Tashi Delek and No Losar

The signs and posters were up everywhere: "No Losar! " and "No Losar Celebrations to Our Solidarity with Tibetan Martyrs." Really no New Year's celebrations? At first Michael and I were a little dismayed but it soon became clear that this effort was drawing much needed media attention and this was an effective way for communities both in Tibet and in exile to express their horror and protest the ongoing human rights violations occuring under Chinese governance.


(Locals walking by the huge No Losar posters on the front of the Tibetan Youth Congress building down the street from our guesthouse.) 

(A poster hung from barbed wire on the walkway through the woods around the Dalai Lama's residence- an enlarged photograph of a bare chest pierced by a bullet hole. The caption reads: "A Ngapa Amdo person was killed under Chinese force March 16, 2008.")

The violence continues in Tibet with Chinese soldiers gunning down a protesting monk as he set fire to himself, just last week. And needless to say the tone in Dharamsala / McLeod Ganj, the Indian site to the Tibetan Government in Exile was sombre. Nonetheless the place is fairly indefatigable, lively and bustling and Michael and I had a great time for the almost two weeks we were there.

There was much relaxing, meeting of fellow travelers from around the world (including a regular mealtime companion in his 80's from New Orleans named Tom), and long walks on mountain roads in the area. One of the highlights was making friends with Tahir and Raj, young Kashmiri brothers running the rug and shawl shop next to the fast internet spot on Temple Rd. Tahir's idealistic sweet kindness was well matched by is younger brother's playboy good looks and flirtatiousness. Many hours were spent drinking tea on their stoop and in the shop taking about the difficulties and charms of life. We got a broad history of challenges that Muslims have faced in the area, a series of insistent invitations to visit Kashmir, and a lexicon on inspirational mottos about love and friendship delivered by Tahir with a sparkle in his eye. The redheaded fiesty and funny Carrie Marks was with us for much our time in McLeod and was the object of much attention from the Kashmiri brothers and all their friends! 

(Carrie and me in Tahir's shop- Raj in the mirror taking the photo.)

(Michael and slow moving path-hogger on the Dalai Lama residence kora path that we liked to walk.)

There is a lot more to report from our stay in McLeod, like probably most significantly Michael's meeting with H.H. the 17th Karmapa and, maybe less importantly, my love of veg momo soup. But I will leave this post as it is, for now, and only say that we left McLeod happy and well-fed, took a local bus (actually 3 buses) to the little village of Bir Tibetan Colony a few hours away, and are now contentedly and busily engaged in tasks great (preparing to document a massive conference translator bigwigs) and smaller (hanging art in the dining room) at the beehive of activity called Deer Park Institute. More soon...

More Photos

Below are pictures from Kathmandu

Below are pictures from Lumbini and Kushinagar
























Below are pictures of Varanasi and Sarnath

Offering

Here is a simple poem that I wrote after an audience with H. H. Karmapa

Aspiration/Fulfillment

Across the waters, plains, trees and on and on
Across the tumult of hope and fear
Across the boundaries of life, death, time and love
I sit with you for a moment
For a smile
And the expanse of space immeasurable

Oh Karmapa
You who fulfill all wishes
I am left without question or answer
I am left alone with the murmur of my mind
But to see you smile at me
I am cheerful beyond reason

I am a foolish jittery child
I am awakened potential
I am a free man inside of this trap
Everything is as it was before!

I set my intention to see you, and then
I made it to your sitting room
It is possible!
Because it is possible, because of
you
I now switch my intention
May all beings without exception
Be liberated from the agenda of ego, the clumsy mistake of brilliance
and rest with complete ease
For as my father said
The self described "honkey wangpo"
The heart son of the madman of love
"Beyond that, there is nothing else to wish for."

Michael Rigden Rich
Feb 17th 2009

finally a few more pix...

This little Tibetan run internet place is letting me upload photos like a charm, so I've posted a few more (adding them to go along with previous posts- see below...) while I sit here with Michael and Carrie Marks. Now I think we're going to go have Indian food for dinner, for a change...

Some Highlights

Going back through the catalog of pictures from our arrival moving forward. Please look for more here over the next week.

-Michael

New Delhi Sky Line
Afternoon Monklets during the Kagyu Monlam, Bodhgaya

"Unit of Drala" store front sign, Bodhgaya
Stray Monklet, Kagyu Monlam
Prostrations, Mahabodhi Temple, Bodhgaya

Josh Pressman and the throngs waiting for H.H. Karmapa

Steve Brooks overlooking ruins of Nalanda Universtiy Corey doing the same
Steve Brooks sitting in a cave on the path to Vulture Peak Photos in the midst of devotionals, Vulture Peak Mountain, Rajgir in Bihar

Kathmandu and back

Full on a good meal and an outstanding chocolate-walnut brownie, and all wobbly-limbed from two days of travel, which brought us to McLeod Ganj (aka Dharamsala) this afternoon, I realize I might have some difficulty summing up our time in Kathmandu. But I'll give it a stab...

