or any Tibetan master with traditional claim to realisation has recognised Perks as liberated or enlightened; Perks' claim of spiritual authority stems solely from himself. In the Indo-Tibetan tradition, realisation and lineage holdership are always (and most of the time in multifold form) endorsed by other senior Tibetan masters." Scherer discerns how Perks' "transmission story is vague," lacking evidence of Trungpa's formal "empowerment." Given the narrative Perks provides, Scherer reasons that Trungpa did not teach "such New Age creolisation" as a formal teaching upon which a lineage could be claimed as a "realisation." Yet, in the spirit of crazy gurus and maverick monks, textbook definitions do not match what "Celtic Buddhism" becomes in Perks' conception. As the Venerable Seonaidh (1998, 303), Perks quoted how Trungpa told him of the founding of his own Tibetan lineage centuries before: "Well, there were three idiots sitting by the bank of the river and one of them started the lineage. Why don't you try starting a lineage, Johnny? You're an idiot too." This Buddhist blend affirms eclecticism. Its syncretism may resemble Celtic Christianity within Irish Druidry today: eco-spirituality, sexual inclusion, and accommodation with folk traditions (Butler 2005, 99). These "lineage holders" at AnaDaire assert hybridity. Glen Ard blends Franciscan-influenced nature mysticism with Celtic paganism and eco-feminism. "Celtic Buddhism" integrates shamanism with meditation. It mixes Tibetan methods with Vipassana approaches chosen by many Westerners for their psychotherapeutic affinity. Prajnaparamita, the Heart Sutra teaching the indivisibility of form and emptiness, remains their core text for practice (Perks 2004, 215). A brief comparison with the rituals adapted by Dublin's branch of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) illuminates this cultural spiral. Lorcan McMenamin (1993: 30-31) translated the Heart Sutra into Sutra An Chroí amidst medieval Celtic imagery and lettering gracing A Puja Book. This incorporated an Irish tone, with an introductory talk by Dharmachari Sanghapala that substituted more encouragement - regarding, say, flowers, candles and incense in worship - versus elements in the "standard puja book." The former version of this FWBO ritual threw "about the language of evil, suffering, worship, and other things that might be counterproductive for people coming from an Irish Catholic upbringing." Laurence Cox's (2009) Cox, Laurence. "FWBO Puja", e-mail message to author, 16 June, 2009. remarks on impacts of Asian-exported models upon "convert" Buddhists supplement his contributions with Maria Griffin (2009), extended into the present volume. Envisioning "Celtic Buddhism" Perks (2004) narrates his visualizations during a "deity yoga" meditation. These exercises--in which the practitioner summons up revered figures to contemplate and confront as emanations ultimately derived from within rather than above--combine Celtic energies with Buddha-fields. Perks 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 that take the soul in transition to either rebirth or liberation during one's afterlife. Perks admits that these Celtic visions emanate as "another cultural aspect" connected to Tibetan, African, and Asian representations. He does not pinpoint where the two concepts of "Celt" and "Buddha" will meet. Perks (2004, 216) concludes his autobiography with the admission: "Personally, I have no fixed or clear idea about how Celtic Buddhism will finally manifest." Speaking as the Venerable Seonaidh (1998, 305), Perks ties this "Crazy Heart lineage" to Wiccan-influenced nature spirituality. "The Celtic Buddhist is in love, without attachment, to the environment." This lineage dismisses historical verification as the only validation of ultimate meaning. Venerable Seonaidh (1998, 301-2) adapts as its motto a fundamental Buddhist doctrine of impermanence: "Nothing whatever should be clung to." For Perks' associate, Bill Burns, the painted thangka - a Tibetan scroll tapestry - conveys the visual emergence of the empowerment meditations described by Trungpa's new protégé, or dharma-heir. Burns (2010b) proposes that "the combination of the open approach of Buddhism and the existing mandala of Celticism mixed together is Celtic Buddhism." 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." Burns (2010b) 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 sacred space, a mandala reifies the practitioner's personal archetypes. This tantric concentric, circular "cosmic diagram" (Trainor 2004, 239) invites an adept to visualize celestial deities and symbols as penetrated and encompassed by "the perfected state of the meditator's own awareness" (J. Coleman 2006, 487). Circle frames 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. Depicted on the Celtic Buddhism.org website, Burns (2010b) incorporates a mandala centrepiece of a blond Buddha on the lotus seat - with Cernunnos as deer, the Cailleach as wise-woman healer, and Blodeuwedd as flower-faced Welsh beauty - into a Book of Kells-patterned array of Tibetan icons. The Buddha is based on the Kells incipit, the lettered start of the gospel of St. Matthew. Their tree-of-life motif interweaves Himalayan and Hibernian traditions. For Perks (2004, 134), 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 (1992, 89) conclusion. He places the Gundestrup treasure within the magical tradition akin to Siberian shamanism and tantric yoga. He suggests 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." 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. (Atomised is its British title.) 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 as 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" (Houllebecq 1998, 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 (Houllebecq 1998, 250-1). 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" (Houllebecq 1998, 252-3). 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" (Houllebecq 1998, 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" (Houllebecq 1998, 258). Conclusion 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--alongside 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 (2005, 74) poses as a koan, a Zen riddle. Why has the dharma come to Ireland? "In the true spirit of Zen, one might answer 'Galway Bay' or 'the Rock of Cashel.' " 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 may come to pass over a century later for today's Irish, dissatisfied with Christian conformity and secularised consumerism. Exactly two centuries separate Francis Wilford'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 genetic miracle immortality for those who remain behind. The missing link between a factual "Celtic" tie with historical "Buddhism" contorts academic reasoning (Murphy 2010). Yet, for a fictional French scientist in Galway or a faction of Celtic practitioners in Vermont, the bond between the two terms remains perhaps as insubstantial and inviting as the elusive story told on the Gundestrup cauldron. There any factual solution retreats. It illustrates where storytelling returns to enrich our spirit's search for meaning. PAGE 2