In the Market

(photo: still from the film "Milarepa". The man farthest to the right is a friend of mine).

Wandering through the open markets in Leh, I dicovered that all of the vendors of these markets were Tibetans (as opposed to Ladakhi). Most of them had a settled home somewhere, usually in Bir or McLeod Ganj - but spent each year as traveling merchants: the rainy months away from the monsoon in Ladakh, the winters on the beach in Goa, and the spring in Dharamsala.

I spent an afternoon looking at jewelry in one of these outdoor markets, and once I began bargaining in Tibetan, I became an instant source of curiousity. I was very glad to find people speaking Lhasa dialect and exile Tibetan, as I had been struggling at times to make myself understood in Ladakhi. A husband and wife invited me to join them for ubiquitous butter tea (whispered conversation, overheard: "Don't serve her butter tea! Westerners don't like it." and then "She speaks Tibetan, of course she must like it").

The three of us began a very animated conversation. They wanted to know how, where and why I learned Tibetan, if I had visited Tibet, what my impression was of the current political situation. Had I met the Dalai Lama? Visited Himachal Pradesh? I wanted to know their birthplace, where they were from, when they escaped Tibet. He had escaped Tibet as a boy, and his family home was now in Bir, forty kilometers east of Dharamsala. After a few endless cups of tea, the husband started to cry in front of me. He was an older man, with a beautiful weatherworn face and an outrageous mustache. It is very unusual for Tibetan men to have cultivated facial hair, and I felt a great affection for this mustache.

He took my hand, wiped his tears, and told me how happy he was to see a foreigner speaking his language. His generation is among the last born in a free Tibet, and the first to be exiled to India. He was so inspired, he said, to meet a young person making an effort to preserve the language and the rich cultural and spiritual heritage of a dying Tibet.

In many ways, it has felt to me that my studies have been so selfish, so completely oriented around my own goals, my own need for adventure, for spiritual contact. And for one moment, while sitting there with him, I felt that the scope of what I do actually benefits other people, as well as myself. It is a beautiful feeling.

The story of this afternoon came to mind a few days ago, at the premiere of a new film by Neten Chokling Rinpoche on the lifestory of Milarepa (www.milarepamovie.com). Milarepa is Tibet's most beloved saint and poet, and his legacy is preserved in the thousands of spiritual poems he composed in the eleventh century. This film, the first of two, recreates the childhood experiences of Milarepa. It was filmed in Spiti Valley, which is the eastern Himalayan range of Himachal Pradesh. The monastery of Neten Chokling is in Bir, and most of the actors and the crew were ordinary people harvested from the monastery and surrounding town.

In the film, when the birth of the boy Milarepa is announced, his father emerges from a tent to receive the news. Milarepa's father was no other than the man I had met one afternoon in the market in Ladakh - no one else in the world could have that mustache. This time, it was I who cried.

Give me the Goddamned Camera

(left: a statue of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, in the Manjushri Hlakhang at Alchi Gompa)

9 August 2006

Adam, Maya and I left Leh for a few days and headed out by early morning bus to visit some monasteries in Western Ladakh. We wandered before dawn through the Muslim quarter of town, through the polo grounds and over to where the local bus was supposed to be ... no bus. This is often how adventures begin.

We made our way quickly to the bus stand outside of Leh, and managed to bribe the driver to let us sit in the front of the bus, which is a small cordoned-off glassed-in compartment where the driver and his lackeys (always two or three) smoke endless cigarettes and listen to Bollywood soundtracks. Room for three more, and off we go.

We arrive at Lamayuru four hours later, after a quiet drive through the mountain desert of Ladakh. It is a sleepy little place, quite desolate save for a guesthouse or two, an outdoor cafe that served ramen noodles and omelets. As we walked down the lone street, we were approached by a Ladakhi woman who prepared dinner each night for guests. She invited us to her home, and we made plans to join her for dinner.

Dropping our packs off in the little guesthouse with chickens on the roof, we made our way up the steep cliff and into the vast complex of Lamayuru Gompa (monastery). We wew ushered into the main temple, and I began asking the monks about the history of the buildings, the monastic site. Sometime in the early 10th Century, the famous yogi Naropa (after whom my university is named) came to do solitary retreat in a small Ladakhi cave. Eventually, a small building was built around the cave to accomodate his practice, and much later, a temple around the cave site. Over the following hundred years, this evolved and continues to evolve - there are now quite a few other external buildings, a retreat center on top of the surrounding mountain, halls for study and for housing the many monks who reside there. We walked into an outdoor Sanskrit class for the young monks, who were more interested in learning addition in English. Two plus two is five! they yelled.

We climbed to the highest peak to take photographs and survey the valley in which Lamayuru is situated. A green swatch of earth cuts through the little town, which runs increasing more desolate the higher the mountains stretch into the horizon.

Over tea and tuna fish in the late afternoon, I met a yogi-monk in the outdoor cafe and invted him to join us. He didn't speak a word of English, so I translated as we all introduced ourselves. I was immediately intrigued by his appearance, his long hair plaited and wrapped around his head - it is the sign of a long-term meditation practitioner. I asked him his story, and he told us that he lived most of the year in retreat in the retreat center above the gompa. He invited us up to visit the place.

