An Account Of Travels To And Beyond The Buddha's Brain

Dirty South, Pt. 2, as transcribed by Konstantinos Mecheliarches, Anachronarch of Crete

"Konstantinos, will you be my scribe?"

"If that is how you wish my debt shall be repaid..."

"Indeed it is, for I have a tale of faraway lands, of marvels and tragedies and comedies such as you have never heard, and it falls upon us with the grave force of destiny that it should be recorded for all to see. You shall honor your debt by transferring my words onto the finest vellum, that which we call cyberneticus, and post it on the church-doors of St. Googliades' and St. Yahoo's.

"I should have thought the liberties you took with my daughter would be enough..."

"And perhaps they would be if your talents with the quill were even close to matched by her deficient talents with... begin writing or I shall elaborate."

In the year of our Lord, 2010, that is to say 7519 years since the Creation of the Earth, Ghostface Buddha-

"Begin again."

In the year of our Lord, 2010, that is to say 7519 years since the Creation of the Earth, the merciful, wise, and magnanimous Ghostface Buddha was stranded on the distant isle of Ceylon. As the annals show, Ghostface was at one time moving westwards along the southern coast, and did not find it entirely worthy of his attentions-

"Bunch of fish-eating fishfuckers."

-"A land of unlettered fishermen", he proclaimed. Nevertheless, finding himself in Tangalla he sought to amuse himself by visiting the laugh-worthy temple of Wewerukannala.

Arrivi-
Arriving at-

In fact he did no such thing, for the most interesting bit goes at the end , which a scribe would know if a scribe weren't such a bloody Byzantine cockup of a human being and didn't narrate events so damn literally. Ghostface Buddha was in Sri Lanka's southwest corner at the colonial city of Galle. While much of Galle city lies outside of its old confines, the new bit consists largely of the cricket stadium. The heart of the city retains its pristine colonial air by being isolated within its pristine Dutch ramparts.

"How's it so far?"

"Sir, I must warn you, the more I transcribe about Galle, the less perfectly I shall remember the copious and well-phrased remarks you have already made about Wewerukannala."

"But, sir?"

"Well do it small to leave some white space in the middle."

Galle, Ghostface Buddha reported, was enticing enough for those craving a taste of the old colonial flavor. There is the fort, sturdy and suitably scenic as it projects into the sea. There are old churches, merchants' stores, a lighthouse, the retooled mansions of the dignitaries of the successive European powers amid the quiet and scattered coconut palms. All, in essence, of what the well-heeled expatriate or wealthy visiting touriste desires most of a historic locale in the tropics; a trip to Gale engenders the faux-nostalgic satisfaction of admiring the achievements of the White Man's civilization alongside the climate earlier most undeservedly enjoyed only by the (so it is said) more sloth-ful and swarthie peoples. Its greatest architectural curiosity is its principal mosque, the dominant structure of the town's southernmost end, and which looks quite convincingly like a baroque Portuguese church, save that they've written in Arabic all over the front and added diminutive minarets. Therefore Ghostface mused that the edifice must have been a case of architectural mimicry rather than an attempt at concealment, though it could have been a brilliant example of hiding in plain sight since the British, who were the masters there at the time of the mosque's construction, would have regarded anything Portuguese as heretical anyways. It is one of the many unique flourishes that have graced Galle over the centuries, since its ancient origins as the fabled city of Tarshish -oh, by the saints, I'm running out of space.

"Well get on to Unawatuna then."

"But how? There only remains a sliver of blank space!"

"Listen, I'll be happy to rebuild the entire damn Colossus of Rhodes just to hang you off it from your oily Greek balls, you hear? Now be half that resourceful and get to scribbling."

Unawatuna: not far from Galle, G.F.B. says this ex-backpackery beach haven is scenic enough, and a decent place to hang out, but not that exciting. Pretty temple @ end of bch. Food prices ridiculously motherfucking inflated, worse than a walrus's prick after half a week of ru- SHIT... Fd.$$ too high.

"Your new-found gift for summation is an inspiration to us all."

The temple of Wewerukannala, aside from the weak chuckle it earns for being located just outside the town of Dickwella, is a hilarious and monumental sight in its own right. It is in fact not a lone temple, but a complex of various Buddhist shrines. There are of course a pair of modest dagobas sitting gracefully on the ground, and

"I say, old chap, why is that bit written so fucking small?"

"Sir, you told me to-"

"Well take this last bit and copy it BIG like a regular damn person. No, wait. Leave this first bit of this bit short to show what an olive-brained cretin of a Hellene I had to contend with. Do remember to use ink instead of tzatziki there, Achilles."

Wewerukannala, continued: There are of course a pair of modest dagobas sitting gracefully on the ground, and the usual bodhi tree shrine where groups of white-clad Buddhist ladies come with their more cooperative children on the weekends. There is also, for some reason, a small Buddhist shrine inside a water tower of sorts, which is weird, but really mere chump change in the context of the glorious freakishness of Wewerukannala. The main shrine itself, beautiful in its own curious way, belongs to that uniquely Sri Lankan school of architecture that produces Buddhist temples in the shape of small Catholic missions, where you half expect not be find a sleeping Buddha inside, but some angry, unsexed Spanish woman in nuns' dress cracking a ruler across the knuckles of insufficiently diffident native girls.

