Remembering an old friend and mentor

Birthday Blessings, Losar 2007

When you find a place you really love, it is hard to leave it.  Sometimes, however, there is no other choice.  While it is true that you cannot enter the same stream twice, that stream can still hold sweet water.  And so I left one Tibetan community and returned to another.

2006. This is a story about visiting an old friend, and reconnecting with a new friend.  Having left China (East Tibet) after being denied a worker visa renewal, feeling at sixes and sevens, I returned to a safe place.  India.  One goal was to visit the current incarnation of my deceased root guru. I learned he was in Bylakuppe, which is a Tibetan refugee camp a few hours from Mysore in Karnataka, southern India.  This is where the ancient Sera Me and Sera Je monasteries had been established, after the Tibetans were exiled from Tibet. 

Upon arriving at New Delhi (Indira Gandhi) airport, and spending a night in the refugee community, Majnukatilla, my feet trod once again a familiar path.  How well I knew this road, this 8 hour journey by overnight bus up a twisting bumpy mountain road to McLeod Ganj. This is where my life found its center, during 3 years in the 1970s.  This was my first time to revisit this mountain village in the Dhauladhar Mountains in Himachal Pradesh, north India.  I remembered a sleepy town where the only cars to brave the narrow and rough mountain road were the rare visitors to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.  We lesser mortals rode the rugged bus, each trip a death-defying act over narrow ascending roads cut into the mountainside, or walked the half-hour path down to Dharamsala markets.

The buses entered the small plaza, discharging their passengers before making tight U turns to prepare to head down the mountain again.  In this same plaza sometimes a projector and screen would be set up in the evening, and chairs set out to watch a rare movie.  At the wide convergence of the dirt streets leading up and down the hillside from the plaza, Tibetans on holiday occasions would form a circle and dance traditional dances.

McLeod Ganj is set on a mountain ridge at most one mile long. At one end was the small plaza.  Entering the plaza there were buildings straddling the ridge on either side. Behind the plaza at one end the mountain rose further, where there were stone-built colonial homes left by the British.  This was one of their ‘hill stations’, where they sent their families up from the plains to escape the unbearably hot summers.  In the center of this long narrow plaza there was a cement building housing a large rotating Tibetan cylinder filled with papers inscribed with ‘om mani padme hum’.  Each time it made a complete revolution a bell would tinkle.  Beyond that was a row of smaller such cylinders in rows, roofed but open.  Devout Tibetans came daily to turn these prayer wheels, repeating the same mantra or other prayers.  In one of these wooden buildings on the left side of the narrow road the Tibetan doctor had his medical practice.  When he was not seeing we mere mortals, he was occupied with tending to the health of His Holiness the Dalia Lama.  Or perhaps it was the other way around.  He was to go on to become a world renowned authority on traditional medicines, traveling and lecturing all over the world (Dr Yeshe Dondun). 

Further down the long narrow plaza, before the terminus of the ridge, there was a road sloping down to the right, towards a smaller prominence on the far edge of this ridge.  Except for a few hotels, there were no buildings here.  This was the path that pilgrims walked, alongside untouched woods, to the home of the Dalai Lama.  Hidden in the woods was a primitive nunnery for about 20 Tibetans.  (After I was ordained as a nun I asked if I could join this community of Tibetan nuns in this forest.  I was told it is too primitive for a westerner; I was denied community there.) Believers would take the narrow path below and around the ‘Palace’ repeating mantras, in a practice called ‘kora’ (circle).  They believed they were acquiring merit, canceling out some of their negative karma.

In the decades following the establishment of the Tibetan Government in Exile here, the focus for western residents (aside from those rare visitors who came briefly for a personal audience with the Dalai Lama) was attending the ‘Tibetan University’.  This was a project developed by the Dalai Lama with the purpose of preserving the Tibetan language, art, culture and Buddhist teachings by transferring them to westerners.  It was described in an article in Asian Times in the 70s.