A similar feeling of wobbly limbs delivered us into Kathmandu Valley, after what turned out to be about a ten hour bus ride on the rickety bus from Lumbini. The bus never emptied out but it was frequently packed to overcapacity for hours at a time as we stopped often on the windy road to pick up and drop off passengers on more local trips. The wild-eyed ticket-taker whistling and pressing his own honking switch and sometimes climbing from the open door up the luggage-laden roof to take what seemed like catnaps while the bus sped along at whatever speed it's huffing engine could take us. The rock hard seats took at toll on our tailbones but the drive was gorgeous, on a road that hugged the curves of a turquoise mountain river banked in sandy white, and bridged by the occasional unfathomable hanging wooden footbridge strung high over the river from one mountain side to the next. We arrived safely that evening at the reliable and wonderful Dragon Guesthouse in Boudha (one of the more famous Tibetan neighborhoods of Kathmandu) and then treated ourselves to what seemed like a Western dinner of fish and chips and a few beers at a fancy restaurant facing the Boudhanath stupa.


The next day we walked up to Pullahari Monastery, seat of Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche, about an hour walk through outlying villages, rice fields and what seems like a dirtbike course and small everygreen forest where truent teenagers and young lovers hang out. There we ran into Tom and Jacquie Bell, old friends of my parents (Jacquie was also my third grade teacher) who are there doing a Buddhist studies course.

While we were having lunch with them we recognized (or were recognized by) a British Buddhist nun named Ani Chudrun whom we had seen at the Karmapa's teachings in Bodhgaya and who had also been at the Karmapa's teachings in Seattle last year where she introduced herself to Michael by saying that she recognized his voice from The Lion's Roar (a documentary about the previous Karmapa) which includes interviews with Michael's dad, who apparently had a very similar voice. After lunch we got a great tour from the Bells of the astoundingly artful grounds and facilities, and meditated in the shrine room with heartbreakingly beautiful the gold and jewel encrusted stupa where the previous Jamgon Kongtrul was apparently cremated.

Changing gears from being Buddhist pilgrims to being book researchers for our ongoing project about social entrepreneurs and innovators, we spent the next few days meeting, interviewing and photographing the brilliant people at ECCA Nepal. In true acronym-emracing Nepali style this stands for Environmental Camps for Conservation Awareness, and was started by a group of young friends twenty-one years ago to promote environmental education and practices for young people and communities around Nepal. We were drawn to want to profile this group after we read about their Solar Tuki project with makes available solar lamps (named after the traditional kerosene tuki lamp) as well as other simple solar powered appliances through entrepreneurial and community based micro-finance systems to mainly rural villagers who do not have electricity and suffer great expense, health, sanitation and social costs when they do not have an alternative to kerosene. But although this project is amazing in itself, we also found out about a whole world of other programs the people of ECCA have successfully fostered, from drastically improving school environments to spearheading nationwide river monitoring and environmental clean-up. Their own office building runs on solar and uses rainwater reserves and recycles gray water runoff. The people we met at ECCA were knowledgeable, kind, insightful, impressively dedicated and completely inspiring.
Hopefully we can post some more photos and interview snippets here soon... (Angel Chitrakar showing us the solar appliances on the roof top of the ECCA building.)
(The staff of the Old House Cafe using the SOlar Tuki in their kitchen in Patan.)


The Solar Tuki really could benefit not just rural villagers but every office building, shop, restaurant and household in Nepal that is now operating on a rotating schedule of 16 hours without electricity every day. The effects of this were hugely mitigated at our luxurious digs at the guesthouse, where the lights, waterpumps, etc. ran off generator power for a few hours after dark, but there is no doubt that life after sundown is fairly shortlived and we were early to bed almost every night, carefully planning out our next day around the power schedule.

On one day with very few useable hours of power, but what turned out to be some sort of religious festival day (and, it should be said a day that Michael just wanted to take it easy), I suggested that we take a taxi a few kilometeres out of town to visit an ancient Vajrayogini shrine. We didn't find out that it was a festival day until we ran into a huge traffic jam on the rural road to Sankhul (the town at the base of the temple's mountain). We decided to get out and walk along with whate seemed like every other person from every other vehicle on the road and then just meet our taxi the town to get a ride on the way back. We walked the 4 or 5km just to get into the town with huge throngs of people on their way to some other riverside temple; the road packed with exhaust spewing cars buses, tractors, and motorcycles, and people of every age pushing down the narrow road through rice fields and little towns.
Then we finally got to the town and the Vajrayogini temple turned out to be 2km up the mountain, mostly by a steep set of stairs. It being Saturday and this somewhat mysterious holiday, the stairs were heavily trafficked with families, teenagers, pilgrims, old men and women in highheels. The actual temple turned out to be somewhat strange, an old stupa style building with a small door into a dark room with a super old effegy of what looked like a round girl with a red-painted face. Everyone was making puja offerings of colored powder, marigold flowers, incense and money, throwing it into the door at Vajrayogini's face while a young man with a stylish bandana on his head inside the door seemed to be helping make sure the thrown offerings were making it to where people wanted them to land. Outside there was lots of Newari men singing and hitting drums unmelodically and people lighting butter lamps. All very strange and then we went up some more stairs to discover a very workable teashop seemingly in the middle of nowhere where we had tea and potato chips some sort of fried donut thing. We did eventually find our cab driver back in Sankhul who told us that it had taken him 2 hours to get there from where we had gotten out to walk. Yikes. But getting back went smoothly and with little traffic. All that and Michael had wanted to take it easy...

