We are practising mindful walking on the shore of Holy Isle: a group of thirty or so, mostly in our fifties and sixties, we have formed a large and ragged circle. “Lift, raise, lower, touch,” our leader instructs us; and so we do, foot after foot planted on the sheep-shot-bedizened turf where the person in front has just lifted hers. From a distance we must, I think, resemble a particularly duff channel ident for BBC1 – this slow-revolving blur of sluggish human animals. And we are being viewed from a distance: a side-wheel paddle steamer of antique vintage is sailing down the sound between Holy Isle and Arran; there are passengers on deck waving and shouting at us, but we pay them no attention at all, being mindful only of lift, raise, lower and touch – an interior communion between body and locale.
Not many people realise how strong Buddhism is in contemporary Scotland, or that arguably the reason for this is topographic as much as spiritual. Refugee Tibetan lamas were invited to a Buddhist centre that had been started in a house near Eskdalemuir in Dumfries and Galloway in the mid-Sixties. Over the years they transformed Johnstone House into a thriving community and study centre; pupils have included such cultural luminaries as David Bowie and Leonard Cohen. A cynic might suggest that the affinity the Scots have for Buddhism is born of negative character traits: full of anger and deeply sexually repressed, they are obviously ripe for a credo that makes pacifism mandatory and abnegates fleshly desire. A more charitable view is that the connection between Tibet and Scotland was cemented through northern India.
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