A lucky few could find rooms in the apartments built around the government center, halfway between McLeod Ganj and Dharamsala.  These two-story buildings were mainly for the exiled Tibetans, and westerners who found housing there were usually visiting scholars come to study with the lamas and or to do research at the Library of Tibetan Books and Archives.

My shack was part of 'shanti bhavan', above McLeod Ganj in the forested former Raj-era compounds.  To attend the daily teachings at the Library entailed a walk down some 2,000 meters of altitude, on a dusty winding road. The walk down in the mornings was pleasant. In spring it included a short cut through a flowering rhododendron forest.  The road down was very steep, the view breathtaking.  A large lake was a shimmering ribbon of silver on the distant horizon, drawn on a canvas of blue haze.  To the right was the mountain wall.  To the left was a sheer drop off and the other side of the gorge.  It was a steep gorge cut by a river of melted snow runoff.  The return journey was arduous, in the burning hot afternoon mountain sun. 

On cold winter mornings, shivering in my nun’s traditional robes, I would rush down the small slope to a chai shop in McLeod Ganj for morning sweet chai and a roti, and maybe a cup of freshly made sour yogurt, before the long walk down the mountain to the Library.  The shop, with its worn linoleum floor and made of wood slats, darkened from years of cooking fires, was balanced precariously over a precipice. The cooking fires warmed the room.  A handful of other westerners were also there for the same reason. It was a cozy, intimate experience.

Because much of the housing construction was of unlined, uninsulated wood, winters were brutal.  Luckier, wealthier students and monks lived in concrete block houses, but these were also unheated.  The cold was unrelenting.  Each year there would be a mass exodus of lamas, and their followers, to the warmth of Bodh Gaya on the plains of Bihar state.  Usually from December until the Tibetan New Year, or ‘Losar’, the center of devotion would shift to the sacred area where Buddha was believed to have attained enlightenment.  Buddhists of all traditions were there. It was a rare opportunity to study with other traditions.  Notably was a Burmese teacher name Goenka, who led intensive 10-day meditation retreats in the Vipassana tradition.

When we all returned to McLeod Ganj to live out the short remaining winter weather, it was time to celebrate the New Year.  The high light of this time was receiving the Dalai Lama’s blessing.  He would sit in the main temple on his elevated seat, and a long line of devotees would snake outside the building waiting for their moment.  As I approached his seat, hands folded and draped with a traditional white silky scarf called a ‘khata’ that I would offer him, I would cease paying attention to whom else was in line.  My breath deepened, my spirit stilled, focused on the strong peaceful presence of the man who was about to lay his precious hand on my head. I knew that he knew who I was, and that his blessing was personal. 

Thirty years of change greeted my return.  Buildings had blossomed everywhere on the mountainside.  The dusty narrow steep road down to the Library and Dharmsala beyond was now paved.  It was regularly traversed by taxis and a few private cars.  There were frequent jams, where the road was not wide enough for two cars.  The narrow streets in McLeod Ganj proper were made more narrow by rows of vending tables, nevertheless cars dared traverse its 200 meter length, threading throngs of pedestrians with blasts of horn. 

Much of the forest that had been the front yard of His Holiness’s home was gone.   Many luxury hotels crowded the cliffside, shops and boutique restaurants hug the hillside, and there were new monasteries.  On the cliffs edge of the narrow road, stalls lined the sloping connecting road leading to the Palace.  Leathered brown faces sat beside blankets or tables filled with turquoise and coral stones set in silver, or mani beads.  These are strings of 108 beads, made of fragrant wood, or eye of the Pepol tree, or smoothed semiprecious stones.  

The small ‘ani gompa’ or nun’s temple had been replaced by a far more comfortable nunnery.  The Dalai Lama had done much to raise the level of the nuns.  They received more profound teachings than were available to them before, and were respected for their spiritual depth and learning.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s His Holiness would come down to the plaza, sit with his students over chai and laughter.  By the time I had arrived, the population both Tibetans and westerners had grown to an uncomfortable level.  He could no longer stroll anonymously in his village streets.

