June
10 2006
Updated July 2006
Lahchok,
Nepal: A Trek in the Himalayas.
Part
2
As
I stood on the sidelines, with no idea of what was
going on, a familiar feeling of self conscious ignorance
washed over my pagan soul. I scanned the crowd for
a helpful face. There was a whole community: gold
toothed old hags, young ing?enues, punky school kids,
all were Tibetan refugees and all seemed oblivious
to me. No big smiles or welcomes like I usually received
when I visited remote Nepali villages.
I
admired the cohesiveness of this community in exile.
At least they belonged to a non-judgmental, laid back
sort of religion, one that was based on a certain
amount of reason. No fire and brimstone or guilty
masturbation sessions. No black clothing or mustachioed
women. I had read that the Dalai Lama was concerned
about the loss of Tibetan culture, now that his homeland
was quickly being absorbed and obliterated by the
Chinese culture of crass development and polyester
clothing. I suppose Dalai would be pleased to know
that these refugees were not trying to be Nepali,
they were Tibetan refugees in Nepal hanging onto their
culture and making tourists feel unwelcome.
I
asked the out-of-place looking Nepali fruit seller
standing near me "What is this all about?"
He shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of non-comprehension,
not so much of the event but of me and my foreign
tongue. Feeling like a phantom I decide to go through
the gateway of the temple and scanned the faces. I
honed in on an older monk with a friendly look, who
was wearing in the usual saffron and rust colored
robes. His head was shaved, but not recently. It had
a two-day growth of sparse gray hair. He was short,
soft and pudgy. His face was lined with life experience
and his eyes sparkled above a friendly smile. His
face reminded me of the face of the Dalai Lama, a
face I was recently reading about.
The
book was making the point that in many meditative
traditions, particularly Zen, the ideal is almost
a wooden expression. One's true self is the mind behind
emotions so those Zen monks that have reached the
nadir of Zen meditation often have smooth unreadable
faces, as if their emotional response has atrophied
and died. People and their antics are probably about
as consequential to them as fly shit on the windows
is to such people.
But the Dalai Lama's face, as the author pointed out,
is about as far removed from the Zen ideal as possible.
It is fully lined with decades of emotion profusely
expressed. His lines tell the tales of tragedies,
joys, births, deaths, and countless struggles. In
one of his books, he noted that the object of concentration
meditation, being from thoughts, is only a beginning
step in meditative practices. It should be supplemented
with exercises on compassion in order to become fully
connected with others in a positive way. These kinds
of people have faces full of life and sometimes wrinkles,
like the Dalai Lama and the funny short fat man that
I was about to approach.
"Excuse
me, what is this all about today?" I inquired
of the older monk with the topographical map lined
on his face. He smiled and explained, "Today
is the 15." Puzzled, I asked, "You mean
today is the 15th of the month?" "Yes, yes,
special day for Tibetan Buddhist, Number 15."
"So, you mean you have a special holiday of the
15th of every month?" "No, no. no, today
is 15 of fourth month of Tibet calendar. This is when
we finish reading the Buddhist bible and celebrate."
“So, why are they hitting each other on the
head with the box thing?" That is the Tibetan
bible." And indeed, the boxes that they were
thumping each other on the head with were all piled
on one another forming a comprehensive stack at the
doorway of the temple building. It looked like this
was gonna be an all day affair. Time to move on.
Page
3
