Ramoche Monastery - Lhasa

Greetings,

The following piece was written during a visit to Lhasa in 2005 while teaching in Sichuan. The Ramoche monastery was a special place for me to sit down and practice.

Ramoche was the starting point, the beginning of a peaceful march by monks on March 10th which began the current international Tibetan demonstrations and cries for freedom.

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A Tibetan woman in her rainbow apron and thick heavy yak felt boots shuffles along, pausing to make sacred prayers. Her deep lined brown hands join, rise in a blessing over her head, descend to her forehead down to her heart before prostrating herself out, stretching full length along stones on hands and knees, touching her forehead to the ground with her arms extended out in front of her. She unfolds from the ground, rising softly and walks forward, performing her ritual repeatedly. Earning merit. Offerings.

Side streets offer tables of huge yellow cakes of butter, slabs of meat as laughing Khampa men hack through bone, weighing it up on old scales. Piles of yak heads, glistening butter. Muslim merchants in skull caps and white beards from Xinjing push rolling carts of dried fruit - apricots, raisins, dates.

I wander near the Barkhor down narrow twisted alleys - severed tree branches with prayer flags stapled to their thin arms stand against a house. The trees have been cut into long slender segments. Before New Year, or Losar, people will buy them, climb onto their roofs and replace the old ones on four corners.

A man inks prayer flags. He sits in partial sun with rolls of white, red, blue, yellow, green cotton cloth to his left. On a pillow are two 8×10" carved wooden blocks. Black ink from a plastic bottle floats in a small pan. He sponges up what he needs and coats a block. He pulls white cloth over it, centers a segment, slides his hand into a torn plastic bag, starts at the bottom and applies pressure up, down, sideways. Ink bleeds through. He pulls cloth through, re-inks the block, repeating the procedure. A man next to him cuts dried cloth into individual pieces and staples colors to thin branches.

I took a side street to Ramoche built in 641 by Wenchang, a Chinese princess. Her Tibetan name was Kongjo.

Peaceful, quiet, - many pilgrims, kids, elderly spinning long rows of prayer wheels. Inside beautiful statues, past, present and future Buddhas, dancing in flickering butter lamps. Many people buy yellow bags of butter to spoon into large ornate butter candles as they proceed around and through the temples.

A monk invites me to sit on a carpet inside a small interior chapel in late afternoon, contemplating large tall, beautifully sculpted and decorated statues. Amazing art and meditative peace.

On the far ochre wall is a mural painting of multiple yellow Buddhas, with a patina aureole halo around his smiling head and face. Suddenly I see one image is half illuminated by a single shaft of bright light from the sun slanting through an opening way near the ceiling. Beautiful and immediate!
I just sat there absorbing this vision as light examined the face, slowly moving across it from left to right.

An old man with a serene dirty face entered with a toddler. The child immediately went to the statue on the left, touched his forehead on the fabric at the base, backed up, put his hands together at his head, mumbled his prayer and moved to the larger center statue. He repeated his ritual.

He forgot to put his hands together so his grandfather whispered a couple of words and the boy made his prayer. He skipped off to the third statue as the old man followed him.

Families, parents, old single men and women, young singles, and couples shuffled through in an endless procession.

I went outside, past people doing their prostrations to sit in the sun with a group of monks. One smiled, “You didn’t pay the entrance fee.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know there was one.”

“Yes,” he said, pointing to a half hidden fading sign on a slab of door, reading “Office. 20Y.”

“Would you like me to pay now?”

“No, it’s ok,” he smiled.

He asked the standard questions. “Where are you from? How long have you been here?”

“I am from everywhere. I’ve been here all day.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Seven years. It’s ok,” adding, “Buddhism is about compassion.”
“Yes it is.”
Ramoche is a fine place and I will return often.

Peace.

Patriotic Education in Lhasa

Reports say the hard line Chinese #1 and his Tibetan co-leader visited the Jokhang monastery in Lhasa. They didn't go there to pray for peace.

They went there to tell the monks they would increase "patriotic education" classes in all the monasteries. Re-education through reform, ideology, propaganda and control. It's about control.

