The weather changes dramatically here when the sun is not shining. The sun here so remarkably intense. Burning. Penetrating. 12,000 feet above sea level worth of the Tibetan sun. I think at night of the summer monsoons in northern India, the constant rain on tin roofs in Sikkim. And sometimes, here as well, the cold rain of Lhasa.
Tibet has changed in seven years, since my last adventure here. As a Chinese territory, Tibet has constant development disease. Scaffolding everywhere. Sawdust. Municipal workers in bright orange and blue smocks. Small stores teeming with building supplies. And somehow the old Lhasa lying dormant, prostrate, silent underneath. No sawdust can hide the Potala, although the Chinese have turned it into a museum.
The old Lhasa. The old Tibet. It no longer exists, certainly not in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. The villages outlying the cities also have constant development disease. Small concrete building line the roads, replacing the mud & brick Tibetan structures, painted white with black trapezoidal windows and roofs lined with drying yak dung, fuel for a treeless windswept plateau. Dust and debris now hang loosely and sigh under the summer sun. Where no trees or flowers have been cultivated, the earth remains grey, fallow. Asleep.
Caught in a rainstorm last week I found a little book called "Searching for Shangri-la", written by an American businessman based in mainland China who cashed in his chips and decided to follow the wild Tibetan ponies of his reoccuring dreams. He begins hitchhiking through Qinghai province and the Tibetan plateau, searching for the Lost Kingdom - only to discover that Shangri-la is a state of mind and not a geographical destination.
So many come to this place searching, searching for something that is not here. This disillusionment is something I must facilitate in my line of work, and it is an interesting position in which to find myself. For what is it that I myself search for here?
Although I speak the language of this country, I do not feel a part of it. Tibet itself is not quite like Himalayan India or Nepal, places in which I move with ease. Perhaps because Tibet is now China, and China is quite unlike anything else in the world.
Finding a Shangri-la inside of oneself transcends the physical, the cultural, the discrepancies, the similarities. Finding a Shangri-la inside oneself is the heart of the Buddhist teachings. And it is perhaps the journey, the search itself for an external Shangri-la that yields the most powerful result: the human heart is also subject to constant development disease - but it is what lies dormant underneath which no layer of sawdust can ever fully cover over.
