Slow Afternoon at the Burrell

This dreary Saturday afternoon, I head across to the Burrell Collection in Pollok Park. It's merely a hop across the motorway, the great divide, from Cessnock. I cycle across the great drumlin of bella Bellahouston down Bellahouston Drive past the back of Cardonald College and along Corkerhill Road. Just before entering Pollok Park at the White Cart Water another drumlin rears up, upon which stands one of the last remnants of the ancient Crookston Wood.

The path weaves its way by the water and through a small wood, all those bare trees in mid-December standing like Buddhas... silently contemplating the onset of winter. Great clouds in the failing light (how could light ever fail?) travel overhead. I pause at the entrance to the museum and gaze upwards at the real Art.

Inside, I pay my respects to the 800 year old wooden statue of the bodhisattva Guanyin, 'the compassionate one' - the one who hears all the sorrows of the world - (I realised today that Guanyin is the Chinese name for the Sanskrit Avalokiteshvara who I saw a few days ago in the Museum of Religious Life and Art. It was a real epiphany, not least because you would never know the difference from the two statues (see below). Anyway, next to Guanyin are the two terracotta guardians from the Tang Dynasty (Burrell had a particular fascination with China for all the right reasons) - I quietly bow to them. And to the great seated Luohan, another bodhisattva who has postponed nirvana in order to bring the light to others. He is perfectly placed sitting in front of the great glass window and the wood outside in which all manner of birds scurry between feeders.

The museum itself is deathly empty save for a few people at the polar regions of life. Those in their teens, 20s, 30s, and 40s and even 50s, are all conspicuous in their absence (why, after all, would you be in a museum on a Saturday afternoon when there's football and shopping?)

'In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop', writes the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Maybe we're at the end already? In the final analysis, most of us tentatively exist in a 'shopocracy'.

After discovering another bodhisattva hidden in a house-brick (!) and J.D. Davidson's exquisite imitation of a Qing Dynasty brush-pot (ivory with silver mount, made in Glasgow, 1894-5) I make my way out - exit through the gift shop - and discover where everyone is...

On the way back, crossing the bridge over the motorway, I encounter the football fans like some great exodus coming back from their match at Ibrox... all in one direction, with me and my bicycle and my light, (oh thank Guanyin for the light!) going in the other.

It is a moment of transformation...

This, the Sino-Tibetan image of Avalokiteshvara (the Sanskrit name for Guanyin), depicts him as having eleven heads. This is because he had doubts about the sheer number of deluded souls that he could awaken. His head was initially split into a thousand pieces, but the Buddha Amitabha with the help of another bodhisattva Vajrapani helped reunited the broken pieces into what was to become his eleven heads. He was also said to have a thousand arms with an eye in each palm signifying the union of wisdom and skill. Nowhere is out of reach of his ability to see and do what is necessary to save people. 

This gilt-bronze statue was made in the 18th century and stands on a lotus flower throne which rises on a stalk from swirling waters. One of his eleven heads is missing, but the figure still retains traces of red and green lacquer and the guilding is exceptionally well preserved. [Museum of religious Life & Art]