By the time of my return visit, the population had swollen to a seemingly insupportable size. His Holiness would give regular teachings each month, announced on his web site.  Throngs of westerners and Tibetans alike would travel in for the week-long teachings and sacred initiations.  The hotels were full, the Tibetan family homes were crowded with distant relatives sleeping on couches and floors.

My plan was vague; I was running away from disappointment, looking for a healing solution.  While passing through Bangkok from China I managed to obtain a ten-year tourist visa.  My goals included getting back in touch with my teachers, get some teachings, do some retreats, and otherwise jump start my flagging spiritual life. 

After a few days in a hotel in McLeod Ganj I was lucky to find an apartment halfway down the mountain towards Dharmsala, in an area that used to house the exiled government secretary.  In its day its address was home to a publishing house, which specialized in translations from the Tibetan scriptures and commentaries to English.  Now the area was developed and still developing, the now-asphalted path lined with concrete construction.  My apartment was in a 2-story quadplex.  It was modern, with tiled floors, a large shower and well-equipped kitchen.  

I applied for and awaited my permission to go to the Bylakuppe refugee center in Karnataka, were I would visit with the young incarnation of my deceased Library teacher. This would be a new experience for me.  Would he recognize me?  Would he find it strange that I treated him like an old friend, this 11 year old boy?

My year was coming to an end as the Tibetan New Year approached.  I had renewed my acquaintance with some of my teachers, sat in on illuminating teachings, and spent months in retreat meditating on these teachings.  I had made it down to Bylakuppe, and met the young ‘yangtse’.  As it happened, the holiest day of this Losar would fall on my birthday.  It was raining, cold and miserable in McLeod Ganj.  My summer wardrobe was hardly appropriate for this cold and wet weather.  My stay would be short.  I found a bed in a lodge run by a group of monks from a traditional monastery, right on the central plaza.  Losar was a holiday festival, a time for everyone to relax and enjoy themselves.  It was fun to be around the monks in these days.  Their childlike sense of play, and the laughter that filled the shared restaurant-reception area was infectious.

Reflecting on the old days of receiving His Holiness’s personal blessing at Losar, I wished to re-experience that intimate connection.  In reality, during the intervening years he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and become world-renowned.  It would be impossible for him to continue that practice of touching each of the tens of thousands of visitors who waited expectantly for his blessing.  Instead, the day’s activities in his temple would take on a different aspect.

I could not face these crowds of strangers.  Instead, I decided to spend the hours doing kora around his holiness’s home and temple.

Even that had been built up.  Of course, much of the path on the exposed side of the mountain was still narrow and unpaved.  But along a broader strip of land new homes had been added to the mountain slope, for honored reincarnate lama teachers, benefitting the monks studying in HH’s monastery.  Devoted followers had donated shrines, small buildings housing precious reliquary and candles.  Near the end of the long circle there was a small plaza, lined on one side with mani wheels and on the other by an enclosed shrine.  I reached that point at the end of the kora, just as the sun came out dispelling the drizzle.  I folded my umbrella, and stopped for reflection. 

I closed my eyes, and focused on that precious presence.  I wished him a happy new year prayer.  To my astonishment, a warmth flooded over me, accompanied by an inner light and profound peace.  It lingered for a long moment.  He came to me, and wished me a happy birthday, letting me know that he had not forgotten me.

Upon that joyous note, I soon booked my travels back to Kham, East Tibet, where my friend was awaiting the arrival of her first child.  I was the designated doula, or midwife.  I was returning to China as a tourist, for a short stay of three months.  The future was uncertain, but I knew that whatever came my way I could weather it, knowing that I was held in the heart and under the protection of a very special spiritual being.  Though I be alone in the world, I know I am tethered by an unbreakable cord.