Nepali Time, revisited

Back in the day!   Temporal dissonance in Kapilvastu district, early January 2009.  With my gracious host, Pusparaj Poudel, at his family's homestead.  

 

Back in January '09, after a rewarding but often overwhelming village stay in the mid-Western Terai, I channeled the frustration of cultural dissonance into a double-barreled post on "Nepali time."  It's still one of my favorite pieces of writing that's appeared here, and, thinking back on it after this past trip, I realized that there's more to be said on the subject.  Here, then, is part 3 of the saga.

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Nepali isn't as difficult a language as most people assume; it does share Indo-European roots with English, after all.  The pronunciation takes a sensitive ear and a lot of time to master (e.g. four different T's, four different D's, with differentiation between aspirated and non-aspirated and retroflex and dental sounds), but you don't need a huge lexicon to converse.  In fact, a small arsenal of key phrases can get you a very long way: ke garne (a rhetorical 'what to do?'), tyai ta ('that's what i'm saying!'), hawas ('thanks'/general acknowledgement), thik chha ('it's OK') and pugyo ('enough!'), for starters.  The committed language student finds that, once the initially steep learning curve levels out, he can stumble his way through a million iterations of the same few basic conversations with surprising success.  But there are certain...puzzling features of the language.  Things that don't translate directly and whose idiosyncratic usage has to be picked up through gradual exposure.    Of these unintuitive features of the language, the crown jewel is verb tense.

At first glance, the situation's not too bad: Nepali has fewer tenses than English and they all sounds straight forward enough.  A couple past tenses, a simple present, continuous past and present (was ___ing, am ___ing), and something sometimes called the Probable Future Tense.  I love this one: we never know what's going to happen anyway, so why pretend to predict the future with any certainty?  Hence we have an entire tense construction dedicated to statements in the nature of "see you again, probably."  What's disconcerting for the native English speaker, though, is that this is the only future tense in Nepali.  So how do you see "I'll see you tomorrow?" without sounding like a total flake?  The answer is, you use the present tense.  This must be a pretty common ploy in other languages as well, judging by the number of ESL students who say things like "I see you next week."  The Nepali "present" tense is used for this kind of confident near-future declaration and to express what's ongoing or true in general.  So far so good.  Where our deeply-seated ideas about time really start to get yanked around is in the realm of the past tenses.  On feeling the first raindrops of an approaching storm, a Nepali might declare "paani paryo," literally "water fell."  A novice student's natural response is, "when?  When did it rain?"  But if s/he tries to "correct" the temporal confusion the next time by stating "paani parchha"--the present tense--a Nepali might well respond "when?" As in "when will it rain?"  (And how the hell do you know?) To express that it is in fact raining, Nepali emphasizes that some water has already fallen from the sky.

Likewise it is truly disconcerting, at first, when you're waiting at a bus stop and someone hears a distant rumble, spies a far-off dust cloud, and says non-chalantly "bus aayo."  The bus came.  What??  The bus is coming.  It's on its damn way.  It has definitely not arrived!  To add insult to injury, the guy talking into his cell phone (in this village that has a single indoor toilet and no telephone lines) cuts his conversation short with an abrupt "la, bus aaisakiyo."  The bus already arrived; the bus finished coming.  All this before the damn thing's even in sight!  What insolence!

There is a pattern to these usages, a method to the madness.  The whole temporal framework of the language--and thus of the culture--is simply shifted back.  To talk about the present, you use the past; to talk about the future, you use the present.  And sure enough, if you want to talk about the past, you sometimes use the past perfect.  "(One time) I went to India might be ma India gaeko thie, 'I had gone to India.'  This backwards-slanted verb system jives well with a culture where the future is eyed warily, where the only certainty lies in what's good and done.

In addition to this usage pattern, what can strike Westerners as the maddening temporal imprecision of Southasian cultures is also firmly rooted in the language.  Take the word for now, ahile.  As might be expected on the basis of the usage of the present tense, ahile has a distinctly future-leaning sense.  At the old bus stop, perhaps you're tempted to inquire of your fellow passenger to be just when he expects the bus to arrive.  Wanting to reassure you, he replies "ahile aaunchha," literally "it comes now."  By now you may have enough experience to realize that not only does aaunchha mean "it will come," but ahile means "soon."  When are you going to the store, you ask your friend?  Ahile, replies, sitting there with his eyes glued to the TV screen, not moving a muscle.  

The words for yesterday, today and tomorrow--hijo, aaja, and bholi--are used precisely when they're used on their own.  But they can also be strung together, as in hijo-aaja or aaja-bholi.  These compound words mean "these days."  Nepali has words for 'the day before yesterday' (does English really take seven syllables to express that idea?) and 'the day after tomorrow:' asti and parsi.  These get a bit more impressionistic.  Asti can refer to practically any day in the past, and hijo-asti means, essentially "in the old days."  Parsi is relatively literal, since there are also precise terms for 'three days from now' and so on, but bholi-parsi means "in the future" or "one of these days."


Confusing?  Tyai ta!  But enough for now.  What can we do? We'll probably talk more on these things in the future.  Ke garne? Pugyo.  Bholi-parsi kuraa garaulaa.

Home Again, Same Day

It's my last day in Asia for a while, a fitting occasion for a post.  So I figured anyway, but the fact is I don't quite know what to write about, where to start, what tack to take.  Hmmm.  Ummm....Yeah, well, here's the situation, see: I've been on the move since late June in a sort of pre-emptive break from the intense 4 year bout of schooling I'm now, finally, about to dive into.  This was my last foreseeable chance to travel to India and Nepal with my partner, and we scrapped our initial plans to spend the summer in Guatemala to return to this part of the world instead, to the places that have hooked us, to deepen our connections here in Nepal and Northeast India and to branch out into the Hindi-speaking world of greater North India.  It's been part vacation, part pilgrimage, part adventure, part retreat.  Like any slice of life, it's included moments of frustration, ugliness, and boredom as well as sublimity, inspiration, and joy.  It's been a long trip and, yes, a strange one.  I find now as it draws to a close that I'm ready to return.
Perhaps out of some fear that these past months will recede into a slippery, dreamlike blur, I find myself wanting to somehow solidify my time here, to pin down a few experiences with words and images so I, and others, can refer back to them and say simply "see?  that happened."

If I'm sorting through my memories of the past four and a half months, winnowing them, there's a lot of chaff to get through.  A lot of in-between times I didn't often have the grace to turn into a numinous present: sweaty bus rides, low evenings in cheap, mildewy guest house rooms, greasy breakfasts gobbled down in front of staring eyes.  The camel ride from hell.  Aimless times, times that felt worthless in their essential self-centeredness, miserable sick times.  Mundane as they were, these were all part and parcel of the trip, and they bear mentioning if only to avoid romanticizing my time here or giving the impression that this has been some sort of high-flying joyride through Northern Southasia.  And, of course, a lot of the hardest times have been the most important.  The grinding challenge of silent meditation retreat, the sometimes literal immersion in destitution and filth, the acutely uncertain days of relationship crisis that welled up amidst the karmic vortex of Varanasi. And the paradox of finding the sublime interwoven with mundane substrate, of finding Saraswati in a junk pile.