All in all it was heavenly to be in Kathmandu with its hubbub and intricately ornate architecture and interweaving of cultures and ethicities. And Boudha was a little haven for us, a little cobble-stone village becoming ever more modern and commercialized (both conveniently and heartbreakingly). Although we may actually became just a wee bit complacent or even bored there I think we were both a little sad to leave. We finally got a look at the breathtaking snowcaps of the jagged Himalayan peaks over the cloud and inpenetrably hazy pollution cover as we flew out over the Kathmandu valley and south west, back to Delhi.

As of yet, we still haven't been able to find enough bandwidth to upload any of the many photos we have to go with these posts. (I did try to provuide some visual accompaniment with the links here) Hopefully Dharamsala, the town where you seem to be able to get anything, will provide...

"Hope"

After gathering ourselves from our bazaar and somewhat tedious journey (I just finished reading Born in Tibet again so I'm reluctant to think that my journey is at all difficult), we set out to explore the new development in Lumbini. Beginning around what is thought to be the exact birthplace of the Buddha is a development complex that has two parallel rows of monasteries from various nations stretching out approx. two miles. It is quite a beautiful plan (which is a work in progress) and the area exudes a certain peacefulness. While the monasteries are very grand, especially the Chinese and Thai, the star of the show is the park and ruins of the exact spot of the historic birth. Inside a protected enclosure you find the remains of a structure dating to the 3rd century C.E. Among the remains is a peculiar "marking stone" which is encased in glass, but I failed to absorb the full details on the stone. It seems like it may have been placed there under the direction of the King Ashoka given the dates floating around and the obvious connection of having one of the famous Ashokan Pillars close by. The place has a strong feeling of history not only of time but of reverence and prayer.

(Michael has much better photos, but here's one just to give you the feeling...)


We spent a total of three nights in Lumbini and enjoyed a sense of relaxation. It was particularly amusing to rent bicycles and spend time cruzin' the scene, man. We developed a warm relationship with the owner of our guesthouse and spent some time laughing about the idiosyncrasies of certain groups of travelers. The most humorous of which (especially to our owner, Jupiter) was the young travelers from France. With a powerful consistency they show up with hippy/rave culture clothing, smoke a lot of pot, drink a lot of beer, feed their munchies and giggle to each other till all hours of the night. Jupiter compared the laughing fits of these young French to that of small school children who laugh for no reason. He acted this out using the example of laughing at a dog for wagging his tail. "Of coarse dog wags tail, that is what dog does." I found it to be a very accurate rendition.

Through working out the details of our transportation to Kathmandu with Jupiter, (some 10 hours on the traditional jam packed local bus) he began to ask us about Obama. Being cut off from our injection of highly intellectual and liberal news from various New York dealers, it was great to hear about various stories through the lens of this sweet and upright Nepali. He was very impressed by some kind of press conference addressing terrorism, especially how clear and well spoken he was in explaining the difference between the religion of Islam and those who choose to push their agenda by the mindless slaughter and destruction. This made him hopeful to hear our president be able to hold a mature and thoughtful view, and not just lump Muslims and terrorists together. Concurrently I had just finished "Dreams From My Father," which is a stunning read and an extraordinary window into the complex mind of our president. It was particularly great to read about his time as a child in Indonesia. The landscape he was describing could easily have been the very one we were now traveling through. It was a great feeling to think that our president had such expansive and lived experience.

The morning of our departure from Lumbini Jupiter had a serious look on his face and told us he had some bad news. He told us of how he had just heard on the news that an American who had been laid off had killed his family and himself in a fit of despair. This news was very upsetting to him, and he wondered out loud why the man hadn't moved to Nepal where it is very cheap and stated that he would have given the man work at his guest house. We also learned that morning that he and some others had gone to the birth place of the Buddha and lit a butter lamp on the night of the American election making prayers for Obama. Touched by this man's genuine heart I reached into my bag and offered him my Obama campaign pin which had the bold type word "hope" written simply. His face lit up and he held the pin over his head calling out the word inscribed. "That's it," he said "Hope!". We bid him farewell and tumbled down the road continuing our adventure.