More on Buddhist Paris

Who knew that Claude Monet meant his Waterlilies series to be a Dharma experience? But that's what L'Orangerie's handout guide essentially says.

Monet created these masterworks specifically to give Parisians frazzled by the First World War a chance to regain calm. And perspective. He was "inviting them to contemplate the infinite," the handout guide says.

The entry is through a blank white corridor designed by Monet to be a "decompression space" between agitation and peace. It ends in a large gallery with four enormous canvases full of waterlilies and their stagnant pond. "...this room," Monet wrote in 1909 when he was searching for a way to express the ineffable, "would offer asylum for peaceful meditation...."

And the eight canvases spread out over two enormous galleries--what the guide calls "the culmination of an entire life"are all about meditation. "Monet represents neither the horizon, nor the top or bottom. The elements--water,sky,earth--become intertwined in a composition without perspective... . The painter thus gives 'the illusion of an endless whole... .'"

I take it that the huge stagnant pond can be Samsara. And of course the waterlily is the Western lotus rising out of it. Clarity, cloudiness, darkness are all there in natural phases.

The Waterlilies Gallery at L'Orangerie was a magical place to meditate.

Svaha!