Historically, the Chinese, after destroying and looting monasteries in Tibet and in mainland China during the 10-year Cultural Revolution, restricted the number of monks at the three major Lhasa monasteries, Sera, Drepung and Ganden.

They recruited some Tibetans to live and work in the monasteries as spies and informers. This system had proved effective during the Cultural Revolution when family members reported on each other, neighbors and wild capitalist running dogs. It was a practical "peoples" campaign of fear and suspicion to create paranoia and ideological control.

Monks and nuns allowed to live and practice in the monasteries who resist or question this form of subtle "patriotic education" risk imprisonment, torture and death. They well know what has and continues to happen to monks and nuns at the notorious Drapchi prison outside Lhasa.

Peace.

One Sunday

The sky is overcast. Everyone is sleeping. You get up early and take the green metro into town. The odd worker, an old man, a young girl going somewhere, perhaps to a factory shift rides the rails.

You are ready to disappear into nothing, looking for visual moments trapped in time. It is a walking meditation.

All the shops, stores and businesses are closed. Steel shutters and bars protect invisible interiors filled with foods and fabrics. Dead quiet. This reality reminds you of any other town, village or place on a Sunday. Quiet and deserted. Only a guy with a camera, a few early shopkeepers laying out board tables and cats. Lots of felines, prowling for garbage and mates.

Among some new people you meet are a group of musicians in a small cafe off a series of narrow alleys near a bookseller.

The men play, a woman sings. Drinking brown tea you absorb sharp clear string notes and her voice. It is a lament, a sad strong sorrowful love song from her heart, her lips, her life.

Peace.

Unspoken Excuses

Lhasa and provincial turmoil continues. People expect massive retaliation. A news blackout, ghettos, death and more exiles streaming away, remembering. Suffering.

Here, the woman studying, holding the paper on the metro was amazing and sad, at the same time.

How it was her eternal, endless source of concern, how her Eastern far village distant eyebrows thick and black like furrows in frozen fields narrowed when she opened the paper to read the numbers.

She knew how to count and read. She was about forty with two kids and an unemployed husband. She worked as a cleaner and the man observing her was hidden behind dark glasses, old silent whispers - he could tell her immediate destiny was there, spit out by a bank machine after a teller pressed a series of buttons on a keyboard labelled "distractions" and "debits."

She hoped, by folding the single sheet into thirds it would change the numbers, the stone cold reality but it didn't work that way. She looked at it. She folded it. She opened it and looked at it again. She kept repeating the folding and staring, folding and staring.

Once, when she unfolded it her eyes dropped into a swimming ocean where letters and numerals intermarried, forming new spoken and written languages filled with word-pictures and the longer she stared, the deeper her heart and mind realized how futile her effort had been was. Everything before and after her life was on that single piece of paper.

Friends in Lhasa

"What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high."

I'm sitting here in Asia Minor wondering how friends in Lhasa are coping with their new reality. The news blackout makes it difficult to know the extent of destruction and suffering. I have changed their names to protect their identity.

Tsering, a gentle young man living and working with his mother and sisters; shopkeepers in the Barkhor. Remembering how we walked the kora, the circle of prayer around and around, talking as he shared his dreams of returning to Amdo and being a teacher. We were surrounded by peaceful, devout pilgrims making offerings. How he led me into the Chinese owned and managed concrete mini-plaza where Tibetan women offered coral and turquoise stones. How we haggled, enjoyed their company, laughed and continued on our way.

We met again one day during Losar, the Tibetan New Year, at Deprung Monastery outside Lhasa. They'd climbed through the series of temples, making offerings, saying their prayers. We shared butter tea with his mother and her friends overlooking the Lhasa valley.

I remember Shalu, a young Muslim girl studying English, also dreaming of being a teacher. Having been to her home for a meal and conversation with her family I feel she is safe from the chaos.

Her friend, Dorje, is a doctor at a Tibetan hospital. I imagine she is taking care of her patients with loving kindness and working under extreme stress.

A Tibetan photographer and his Chinese wife, a painter, and their young daughter I met climbing the mountain above Drepung to release our prayer flags during Losar. How they graciously invited me to their home for fruit, tea and conversation.

I remember all the kind compassionate people in Lhasa.

May all of them be well. Light a candle.

Peace.