But at this valedictory stage, I'm just as much in the mood to look back on some of the fun, blissful and hilarious moments of the trip.  It feels like every geographical stage of the journey had at least one.  Sometimes highs were triggered simply by arriving somewhere: returning to the familiar alleys of Kathmandu and the Nepali-speaking sphere after days of travel across the Gangetic plains in the summer closeness and finding myself more fluent in the language than I'd remembered. Once more navigating the backways of the Newari old city around Indra Chowk, Bhedasingh, and Thahiti I found myself wanting to talk to everyone, to broadcast my joy to all comers.  The feeling faded back into rude normalcy quickly enough, but for a day or so I felt like a salmon who'd returned after years and thousands of miles to his own native stream.

Then, after an idyllic interlude in Darjeeling and some catch-up with our old host families, there was my and Thandiwe's two days at Khecheopalri lake, where we stayed with an amazing young lama who sent us on an unforgettable excursion to a sacred meditation cave in the leech-ridden hills above the secluded, footprint-shaped lake and then returned shortly after we did with armfuls of foraged greens and fiddleheads.  That 36 hours already inspired its own post (back in August), in which I think I failed completely to capture the charisma and youthful, exuberant wisdom of the lama, Sonam, and the time-apart quality of those couple of days.

In Orissa, the tropical, seaside East Indian state South of West Bengal, the undisputed twin highlights were seafood so fresh it seemed a religious experience and a ride on a rented motorbike to a perfect, empty stretch of beach.  After days of shying away from swimming at the crowded, tout-infested and shit-spattered beaches of Puri, we were finally able to cut completely loose and frolic free in the bath-warm surf.  It felt as if the world were ours alone, and that our lives were as simple as sand, surf, sky.  And motorbike.

Our final destination that day was the famous Sun Temple at Konark, where we figured we might as well hire a local guide to explain the esoteric structure to us.  Our guide, who proudly told us that he was the head of the architectural tour guides' association, proceeded to enlighten us as to the precise details of the erotic carvings that stretch for what seemed like miles around the temple perimeter.  He'd obviously picked the brains of generations of previous tourists to glean the most (in)appropriate phrases to employ in his good work, with results that would have been creepy if they weren't so utterly hilarious.  As this is a family restaurant, I won't be reproducing any of those here.      

The next substantive stop, Varanasi really does feel like a blur, a sort of fever dream.  The place immediately provoked some of the most intense highs and lows I've ever experienced, in such rapid succession that I keep finding myself at a loss for how to describe it.  But the place itself, by virtue of that sheer intensity, strikes me as a highlight of the trip. It also set the stage for one of the most important friendships, and certainly the most timely one, of the past few months.  Budding neuroscientist, dedicated meditator, shamanistic psychonaut, outrageous storyteller; Nicholas Anderson is all these things, as well as a godsend to both Thandiwe and myself during a time of extreme emotional instability.  In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, he offers up the notion of a karass, a group of people who are one's spiritual family in life.  (He opposes this to the granfaloon, which refers to all the groups we identify with consciously and, more often than not, emptily.  I always think of fraternities, and I wonder if Vonnegut, a fratboy himself in his day, would have agreed.)  I've been blessed with a wonderful karass, and it is one of life's joys when a new member appears.

The last major destination before Thandiwe headed back to start school again was Rajasthan.  Amidst all of that state's sands, camels, myriad turbans--India at its most photogenic--the city of Jodhpur stood out for its character and charm.  Besides the ongoing pleasures of delicious food, beautiful sights, and a warm welcome from the Muslim family who hosted us at their guest house, the time I spent with an avuncular Ayurvedic doctor a stone's throw from the landmark clocktower remains one of the most memorable episodes of the trip.  It was the sort of connection that could suffice as an excuse for another trip, the kind of connection I spent so much of my Fulbright year in Nepal looking for: here was a vaidya enthused at the prospect of sharing his vast experience and knowledge with a young upstart.  And it makes for a good story that the medicine he prescribed for Thandiwe and that finally cured a nasty five-day old bout of diarrhea consisted, mainly, of opium.  Everything is poison, everything is medicine...according to Dr. Vasant Lad, "Arurveda asks, 'but for whom?' "

In Delhi the night before Thandiwe's flight, we got ripped on fancy lattes in the tourist district of Pahargunj before turning ourselves loose in the intoxicating Old City, Shahjahanabad, where we must have walked five miles through its back alleys while stumbling upon all sorts of wonderful diamonds-in-the-rough.  There was the pristine, quiet, pastel-colored lane of the 500-year-old Jain temple, where an absurdly friendly man welcomed us into his antique facsimile export business and sent us on our way with gifts of little jewelboxes.  There was the bustling wholesale market of Khari Baoli, where dried fruit vendors' piles of dates, almonds, raisins, walnuts and figs towered in (to quote my favorite Just-So Story) "more than oriental splendour."  There was the locally-famous stuffed naan shop, the quintessenial five star hole-in-the-wall, where I was later tempted to order the spicy naan to my everlasting chagrin.  Never, never order the spicy naan in India.

Of course a lot of my best memories are tied up with the traveling itself, and this comes through in some of my earlier posts.  A good, long Indian train ride may itself be reason enough to travel to India, and, traveling sleeper class, it's certainly one of the most honest ways to do so.  Bus rides are harder to recommend, but they too have their moments.  Seize, seize the opportunities to urinate when they arise, and bring headphones.

After Thandiwe left, once the initial shock of separation from someone I'd been attached at the hip to for nearly 3 months wore off, the nature of my trip changed completely. I felt the need to structure my time much more, partly to keep the five weeks until I met my mother in Nepal from yawning like a hippo's maw.  Apart from a gritty week in Amritsar and Delhi (where I ate the spicy nan and ended up in my little hotel room watching more TV than I have in years, including the undisputed and incredibly unexpected cinematic highlight, Moonstruck), I spent this time in the hill districts of Northwest India: Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.  I did a short meditation retreat and a short Buddhism course, both of which were wonderful in their own ways and in the people they put me in contact with. I got to see the Dalai Lama give public teachings, though I admit I'd had enough after the second session of listening to the rather dry discourse translation through FM headphones. I fell briefly into the black hole of touristy Dharamshala after being seduced initially by the bustling energy of the place.  And I spent a highly enjoyable week with the current crop of volunteers and interns at Navdanya, Vandana Shiva's biodiversity conservation farm.  Like most of the foreigners there, I probably spent more time strumming a guitar ("Quando sei qui con me / Questa stanza non ha piu' / Pareti ma alberi / Alberi Infiniti..." I learned to croon, from a wonderfully impish young Tuscan Indonesian named Nicolo) than weeding the herb patch or sorting chickpeas.  There again it's the people I'll remember most, and the hope and inspiration they lent me through their visions, projects and experiences.  Ali and Thea and Hannah from Brighton; Nicolo from Firenze; Sinclair from South Dakota and Abhyudai from India; and the local old woman (I just called her "didi") who was the head of the chickpea sorting operation and a font of wisdom and anecdotes that I struggled to understand with my intermediate Hindi.
This brings me almost to the present.  The last two weeks and a bit have been a third distinct stage of the trip, one that began when I met my mother at the Kathmandu international airport.  I've been playing guide, translator, son, and, increasingly, friend.  There has been considerable luxury and equally considerable squalor, as on one unforgettable incident in a tourist trap of a town called Chisapani, a day's walk uphill from the Kathmandu Valley, where we ended up sharing a bed in a hotel "for sheer animal warmth," as my mother put it, after a miserable evening of waiting for our daal-bhaat to arrive while being accosted for hours by a well-meaning and thoroughly unbearable troup of piss-drunk Bahuns who'd decided to ride their motorcycles up for an evening of the sort of debauchery normally taboo to members of their caste. Overall it's been a time apart for both of us; riding elephants in Chitwan National Park is something neither of us would normally find ourselves doing, but that seemed quite natural in the context of our time together in Nepal.  I've had a chance to see this place with fresh eyes, and to watch my own reactions to someone so close to me that I have no filter as she herself reacts to the sometimes shocking realities of this place.  Finally, mundanely, we're both ready to go home.  For my mother this means going back to her life in New York City, with its literary, social, professional and personal commitments.  For me it means moving again, this time to Portland, Oregon, to start a Master's in Oriental Medicine.  Moreover it means resuming what Gary Snyder calls "the real work...what is to be done" after a lengthy, nourishing, and orienting moratorium.  I feel like I'm about to dive back into the one-way stream of life, and soon this journey will seem a very long time ago.    