Adam and I climbed slowly back up the mountain, the dry grey-brown desert earth giving way beneath our feet. The sun was beautifully warm as it emerged from behind the clouds, but as we climbed higher, the mountain winds begin to whip about and bring with them the cold cold thrusts from the highest snowy peaks.

The monk, Sonam Gyurme, brought us to a small cluster of about nineteen buildings, in each of which lived a retreatant. He told us that there was one Austrian nun who had been there for a long time, and also a young Russian who was trying to learn Tibetan. He ushered us into his one little room - which functioned as a shrine room, bedroom and living room - and made us each a cup of strong black tea. We stayed on together for about an hour, discussing our lineage and lineage histories, our teachers, the fate of the Karmapa, and, of course, why I wasn't yet married.

Adam and I exchanged looks as the tea was being poured - how unique and outrageous to have found this quiet yogi on a mountaintop. We said goodbye, and made our way to dinner.

10 August 2006

The next morning over roadside chai, omelets and chapati, we waited for the daily bus from Kashmir to come rolling through Lamayuru, to hitch a ride to Alchi Gompa. On the bus, while I sat with a nine year old Ladakhi girl on my lap, Adam managed to fall asleep sitting upright. It is a brilliant thing to watch. He swayed with each frequent lurch of the bus, and would have been thrown from his seat several times if I didn't wrap my one free arm around his shoulders and try my damnest to keep him in place. He had the whole front of the bus laughing as this continued ... and when we finally awoke he said - "you didn't have to do that, you know, darling. I was awake the whole time". Sure, baby.

I had been hoping to see Alchi Gompa for many years. I first studied the artwork of Alchi in an art history class in my undergraduate years, and I have been somewhat obsessed with seeing it one day. The gompa was built in the 10th Century, just as Lamayuru. In the 14th Century, the Mughal Invasion swept through India, bringing with it the rise of Islam and the destruction of Buddhist monasteries and artwork. That was the beginning of the end of Buddhism in India. After almost two thousand years in its native country, Buddhism was then bound to be an exile tradition, surviving only in lands in which it had been imported.

Tenth century Buddhist artwork was rather unique and exceptional, for several reasons. Firstly, because of the international creative, artistic and soteriological influences that were a product of the Silk Route. The Silk Route, during its time, ran from the Mediterreanean coastal cities through the Middle East, down through the northwest passage from Afganistan through modern-day Pakistan and into India. Ladakh's proximity to Kashmir and the Silk Route brought a wave of cross-cultural artistic traditions, and in each of the different temples of Alchi, you could pick out the different individual elements. Some of the artwork looked Egyptian, some of it a fantastical Persian animal menagerie. The second reason this particular gompa is so important is because it survived the period of monastic destruction during the time of the Mughals, thus preserving in its entirety a lost period of artwork, an indigenous Buddhist art from the time in which Buddhism was still an Indian phenomenon.

Alchi Gompa is in a small valley, and is famous for the apricot orchards in which it is built. As we walked through the walled complex, we walked under heavy boughs pregnant with fruit and filled our mouths and pockets. It is a small wonderland.

Within the complex, we were three of perhaps ten wandering foreigners. Each small temple was unlocked by the complex caretaker. a strange young monk with a perpetual glass of coca cola and a hawkeye. Because of the age and significance of the artwork, photography is strictly forbidden and natural light not allowed to penetrate the inner sanctums. We spent hours in the temples, shouting to each other when we found another example of foreign artwork. The last temple to visit was a temple to the deity Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom and learning. In the center of the temple were four Manjushri statues facing the four directions, in the four corresponding colors. The blue Manjushri was astounding - he looked exactly like the modern Indian representations of Krishna, the Hindu avatar of Vishnu. As I am most familiar with Buddhism in its cultural trappings outside of India, and because India Buddhist art has been almost completely destroyed in its homeland, I have never actually seem a late-period Buddhist representation in which the artform so clearly paralleled the Hindu artistic tradition.

I needed to photograph the statue. I couldn't leave without a photo. We were due catch a bus back to Leh in ten minutes, so I said to Adam and Maya that I was going to pull a foolish stunt, take a photo, and then we would all leave as quickly as possible to avoid trouble, hop on the bus, and make our way back to Leh.

I tried in vain to distract the caretaker, trying to pull him into a corner and explain some iconography with his back turned from Adam, who was attempting the shot. Not working. I took the camara, turned on the flash, bit my tongue and apologized to any pigment that I wad destroying, and snapped the picture. The caretaker went into a frenzy.

We went outside and immediately started tying on our boots. The caretaker followed, and he began yelling at me for taking a picture. I began playing dumb in Tibetan, and telling him that I couldn't understand him. As he didn't speak any English, and I had spent the last two hours talking with him in Tibetan, this made him even more furious. "Give me the camera!" he shouted. "I'm sorry - I don't understand," I replied, "do you know how to say that in English? What is a camera?". It wasn't very slick, but I didn't know what else to do. He wasn't posing a threat particularly, but I wasn't interested in causing a scene. But that is exactly what happened.

The three of us started walking quickly out of the gompa, being followed with the monk yelling ahead of us - "Don't let them leave with that camera!". At that point, we ran out of the complex, and through the winding streets to the bus stand, laughing and slightly terrified that we might be in more trouble than we realized. We found and empty jeep, bargained with the driver, and sped off back to Leh.