TALK: The Green Mountain College Blog

Here's a picture of the monastery from another angle.

It was on this day that I learned that every Wednesday is a Buddhist holiday because the current Dalai Lama was born on a Wednesday! I think that’s pretty neat. I mean, why not make that pesky day in the middle of the week important? It makes the week seem more endurable, anyhow. We also discovered that the founder of this monastery (I fail to remember the name, but even if I did, I’m sure I’d butcher the spelling) also created an organizational system for Buddha’s 84,000 teachings so that it would be easier for monks to access the ones they wanted to focus on. Now, this was a great idea—until the Cultural Revolution happened and all of his books (including the pen he used to map out the organizational system) were destroyed. Poo on that. Also found out that there’s this lake somewhere in an even more remote place in Tibet (my goodness, how remote does it get??) that the highest lamas used to go to when looking for the next Dalai Lama. Evidently, they see visions in the lake that give them hints regarding the next person’s location and personality. WOW. I guess there’s also a movie regarding this lake that’s out there? But I rarely watch movies, so I wouldn’t have found out via that route, anyways.

When we walked into the assembly hall for this monastery, to our surprise, the monks were chanting. So we quietly tip-toed around to view some of the chapels that were in the smaller rooms that extended off of the main hall. There were some really cool statues of the protector deities—which are much fiercer than the typical Buddhist deities and intimidate people to be good through what we might call “tough love.”

Here are a few photos.

I also got a nice picture of the larger yak butter candles.

We then sat down and had a little conversation on karma. It was quite interesting, but I feel that I’ve elaborated enough upon the subject at this point.

We then had a quick bite to eat. On our way over to the next monastery, we quickly stopped by this tsempa grinding…mill, I guess I should call it, but it was honestly tiny and only had two actual grinders, which were run via water power (a small river ran underneath the building). The locals who were doing the work were rather nice and let us try the tsempa. It had the consistency of corn meal and tasted a lot like cereal, only not, which I guess makes sense, considering it’s a type of grain that one grinds up.

Here’s a picture of the inside of the mill. It’s a little blurry, mostly due to tsempa particles in the air, but you can sort of make it out.

Then we made our way to the Baiju temple, the grounds of which are also home to the Kumbum. Although I was having a bit of homesickness at that point, I was rather excited about visiting the Kumbum, so I could definitely deal with it. Before I go on a rant of how superbly awesome this construction is, I guess I’ll actually focus on the temple first.

I think that in all of my excitement for the Kumbum, I failed to take any pictures of the actual Baiju temple. Woops. I did take a neat picture of some of the buildings further up on the monastery grounds, though.

It was at the Baiju that we first learned about the marvels of butter statues. During Buddhist holidays, the monks and/or lay people will create these yak butter sculptures—and they can last up to an entire year! They mix yak butter with tsempa, which is how the statue keeps shape.

Here’s a decent picture of one.

We then did a meditation on compassion. We focused a lot on the advice we got from the highest monk in Tibet in that we tried to envision the compassion that we receive from our mothers and attempt to express this kind of feeling to every being on the planet. We were told to envision our mothers’ faces in order to do this, which created some emotional turmoil for some because they missed their mothers so much. I just smiled—my mom’s the coolest mom ever and she knows it (at least I hope so!) Of course I missed her at that point, but I’m quite a busy person, so I rarely get to see her. Thinking of my mother at that point was probably the best thing I could do, as it made me realize that everything was going to be ok. Seriously. Some people don’t want to grow up to be their parents—if I grew up to be as wonderful as my mother, I would be satisfied with that accomplishment alone. I felt a little bad though—I had had conversations with other people on the trip about their mothers, and their relationships were a bit more than tense. Because I knew their stories, I really felt their agony during that meditation. If only everyone had such an awesome mom as I do!

After our meditation, we had some free time to wander around both Baiju as well as the Kumbum. I took some final pics of statues from the temple and then headed over to the Kumbum.

Here are some of those pics:

And now for the KUMBUM! Omygoodness. Probably one of my favorite places of all the places we visited (besides perhaps the Great Wall and Mount Everest). It’s this huge stupa that contains 1,000 statues in it in small rooms on several different levels.

Here’s a picture of the front.

So basically, it amounts to climbing a bunch of really steep and sketchy stairs, entering into these tiny dark rooms, and looking at these really cool statues of different Tibetan Buddhist deities. Bud, Hali, and I ended up going up in a group and made the entire adventure into a game. We would guess what deity the statue was supposed to be depicting, using the knowledge we had gained from our readings and lectures, and then we would open up one of our books and see if we were right. It was, believe it or not, a lot of fun. And it helped us recognize how much we actually learned during our travels. What a wonderful way to begin wrapping it all up.

There were a lot of fun statues that I took pictures of. Here’s one of Shakyamuni.

I believe (this was the group consensus) that this is the Mother of all Buddhas. She has a Sanskrit name that literally means “perfection of wisdom.” I believe this is who she is. I’m unsure. There are just so many deities in this pantheon!

And then we made it to the top of the stupa and hung out for a while. This was fun. Definitely some great photo opportunities.

Here's a picture of Crystal enjoying the views.

And here’s me enjoying the intense eyes of insight/compassion that are seen on many Buddhist statues. These eyes were on all sides of the stupa so they could see in all directions.

And then I got a little artsy. Can’t blame me.

And then I got a little silly. Once again. Can’t blame me.

And then we all headed down and had some free time in town. A number of us chose to walk back to the hotel to really get the experience of the area. It was neat to see the little shops and the small market place and to interact with some of the people. Since so many people went so many different ways, we didn’t end up meeting for supper until about 8pm that evening, whereupon we went out to this restaurant that is notorious for having Western food. It was a Saturday night, however, so it was PACKED, and we didn’t get our food until 9:30-10pm at night. At that point I was just hungry and tired, so I wolfed down my vegetarian burger like nobody’s business, even though it didn’t resemble any vegetarian burger I had ever had. Rather than being a burger, it was more like two vegetable podkahs (I don’t know the spelling—but it’s a small patty of vegetables covered in some weird dough and deep fried, usually pretty good, but not a veggie burger). I was honestly too tired to care, though.

After dinner, I finally got the opportunity to make a few phone calls back home. There had been a period of time in which I either didn’t have a phone or every minute cost a ton of money (phone calls cost more the further you are away from civilization). So I got the opportunity to call my mom (things were going well at home) as well as my boyfriend. Unfortunately, this phone call revealed that one of my friends was about ready to head to the navy, and the other was going to be in Tennessee when I returned home. Needless to say, I was a little depressed. So I went back into the hotel and played pool for a little while with a group of the boys and eventually hung out with Ryan until the early hours of the next morning. Ryan and I (with the help of Kate) found the way to the roof of the hotel, where we sat for about three hours or so and talked about the adventures we had had so far in Tibet, our theories about Buddhist philosophy, as well as our lives in general. It was a really nice conversation; a conversation that I needed dearly, as I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep that night due to all the news I had just received. I am honestly really looking forward to going back up to GMC and getting in touch with Ryan again (he lives in Castleton). He’s a really cool guy.

So I went to bed that night, knowing I wasn’t going to get much sleep, but appreciating the conversation I had had anyways. About two hours later, however, fate would see that I had even less sleep than I previously expected. More details to come.