Eating India on a Dime

Without a doubt, the best food in India comes from home kitchens--be it a mud hearth in a wattle-and-daub hut a half dozen kilometers from the nearest road or a gas burner in a fully-outfitted city apartment.  This is a culture where literally every woman and plenty of men know how to cook, they generally do it multiple times every day, and they know how to turn not much of anything into a little some-somethin'.  The basic Indian home pantry (ignoring regional differences for a moment) stocks rice, wheat flour, cooking oil, maybe ghee, salt, a few kinds of daal/pulses, sugar, tea leaves, a small galaxy spices and spice blends, some prepared chutneys or pickles, and that's about it.  Of course this is supplemented almost on a daily basis by good from the nearest market, the backyard garden or the neighbors ruminant: milk, yogurt, veggies, fruit, meat or fish in the non-vegetarian households.  And there are plenty of extras, either seasonal, regional, or caste or ethnicity-specific items that make things more interesting.  In Bengal, for example, there's gur, the unrefined palm sugar that's boiled down into fez-shaped blocks every autumn in the Eastern hemisphere's equivalent of maple sugaring.  But the point remains that the magic is not just in the ingredients but in the hands of the cook.  And in the heart.  How else to explain how amazingly good everything I've ever been fed by Kaanchhi didi (youngest sister) in my host family in Pedong?  It's just ridiculous.

Unfortunately, home-cooked food of even the most rudimentary sort is in short supply for the traveler in India.  And, let's be honest, the myriad dining options that remain are appealing enough.  These come in a few basic sorts, in roughly ascending order of price.  There are the street stalls and carts, the holes-in-walls, the well-established, locally famous holes-in-walls, the standard shiny eateries, the tourist places, the hotel restaurants, and truly upscale places.  A few of these may want explaining.  "Standard shiny eateries" refers to places that may or may not be regional or national chains but might as well be.  They have laminated menus and are usually decorated in bright primary and secondary colors, and are frequented mostly by families or couples who are out to dinner as a treat.  "Tourist places" are distinguished by their clientele and by the fact that their menus usually try to do everything: not just the commonly-seen Indian-South Indian-Chinese (though the last part of this triad really deserves scare quotes) but also Western-style breakfast, various other Continental classics (scare quotes, scare quotes!), and perhaps Mexican, Korean, or Israeli dishes.  Or all of the above. 

The funny thing is, there's almost no tendency whatsoever for the food to improve as you ascend the price scale.  Of course, you won't find high-end Mughlai cuisine like Chicken Korma or rich Punjabi food like Shahi Paneer at a street stall.  But if you were to find street fare like Bhel Puri or Poha at a high-end sit down restaurant, the chances are very good it wouldn't improve a whit on the version available twenty paces away on the sidewalk for a tenth of the price.  In all likelihood, it would lack a certain something--a magic masala of sweat, motorbike exhaust, and ink from the newspaper cone it's wrapped in--that would make you pine for the real thing. 

Of course not every street vendor or proprietor of some cavern-like eatery with three grubby tables and one yellowed incandescent bulb is a culinary genius.  But there's a definite percentage of these places that have a cult following, and some of the them achieve city-wide renown.  Every Delhi-ite can tell you where his or her favorite tea shop or Chat spot is and how much better it is than the competition.  And everyone in Jodhpur knows about Lal Mishri Hotel and its Makhaniya lassis.  After months now of exhausting--but far from exhaustive--research, I've picked up on a few patterns.  Rather obvious ones, actually.  For one, the very best places usually specialize, like the aforementioned tea, chat, and lassi places.  This allows them to focus their energies and hone their skills to a razor-sharp edge and also to achieve a high turnover rate.  For another, and relatedly, they're usually located in busy or central parts of cities.    

As this cyber cafe is emptying out ominously and I'd like to finish this post up in one go, I'll cut to the chase and describe a couple of my favorite holes-in-the-wall and local institutions.  These are places that follow the trend I've just laid out, and add to it each a certain ineffable character that elevates them to the next level.  They're quirky.  Perhaps the proprietors are unduly gruff (a common pattern in the very best eateries everywhere, I think--at least that way you know you're there for the food).  Perhaps they have the exact same limited menu as dozens of other places, but just somehow do it better.  Whatever the source of that charisma, these places have got it.

Mishri Lal Hotel, Jodhpur
Keep in mind first that "Hotel" often just means "restaurant" in the Indian context.  Mishri Lal is definitely not a hotel in the American English sense; it's barely a restaurant.  It is rather two rooms--one for men, one for women, though couples and foreigners can bend the rules--outfitted with benches and counters.  There are no menus, except maybe for a chalkboard or ancient painted sign mounted on a wall somewhere.  It's irrelevant.  Everyone's there for the same thing: makhaniya lassi.  This is not hard to discern; the pastel yellow glasses full of the stuff are everywhere, at least one of them in front of each customer, and more always heading out the door for carry-out.  They are absolutely divine.  Way thicker than a standard lassi, just the right level of sweet, and subtly scented with a masala that must include saffron, cardamom, and rosewater.  This is a magic combination, but again, this place somehow elevates it to the realm of the devta.  They're rich and large enough to serve as a meal in themselves, yet one isn't really enough.  They put you in a zombified love trance.  They're reason enough to visit Jodhpur (which is even otherwise a fascinating and charming place) all on their own. 


Kashi Chat Bhandaar, Varanasi
This place is another justly famous classic.  Counter on the outside, cramped little two-story restaurant within, it serves up all varieties of Chat.  Now just what Chat is is a good question.  It's defined by no one set ingredient, but rather consists of a variety of sauces, crunchy fried bits, savory curries, and bits of fruit all combined just so on a little plate.  It contains all the basic tastes in an almost overwhelming profusion: sweet-salty-tangy-spicy with elements of bitterness and astringency (those Ayurvedic outliers) to keep your tastebuds cocked.  A typical version is Samosa Chat, and Kashi's version contains (if memory serves) a broken up samosa more or less buried under some pea curry, yogurt, tamarind chutney, chopped cilantro, diced raw onion, and...there must have been at least one other thing.  That's the thing about chat.  You never really know.  But to tell the truth, I wasn't bowled over by this joint until I saw what my neighbors we're eating and decided to try it.  It turned out to be tiny little puri, the crispy fried puffed-up breads often seen in glass cases on street carts, filled with a combination of sweet tamarind chutney and yogurt and...something else again.  Each bite--and there were seven to an order at about 15 rupees a plate--is an explosion, literally, as the crispy shell gives way and the yogurt and sauces potentiate each other into a gushing climax.  Sounds sexy, no?  It is.  Especially when you're seated three centimeters away from the next customer and you're being ain't in the guidebook, you see.