Across the plaza, not far from a fine little dagoba, lies the entrance to a subterranean chamber. Thankfully, for I might otherwise have blown a gasket, this subterranean chamber was not an ancient temple, but merely a reconstruction of the inner fires of Hell. Buddhist Hell, it appears, is not all too different from Dante's version of the underworld, populated largely by unjust kings and hypocritical monks, all of comically awful plaster construction, screaming in the agonies of hellfire with side-splitting hilarity. In one corner, the fat and red-bellied king of Hell pronounces judgment on a sinner, and nearby his demon minions are busy at work cooking screaming unfortunates in pots and impaling them upon pikes. The Catholic influence in Sri Lankan Buddhism, it appears, runs a bit deeper than temple architecture. Beyond the statues, for those who really seek an education in the price of sin, lies a dark tunnel containing literally hundreds of extremely shitty murals depicting people performing myriad sins, accompanied by a depiction of the corresponding infernal punishment and commentary in Sinhala. For the foreigner not fluent in Sinhala, it can be a bit confusing, since in most of the pictures it is hard to discern what sin is being committed, leading one to believe that, say, shaking a woman's hand in the poultry market leads to being torn apart by lusty sodomite devils, while shaking a woman's hand near a mango tree merely leads to being sliced in half and left to the dogs. The lesson I took home from all of this is that if you want to stay out of Hell, the refrain from speaking to anyone, take nothing but holy wafers for food, and avoid touching women at any cost unless you are dragging them out of their homes for floggings. But I was an altar boy when I was young, so I already knew that.

I have not yet described Wewerukannala's main attraction, and what an attraction it is...

Looming quite noticeably out of the clearing is a sitting statue of the Buddha. Remarkable? Perhaps not, if the Buddha weren't like SEVEN STORIES TALL on leaning his back against a horrendous concrete tower calling to mind the apartment blocks you would build for the workers at a Bulgarian state fertilizer factory. While the tower he leans on stands in barren ignominy echoing a mixture of ideological purges and babushkas' contraband sheep, the Buddha itself is resplendent in a million mosaic fragments of bathroom-tile glory. A sign pleads the visitor to contribute to the temple upkeep fund, which is in dire straits attempting to replace the thousands of tacky, easily-dislodged "gold" (i.e. orange) tiles that have so far fallen off the Buddha's robe. To top it all off, as there should be, is Buddha's halo of enlightenment, which for reasons that surely only the Enlightened One can understand, looks exactly like a 15-foot twist of strawberry- and vanilla- flavored frozen yogurt. Forget about the American restaurant chain, this is the real TCBY: The Cosmos' Best Yogurt.

Best of all, you can climb the stairs within the Bulgarian apartment block, passing even shittier murals depicting various episodes of the Buddha's past lives, and enter a chamber directly behind the Buddha's head. From here not only are there great views across the endless palm trees, but you can get close enough to Buddha's head to inspect his curls for dandruff. Fortunately, either by divine power or merely the slickness of bathroom tile, the crow droppings that cover this entire island slide right off the Buddha's untarnished locks, leaving it to reflect the afternoon sun in all the radiant glory of that bit of wall above the counter in my aunt's house between her refrigerator and her microwave. Within this final chamber, one wall is replaced by a strange, studded black surface, which I realized was nothing other than the tile "hair" growing out the lower part of the back of the Buddha's gargantuan head, and between two of these curls was a small glass porthole...

A PORTHOLE INTO THE BUDDHA'S BRAIN

I waited in queue behind a number of Buddhist ladies who were curious about what the window might reveal, but did not seem to be aware of the absurd magnificence of LOOKING INTO THE BUDDHA'S FUCKING BRAIN, which I was almost jumping in glee at the anticipation of seeing. When my turn came and I pressed my face to the glass, what I saw was

I'm not telling.

Pondering the recent revelation, I descended the tower and left the temple area, returning by foot to the highway through the goat-choked Muslim quarter of Dickwella. When, wearied by the tropical sun I stopped in a local bakery-

"Oh dear, what's that ringing of a bell? Can it be your daughter returning home from the poultry-sellers'? Why, it is! Penelope, darling, why don't you leave those fowls with your dear old father here so that he might pluck them after he is done transcribing this chapter of my Travels? -Why, yes, I think I should come up and aid you with that, ummmmmmm, bedeviled carpentry problem in your bedchamber immediately! Konstantinos, to the end of that bit, please. Do as you will."

Do as I will, he says. What have I left to do? Compose the rest of this drivel on his barbarous terms? My honor forbids it! Nay, the hemlock leaf, late the friend of Socrates and other honest men, shall be by my last companion. And this tale? And Ghostface Buddha? To the Turks with them!