Other contenders:
Paratha Wali in Paratha Wali galli, Varanasi
Pokhar Restaurant in Jodhpur (even though it's a proper restaurant)
Various sweets vendors in Jodhpur (the point is, Jodhpur's a good place for eating)
Santosh Dal Bati, Udaipur

Tending the Spark, Following the Weirdness: Reflections on Religion and Spirituality and Cultivating Compassion

Few subjects conjure up as heated debate as that of religion.  What is its nature, and what is its rightful role in the modern world?  Plant the question like a smoke bomb at a Bat Mitzvah and run.  Things are probably going to get ugly.

After abandoning my initial plan of studying theoretical physics in college, I found myself drifting for reasons I didn't understand very well at the time towards the nebulous topic of Religious Studies.  It wasn't out of the lingering urge to understand the workings of the universe, as some have assumed; I was too much of a materialist to go barking up the religion tree for that.  Instead I was motivated primarily by ethical questions--and by the need to scrap together a major from my motley coursework thus far. 
                                                                                       Image: His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama telling China he's "no demon."   The DL is in fact revered as a reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the embodiment of compassion.

 Within the hallowed halls of the Religion department I found answers to some burning questions--sometimes.  Sometimes I simply learned that I wasn't asking the right questions, the important or useful ones.  And sometimes in Postmodern Religious Thought seminar we simply drank Guinness or sangria until our brains were numb enough to broach Derrida or Heidegger.  Finally, with a B.A. in "Religion" under my arm, I found myself with more questions than I ever started with.  (This is tangential, but I can't pass up the opportunity to mention my classmate and former roommate Toby Louis David's brilliant graduation speech, in which he likens the Swarthmore experience to the Jews' journey through the desert to the promised land--and manages to reference the "scrotum-tightening sea.") 

After college, I did the only reasonable thing and forgot about religion entirely for a while.  I proceeded to take my own advice and "follow my weirdness."  As my weirdness is considerable and rather strong-willed, I roamed the country, worked in an Indian restaurant, dabbled in homesteading and goat-rearing on a much beloved once and future commune site in Vermont, and eventually landed in New Mexico at a funky little place called the Ayurvedic Institute.  It was there, in a strip mall a couple miles East of the Rio Grande, that my journey really began.

I speak, not too obscurely I hope, of my internal or spiritual journey: my own idiosyncratic way to growth, meaning, and fulfillment in what a mass email I never subscribed to keeps calling "this dream of life."  Thanks, Chava, whoever you are.  Having by now taken a few steps along this path, I find I have a somewhat altered perspective on religion.     

Religion can be thought of us as the larger construct: the institutions, the encapsulized traditions, the ritual--that which the living force we might call spirituality leaves in its wake across history.  Spirituality doesn't require religion--what use the flame for the tinderbox?.  And, unfortunately, religion doesn't require spirituality either.  Religious violence, pederast priests, and the myopic bigotry that so often attends religious life in America all stand as a reminder of this.  No religious tradition I'm aware of has escaped some degree of degradation once the living spark that Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha brought to be bear faded. Material concerns loom larger, doctrinal issues arise.  In the case of Christianity, people spend two thousand years fighting over just how Jesus said to love one another. 

Of course religion does have a role to play, as the living spark of spirituality does tend to fade or be lost.  Religion provides the structure to bridge the gap until the spark can be recovered.  It preserves vast amounts of learning, and if it can remain separate from power as such, it usually doesn't too too much harm.  It certainly provides an an inspiration or at least an excuse for huge amounts of timeless art and music.  It gives the masses some idea of ethical principles, even if it has to do it by scaring them with threats of hell or lower rebirths.    

With my renewed interest in the world of religion--for all its flaws, religious institutions are still likely places to catch whiffs of spiritual insight--I was relieved, then, during a recent 5 day Intro to Buddhism course at Tushita Meditation Center in Dharamshala, when the teacher stated during the first session that "the Buddha doesn't want you to become a Buddhist." This was a good sign: non-sectarianism is a characteristic of genuine spiritual searching.  The appeal of Buddhism for many is precisely that it tends the living spark of the spiritual quest.  Such questing is always an intensely personal matter, since we each come with our own baggage: the habit patterns of mind, speech, and body. Of these, it is the mental patterns which are most deeply-rooted.  It is an example of the principle that the subtle governing the gross.  Every vicious act of rape or murder begins with a "defilement"--anger, hatred, envy, lust--in the mind.   

Now, it is one of the central insights of the Buddhist tradition that the nature of everything is "empty:" empty of inherent, independent existence.  This is only another way of saying that everything is interdependent.  This emphatically includes ourselves: though we like to re-ify our personalities as real objects, Buddhism correctly argues (and Wittgenstein agrees) that the word "me" is ultimately an empty signifier.  The "me" in question always depends on such a host of factors, causes and conditions that to look at it as anything essential is absurd.  Of course there's a conventional me; we all know what this means; the trick is not to mistake it for anything ultimate or inherent.  It's important to recognize the unreality of the me as well. 

The most significant aspect of our "me"s is the mind.  Subtlety, again, trumping grossness. Never mind that the mind, too, is empty of inherent existence; like "me" and so many things, it is a useful fiction.  All the Buddhist traditions are intensely preoccupied with the mind, because the mind is where all the action is.  We construct our worlds in the mind, shape our experiences, and, as pointed out earlier, gestate our actions of speech and body.  Not really existing anyway, minds are infinitely malleable: look at all the things they can learn, the feats they can perform: from Polynesian stellar navigation to polyrhythmic drumming, from the Macarena to multivariable calculus.  They've invented Nutella. 

The mind, for all its talents, is awfully good at getting us in trouble.  This is a way of stating Buddha's First Noble Truth: that life is duhkha: suffering, discord.  Of course there's the mundane suffering that so many billions of have-nots experience due to their material circumstances.  But even amongst those who do have, lasting happiness is exceedingly rare.  What's the problem?  Why can't the many of us who have what we really need just be happy?  Buddha's answer acknowledges the tendency of our minds: to desire, to grasp at, to crave.  Or, on the flip side, to shy from, to avoid, to fear or hate.  What we do--almost all of us, almost all the time--is to look for happiness in experiences that by their nature are fleeting.  We repeatedly seek out those neurochemical states that we learn to induce whether by food, drugs, sex, exercise, or someone laughing at our jokes.  This craving mind is like a child, undisciplined, and we don't at first know any better than to indulge it.  We do so all the time.  The trouble is, where we indulge, the child spoils: the craving only grows stronger.

This is one way of looking at the human condition.  It may sound pessimistic, but actually this Buddhist view looks on the bright side: there is a reliable medicine for our ailing minds.  It is known as the Dharma, the truth, the way.  Buddha himself is the doctor that has prescribed it for humanity, and the third essential component, the supporting staff of nurses and attendants who do much of the day-to-day curative work, is called the Sangha--the community of other practitioners.  A nice quality of the dharma is that it is true--at least it regognizes certain fundamental realities for what they are--and is therefore true by any name.  So enough about Buddhas and Sanghas.  Back to the living kernel of truth, as best I understand it. 

We were at the point of turning to a new approach to the mind-child, a disciplinary one.  This is a matter of re-patterning, cultivating new habits and understandings until gradually the old ones fade out and our spoilt child becomes a model Timmy.  A number of tools are useful here, including but not limited to the proverbial stick and carrot.  All of them involve meditation at some stage, as this is where we can work directly on the mind. 

The particular pattern of the mind we've recognized as an enemy of our own happiness is the part that is ever hungry for more happiness, or rather more pleasant sensations.  In earlier posts I've written about Samatha or calming meditation, the technique of stabilizing and focusing the mind so that we can see clearly.  I've described the Vipassana technique of deep insight and re-patterning as taught by S.N. Goenka at his international centers. Vipassana trains us not to blindly grab at those pleasant sensations, but to observe them as they arise and watch them pass away.  In the process we gain insight into impermanence.  This is deep work but slow, and requires a firm foundation in Samatha, concentration.  Here I want to introduce something else, something that stands alone and that doesn't require such sustained, committed practice to bear fruit.
Since what we're aiming to abolish is a kind of selfishness, the tendency always to seek more pleasure for ourselves, we can apply an antidote in the form of an altruistic attitude.  We can consciously practice putting others first, and not only in terms of their happiness but in terms of their suffering.  If we take on others' suffering ourselves, it will act as a sort of poison that the "self-cherishing mind" can't abide.  The self-cherishing attitude will loosen its grip, and as it does so it will free our minds--a concept coterminous in many Asian traditions with that of heart--to release love.  Put this way, it sounds like a tall order.  The trick is, we can do it in our minds first, using the faculty of imagination to lay the first lines of a pattern that we wish to become our reality. 

The technique is called "Exchanging Self and Others." It is based on the following piece of reasoning. 'All beings deserve happiness and have the potential to achieve it.  I want most urgently to help them along the way, but my abilities to do so are limited.  Therefore I should do whatever I can do help myself help others.'  As this is a technique from Buddhism (a Tibetan branch of Mahayana Buddhism, to be a bit more precise), the logic continues 'I should become enlightened so that I can help others as much as humanly possible.'  This desire to achieve for oneself so that one may help others achieve is a step in the direction of what's called bodhicitta, the altruistic Mind of Enlightenment.  The meditation technique I'm going to describe is a means of cultivating bodhicitta, that is of expanding one's circle of compassion, in Gandhi-ji's terms.  But wait, some might say, wasn't the whole purpose supposed to be to increase our own happiness?  And all we've even started to think about doing is taking on the suffering of others in exchange for what happiness we've got?  False advertizing!  Ah.  But our own happiness is not a fixed quantity, nor something to be hoarded.  As this practice can reveal, helping others generates happiness in ourselves as a by-product.  As the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi says, " it is in giving that we receive...".  He weren't just being a romantic. 

      Exchanging Self and Others Meditation

Seat yourself comfortably and stably and take a few minutes to settle using whatever method works.  Let thoughts slow down as the awareness sinks down into the body.  Become aware of the breath and let it lengthen and deepen.  Relax.

The practice begins with the understanding that others are equally as deserving and capable of happiness as oneself, and that since there are so many more others than there are of oneself (which is only one, in fact), it is appropriate to work for their happiness rather than one's own.  With this altruistic motivation established, the practice begins.  It is easiest to start small, so we in fact begin with ourselves before expanding outward.  Imagine all your future suffering, the pain, the negative emotions, and imagine being able to take it upon yourself now.  As you inhale, draw in some of that future suffering as a black, noxious cloud.  This is distasteful and may be difficult, if you are visualizing strongly, but try and keep inhaling the black smoke.  As you do so, imagine it flowing to your hard, self-cherishing heart.  The selfishness in you can't stand all this suffering, and the presence of the suffering weakens it.  Keep breathing in the black suffering smoke and letting it dissolve your self-cherishing, and begin to envision happiness flowing back out with your exhale.  This happiness can take the form of a pure white or golden light.  Direct this happiness towards your future self.  Keep breathing in the black smoke from your future and breathing out the pure light.

The next step is to expand your scope to include another person.  It's easiest to start with someone you love.  Picture inhaling their suffering, little by little, letting it dissolve the hard selfishness in your heart, and exhaling pure light of happiness for them.  Watch the expression on their face relax as you relieve them of their burden. 

As you feel ready, add another person.  At some point, try visualizing someone you've had difficulty with in the past, an enemy, even.  They are no different than you in wanting happiness, and maybe less clear about how to achieve it.  And it will relieve you to comfort them selflessly, even in the mind.  

 As you work, imagine the scale of the enterprise growing.  You're no longer breathing in the suffering of individuals, but of households, entire neighborhoods, regions, countries.  As your energy and imagination permit, you can work up to the point of imagining yourself breathing in the suffering of the entire planet of sentient beings, unleashing it on your self-cherishing, and returning back the selfless love that results. 

However far you take the practice, at its apex, breathe in extra deeply of the black smoke and hold it in.  Feel it massed there in your chest, caustic, noxious, stinking, unbearable.  It is unbearable that beings should suffer like this.  It is unbearable that you should have to take it upon yourself.  Feel the explosion as your self-cherishing attitude disintegrates, leaving only a wash of pure light for you to exhale to everyone in your scope.

The practice can end in the traditional Mahayana way, with a dedication to all beings.  Or just sit quietly for another few minutes, watching how your mind has reacted and reflecting on what significance the practice holds for you at this time. 


Finally, in the spirit of non-sectarianism, I'd like to offer the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.
  

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon:

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope

where there is darkness, light

where there is sadness, joy

O divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

A Listing Fancy...and the best of Indian English

I'm a list maker by nature. Groans? Chuckles? Knowing sighs? Yes, I'll make a list of just about anything. In the most neurotic stretches of my college career, I would give in to insomnia and sit up at the computer, making a Master List. A list of lists. That way I would always have another list to work on. I must have felt that this meta-list, if it could only be made thorough enough, would define me as a person. Take one particular sub-list, that of favorite music: surely a few data points (say, The Fall, Chopin nocturnes, and Doc Watson) taken together would define a unique individual, just as three points uniquely determine a mathematical plane? Something like that. This was list-making as an exercise in self-definition, at a time when a sturdy identity is worth its weight in Monte Cristo sandwiches. But greasy culinary adventures are another topic, and another list, entirely.


I've been indulging in the old vice again, now largely as a way to get a handle on the ungainly, wildly varied mass of memories that have piled up over the course of my travels this season. List making as mnemonic device, an age-old strategy, I suppose. And there's the thought that each list harbors the seed for one or more pieces of writing. Little seeds I hoard jealously, as, now that I've embarked on the solo phase of this trip, writing is my lifeline. Lord help me if I can't come up with something to write. So, lists.

Here then, are parts of my master list for this time and place, with each item to be made flesh by the great Word as my fancy and/or readers demand:


Best Samples of Indian English
Best Hole-in-the-Wall Eateries
Worst Hotel Experiences
Most Memorable People Encountered
Causes of Continued Culture Shock


In fact the first of these lists is easily completed--or at least begun. Without further ado, then, here are my favorite examples from signs, menus, etc. across the Subcontinent, of the way English is used and abused around here.

"Yes...we are less dirty" - restaurant

"We all made out of one radiation" - ashram banner

"Sweets problem? Solves with us" - sweets shop

Oil Pouch, Water Pouch, Es Cambal - egg preparations on a menu

Butter Scrotch - ice cream flavor

Cheaf & Best - hotel advertisement

Beans Coffee - menu item

Testy Snakes - menu heading

Fooding and Lodging - ubiquitous hotel offer

Shirting and Suiting - tailor's sign


...and many more, if only I could remember them all. Or figure out which mildewed, scrunched up notebook I'd jotted them all down in.

Holy Shit

Another day in Varanasi.  The sun rises red on the far side of the Ganga; down by the Ghats, boatmen ply their services to groups of pink-faced tourists whom they lead down the grimy steps between bodies in repose to the water's edge.  Ah, the water's edge.  The broad sweep of the ghats and their steep stone stairways, the boats boring their way upstream or floating serenely down at dawn and dusk; multitudes of pilgrims bathing their sins away in the turgid drink--these are the images that Varanasi has impressed upon the psyche of generations of visitors, domestic and foreign, from Lord Rama to Mark Twain.  There is a great deal more to the city than the river, of course.  But not for nothing is a twilit Ganga scene the memory millions of visitors will take home with them.  The river at the liminal dawn and dusk hours is a fitting encapsulation of this place, of its simultaneous subtlety and grossness and all of its other contradictions.  Let the image linger: legions of devout purifying themselves in a mighty river of filth.

*    *    *

As I write this, I can feel the shit drying on my heel.  This is the price of a moment of abstraction in the twisting lanes of the old city--and this is An Old City--a mis-step into a mass of cow mess.  To call it manure is optimistic, when it will fertilize no more than an algal bloom in the river 30 yards away, and when the cow's diet consists of what it can forage from trash strewn along the roads and--gods' grace--the occasional sweetmeat or dosa.  It is shit.  And it is in fine company: the narrow alleys are smeared, plastered, and adorned with excrement of all sorts.  It is so ubiquitous that one quickly grows used to regular, garden-variety crap; it is the diseased stuff that continues to horrify.  That, and the stuff that looks like it might have come from a human. 

But between whiffs of fecal matter wafts the aroma of flowers.  Marigolds, jasmine, garlands in orange and white; the streets are decked with blossoms.  Every petal is destined to be placed lovingly around the neck of a god, draped across one of the city's thousands of Shiva Lingas.  This, after all, is Shiva's city, the City of Light.  At night especially the whole place glows,and no beacons burn brighter than the multitudinous temples.  The maze of alleys around Vishwanath temple, site of the most famous of the 12 Jyotir Linga--lingas of light--blaze like a carnival.  To the eagles that circle above the city, this district must appear as a network of multicolored glowsticks arranged end-to-end.  At street level, the effect is dazzling.  But not all the luminosity comes from the god-houses.  Looming equally large in the minds of masses are Banarasi sarees, silken ones with metallic threads worked in.  And bangles, yes, bangles in teetering stacks, colored and shaped for every woman's wrist.  Other stalls hawk metalwares, fried and spiced snack mixes, you name it.  Benares, they say, is not just the best place to die.  It is the best place to live!  The betel leaf mixture called paan is legendary here, the sweets succulent and profuse, the perfume and attars sublime.  Surely Benares is the best of both worlds!

But a casual visitor could be forgiven for thinking that religious matters have been forgotten altogether out on the main thoroughfares.  The bustle and din here is unbelievable: it's the usual Indian mash-up of cycle rickshaws, pedestrians, three-wheelers, bullocks, and swarms of pedestrians all inching their ways along.  Along either side are hundreds more fabric shops, bank branches (with ATM), and snack vendors.  Indian society (by some measures, apparently) is the most materialistic on earth, and in the City of Extremes the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming.  On closer inspection, though, one of the little shops is found to be a "government shop," i.e. the official distributor of sacred marijuana products: powdered "pollen" mixed (for locals) or unmixed (for tourists) with holy Ganga water.  Less officially but no less visibly, the lassi sellers at the corner offer a conspicuously green "special lassi" that is likely to offer a great deal of bang for the rupee.  Shiva-ji loves his bhang, or at least his devotees do.  It's not just the ash-smeared saddhus who partake of this sacrament; so do most of the foreign tourists, and plenty of shopkeepers I've run into in the Bengali neighborhood I'm staying in.  The flute teacher who sits in the doorway of his music shop-cum-opium den, and the two equally-stoned proprietors of a dosa-and-idly restaurant a few doors down.  The City of Light has a decidedly cloudy side.

Piercing the haze are the ever-sharp eyes of the beggars.  Religious mendicants sincere, charlatan, or in between; old women and lepers; undersized children slipping barefoot through the labyrinth they know better than the minotaur.  And bovines.  As a rule, locals ignore the children, mischievous or desperate as they are, give an occasional coin to the helpless, may hand out regular alms to the sannyasi, and feed the beloved cows lavish treats.  The ever-resourceful children (the others have been culled by natural selection by now) have learned to solicit the foreign faces, unused to such stark inequalities.  And who can say no to a grubby, bright-eyed boy who knowingly takes you by the hand and leads you to the store where your 24 rupees (75 cents or less) can buy him enough biskoot for him and his little sister, too?  My own guilt-assuaging strategy has been to sit these kids down in the restaurant with us and get them some real food rather than put coins into outstretched hands.  On a larger scale, the city is a hotbed of charitable organizations, which may for all I know attract more of the destitute.  The city is a magnet for rich and poor.

For sinners as well as saints.  And what more attractive place for the rogue with the slightest religious tendency than the city that promises to wipe out the accumulated karma of all who so much as bathe in the holy river?  Dying here is better still, which is why, according to Diana L. Eck in City of Light, the truly devout take a vow never to leave the confines of the old city even to venture to Benares Hindu University a scant few yards South of the official line.  The greater the negative karmic load, the greater the incentive to stick around the maze beside the river and thus end up on a pyre at the burning ghat.  Less sinister but more menacing are the touts and hecklers at every turn, those who at the sight of fresh tourist meat may go so far as to try and lead you bodily into their trinket shop.  Here as everywhere else, the thin get thinner and the fat fatter as the wheels of commerce grind on.

Up another narrow galli from the touristy Bengali Tola lane I have found a bastion removed from worldly concerns, at least if one can get past the 100 rupee ticket: the grandiosely named International Music Ashram.  Twice a week a modest crowd of mostly (indeed) internationals gathers to have the latest generation of classical Hindustani musicians lull them into an intoxicated state without the use of any chemicals save those produced in our brains at the prompting of sitars' microtones and tablas' polyrhythms.  The ceiling fans blow, the sweat drips, the mosquitoes bite, and I don't care.  The trio seated cross-legged on the white-draped little stage has rendered me one-pointed.  Another day in Benares, redeemed.

*    *    *

The Ganga flows on as rivers are wont to do, swollen now by the monsoon and carrying along with bits of vegetation votive offering of flowers and ghee lamps.  In the depth of its channel, the unburnable bodies of pregant women, children, lepers and animals must be scuffling along, inching closer to the Bay of Bengal.  The bathers, whose rank I will be joining tomorrow on my last day in the City of Holy Shit, pay no heed to this or to the fact that open sewers continue to empty themselves into the great river, but continue placidly to wash themselves.  They may have noticed a striking fact: despite the feces, the chemical load that must permeate these waters, and the corpses burning around the clock, down by the Ganga there is not a trace of a bad smell.

Puri

{Photos!  I've just gone back and added images to a few of the posts from the last 2 months, and I'll catch up to the more recent ones soon.} 

Coming from the Bhubaneshwar, Orissa's capital city, Puri was a bit of shock.  From the bus park we rickshaw'ed to the backpacker enclave on CT Road--we, too, wanted a piece of beach to twiddle our toes on--and even before we began to scrutinize housing options my heart had fallen.  I recognized all the telltale signs of a tourist ghetto: gaudy signs for oddly-named restaurants, "adventure" and "tribal tour" outfitters' offices, the vaguely malignant vibe of the local workers on the tourist strip, dependent on the whim of affluent foreigners to make a living.  No surprise here; Puri is a modest destination for foreigners as well as a famous Hindu pilgrimage town.  The city, one of the holiest in India, hosts the annual extravaganza of the Rath Yatra, when lakh upon lakh come from around India to watch a massive wooden chariot being pulled through the streets from its home in the enormous Jagganath Temple. 

But CT Road and the beach are another world entirely, or rather two other worlds: parallel tourist realms, one for foreigners, one for honeymooning Bengalis.  Having settled on a guest house and haggled out a price for a seafront room, we took off to explore the beach.  What we found must come as a rude awakening to many a foreigner looking for an exotic beach destination vacation.  This is the beach.  But it's also India.  The sand is dotted with garbage, the ubiquitous little foil plastic packets fluttering in the sea breeze.  Mangy dogs wander about and deposit their diseased excrement at intervals, to join the variety of feces already speckling the sea scene.  There is a certain odor about the area.  To one side, just beyond the range of budget backpacker haunts, local fishermen sit under the shade of tarpaulin sails and work on their nets, while others launch hollowed wooden boats into the breakers.  Their village lies behind the beachfront: low cement houses crowded together, pungent with fishy smells, children running naked through the sand...

Rather than the reverse, we find ourself needing to escape this constructed holidayland to dive back into the real city that co-exists in another dimension but only a kilometer or two away.  This city is centered on the massive Jagganath Temple, forbidden to non-Hindus (or, in practice, to light-skinned folk).  The streets are lined with stalls selling religious memorabilia, with "pure veg" restaurants for the Hindu devout every dozen yards.  Yes, two separate towns, we agreed...or, as we discovered, three. 

Note: I was intending to come back and finish describing Puri, but life pulled rudely ahead of letters and my recent attempts to wrap it up felt lackluster.  Enter Thandiwe to save the day: a recent mass email of hers fills in the gap quite nicely, I think.  I quote:

Jon and I had a bit of a funny time leaving Orissa. We actually missed our train because we had changed the date of our ticket to a couple of days early and assumed that we were on the same train leaving at the same time and didn't bother looking at our tickets (I know - stupid) until we actually got to the train station at 11:30 for our 12:15 train and Jon took out the tickets and asked, "Why does it say departure 1055? Wry smile. Anyway, we decided to turn our lemon into the best lemonade ever, sucked it up and paid for tickets for the next train out of Puri at 9:50pm, giving us the entire day to bum around the town. We checked our bags at the train station and headed to the old part of town and the Sun Temple to check it out again. Good times and some cool photos taken of all the pilgrims there. We had some lunch then decided, upon my request, to splurge and spend the beautiful day at a swimming pool where I could swim in a bathing suit (as opposed to the full-length mumu/nighty/dress that I wore in to swim in the ocean near Konark). So we went to a hotel we'd read abuot in a guide book, but their pool was being cleaned. They recommended another place called Hotel Hans Coco Palms (I know, hilarious name!) that was across town. We hopped into a rickshaw and headed over there. It turned out, we had missed half of Puri!!!! The area the rickshaw drove us through was jam packed full of hotel upon hotel built for Indian (primarily Bengali, I think) tourists! There must have been 2 solid miles of hotels two or three deep across from a promenade and the beach. The hotels were generally larger, shinier and overall more expensive looking than the backpackers' lodgings over on the side of town where we had stayed. Saari shops boasting Orissa hand-woven saaris and mens' churidars filled in the spaces between the hotels, and the restaurants clearly catered to an Indian clientelle. As we drove in, the beach was lined with covered carts, and I mused as to their opening in the evening. We figured the swim was going to be worth it just to have witnessed this other part of town which, so it seemed, most Westerners (including us, almost) missed entirely.


On our way back to the train station we had a chance to stroll along this beachside promenade, and sure enough, it came to life.  Carts selling 'Chinese' deep-friend crabs and prawns, an infinite array of handloom shops and restaurants, religious paraphernalia, even some small Ferris wheels.  It was nothing less than a carnival, and we the only Westerners in sight.  That's what gets me: the Lonely Planets that serve as bibles to practically every backpacker I meet writes off the whole area!  Sure, Westerners expect certain amenities and have certain, uh, cultural needs, but not to even mention this perpetual pulsating carnival by the sea?  Madness!  Guidebooks are a double-edged sword at best, a lesson that's being driven home here in Varanasi...but that's fodder for another post.

A Trip to Sikkim (or, Leeches, Lamas and Sacred Lakes)

In Kathmandu last year, questing around for instruction in the ways of Ayurveda, the venerable and expansive Southasian “knowledge of life,” landed me in some memorable situations. There were the rural health camps, where villagers would come for cheap treatment and where Sarita Shrestha, the mastermind and diminutive head doc, would periodically kick all men off the premises so she could get down to work in her field of expertise (gynaecology). There was the out patientclinic at Naradevi Ayurveda Hospital where, as a fly on the wall, I observed a peculiarly post-modern hybridized medicine being passed on
in the name of both progress and tradition. There was the dispensary and former laboratory of an alchemist-pharmacist, the last of his lineage, who made medicine out of everything from rare herbs and seashells to poisonous minerals. What I was most thirsty for, though, I didn’t have so much luck at finding:
instruction. Of course I learned plenty, but in the way that a participant observer learns, not the way a disciple does. Consciously or otherwise, I wanted a guru. In retrospect, the problem was I hadn’t molded myself into a suitable vessel. Maybe I was too full of the Ayurvedic knowledge gleaned under Dr. Lad at the Ayurvedic Institute in Albuquerque to have room left over for other nuggets; maybe I was unable to recognize those nuggets for gold; or maybe I forgot to remove the stopper from the vessel of myself. In any case, I left Nepal knowing that I wanted to be a carrier of this living tradition but feeling that all the work was still ahead of me.

On this trip, a pilgrimage in its way, I’m focusing less on the contents and more on the forging of the vessel. The molding, smoothing, refining. It’s a big job--endless, I suppose--but a satisfying one, as I find that my cup now overfloweth with a heady mixture of aquae vitae. Not the liquors I’d expected, necessarily, but almost everywhere I turn there seems to be a spring worth drinking from. As I’m peripatetic up to now, there can be no serious thought of a singular guru, a lone fountain. But as I trace out my path in time and space, teachers keep turning up. And naturally, they often turn up where least expected.

* * *

I’ve been travelling in Sikkim on a welcome detour from the itinerary T and I sketched out a couple of months ago. After the long bus ride from Kathmandu to the Indian border we craved some relief from the heat and density of the plains before turning South toward even hotter, denser places, so we made a spur-of-the-moment decision to head up to Darjeeling for a couple days of cool air, Tibetan street food, tea tasting, and other unabashedly touristic pleasures. While there, on a whim I obtained a free 15 day Sikkim permit in case we wanted to visit the tiny Himalayan state, and, one thing leading to the next, it was a no-brainer to take a jeep across the Teesta and explore some of the natural and cultural sites for which this place is justly famous. Well, famous amongst Bengali vacationers, orchid enthusiasts, tantric Buddhists, and mountaineers, at least. (What was the latest state motto according to a road sign we saw? “Sikkim: nature, adventure, agriculture?”) We threw together a week-long itinerary to take in some of the Tibetan Buddhist hot spots, including Pemayangtse monastery, seat of the Nyingma order in Sikkim. T and I have both visited our share of gompas, but neither of us was particularly interested in Buddhism at the time. Nor did our study abroad program, Pitzer in Darjeeling, (for all its strengths!) include anything likely to change that. The monasteries we visited were at the time merely a succession of unintelligible murals, noisy and hypnotic chanting, and general dissonance that, however, managed occasionally to achieve a sublime effect. I thought this time we’d be ready to absorb something substantive, actual teachings. In the event, Pemayangtse was spectacular, managing to feel both ancient and vibrant; besides the layers of Thangka paintings and daily rituals, it houses a one-of-a-kind sculpture a former abbot made over the course of five years of painstaking labor. (The effect is of the world’s largest, craziest doll house.) The gumba was everything we were hoping for, except that we left feeling no deeper connection to Tibetan Buddhism than we’d felt before. The door remained firmly closed--all the more frustrating, given its smoky glass window onto dancing lights and screwing deities beyond.

 The next day, less hopeful for a transcendent experience but still up for a walk, we hiked up to the other really old Nyingma gumba in the neighborhood, Sanga Choeling. Most of the monks in evidence were under 7 years old--these monasteries also serve as schools. We noticed a group of local people sitting outside and struck up a conversation with one of the men, a Gurung from a nearby town, to discover that today was the 49th day after the suicide of his wife. Relatives had gathered for the puja marking the occasion and we were invited in. We sat along one wall with the extended family (seemingly including only relatives
from the bereaved husband's side?) with our hands together in the posture of prayer, listening to the cacophony of young and old voices chanting Tibetan texts at different speeds, in different registers, to
the punctuation of the big drums beating now in 4, now 6, now 10.  The bereaved's head dipped in reverence, then lolled in sleep.  I felt myself drifting off to the glorious clamour, when the chanting came to a close.  We were invited to eat with the family outside the gumba: a full spread of Sikkim-style daal-bhaat, complete with a vat of golden melted butter.  We cleaned our plates and listened to the husband's response to this turn of fortune: he was under fifty and alone, now; ke garnu? what to do? We said our goodbyes, promising to stop and see the man if we were ever in Dentam, and walked back down the hill. We hadn't felt closed off from the life of the monastery this time--on the contrary--but neither did we feel any closer to the kernel, to what it was all about.

***

Buddhism took root in Tibet over a millennium ago when, as legends have it, Padma Sambhava a.k.a. Guru Rimpoche travelled across the Himalaya and subdued the resident demons. The forms that the dharma takes in Tibet even today have texts, imagery, theory, and techniques in common with the Indian Buddhism of the late first millennium A.D. This was a time when a body of mystical, esoteric practices called Tantra came to interpenetrate Buddhism, giving rise to a new path toward Enlightenment. Supposedly these techniques, involving yogic austerities and sexual imagery, were taught secretly by the Buddha to those devotees he felt were ready to hear them, and passed along in a lineage down to the present. More likely, it seems, they are a much later graft onto the original Buddhist stock. Whatever its origins, this approach, which came to be known as Vajrayana (the Diamond vehicle), is radically different from the dry, narrow path of the archetypal Theravada Buddhism. Its greatest novelty lay in the outlook it took towards human desire: instead of working to eradicate mental defilements, such as lust, through meditative practice, why not harness these strong emotions? Tantric practices, which span certain schools of Hinduism as well as Vajrayana Buddhism, have in common this radical turn towards the worldly, the bodily. Necessarily this is a risky path, as it is easy to get side tracked and seek sensory pleasures for their own sake rather than for the spiritual progress they can afford the seeker. It is also considered a remarkably rapid path through which one may attain the goal in as
little as a single lifetime.

In Tibet, Tantric forms and practices mingled further with the native shamanic/animistic beliefs called Bon,and the number of deities multiplied to include fierce “dharma protectors” and other subdued demons alongside
the various Bodhisattvas and Buddhas of past, present and future. Over the centuries, Tibetan Buddhism split into the four major schools that continue into the present (Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Geluk,
often distinguished by the color of their respective Rimpoches' hats), and each evolved elaborate bodies of ritual.  Into the twentieth century, European scholars dismissed the clamor and kaleidoscopic imagery of Tibetan Buddhism as a bastardization of the Buddha’s teaching. Where, in all the noisy, colorful ritual, was there any attempt to follow the path outlined by the Tathagata? What happened to the foundation of sila--morality--that was supposed to lie at the very foundation of Buddhism and was being trounced at every
turn by these meat eating, chang drinking, copulating lamas? In fact the core teachings have never been lost, though they may have been disguised under layer upon layer of ornate drapery. As Buddhism became the primary religion of the Tibetan people, it needed to take on more roles than simply being a method of purifying the mind if it was to cater to the needs of the masses. This is exactly what goes on at most gumbas (Tibetan monasteries) most of the time: religious ritual geared towards quotidian concerns, such as death rites. Of course the religious merit gained by such acts is intended to help the recipient as well as the monks inch closer to liberation, but this is not the mystical core of Tantric Buddhism. That goes on outside the institutional walls of the gumba, in caves and graveyards and other
liminal, inacessible places.

***

After visiting the Nyingma gumbas around Pelling, I was ready to give it a rest. The living tantric traditions I had been so excited about were receding to the level of otherness: another culture’s practices, exotic and opaque. It had been foolish to go grasping at this lead; such things as teachers and signposts on the path come to one by grace, can’t simply be willed or intellectualized into existence. And much as I might prefer a sexier, less ascetic path, I knew that the Theravada practice of Vipassana is a good practice for me, that I should be satisfied with it and leave these lamas alone.

As it happened, our next stop in Sikkim was to be Khecheperi Lake. The footprint-shaped lake itself is believed to have been created by theleft foot of the goddess Tara, while her body and head are constituted by the forested hills above and the cave at the top.  Sacred geography, indeed.  If nothing else, it should be a pretty place to explore for a couple of days, we figured, having more or less given up on gleaning much from the Nyingma (ancient school) Tibetan Buddhism so prevalent in West Sikkim. We followed a little hand painted sign to a plain looking guesthouse by the lake, plunked down our packs and looked around. My heart fell a little at first to see that the proprietor was a smooth-faced, longhaired kid of twenty or
so. Damn upstart, I guess I thought! Practically his first vocal act was to laugh long and hard when we spoke to him in Nepali. It wasn’t a malicious or rude sound, I realized, but a delighted one. A young woman who looked East Asian appeared and joined him in the laughter, like water tumbling down rocks. It was contagious; even we couldn’t help but smile a bit. He was simply surprised and delighted that we spoke as we did, and he was uninhibited in this expression of those sudden emotions.  The peals passed along with the couple’s astonishment and we fell into comfortable chatter: the simple rooms were 150 rupees a night, he was indeed the caretaker and she his Japanese wife, and would we like sweet or salty tea? After settling
in and looking around a bit, we talked more with the young couple. It turned out that he was a sort of plainclothes Lama called a Ngakpa Lama, one who had undergone lengthy and rigorous training but who was now leading a householder’s life. Conversation turned towards meditative techniques, and Sonam was happy to tell us about his experience with different stages of Tantric initiation and about his 3 year, 3 month, 3 week, 3 day, 3 hour, 3 minute, 3 second long retreat. He was a gushing tap of information, and later in our room T and I struggled to recall all that he had told us about his tradition.

The next day saw us heading up the hill and along the densely-forested ridge overlooking the little lake to the Tara Devi meditation cave. Sonam had sent us out with directions and a hand-drawn map, a little bag of leech-repellent medicine made from salt and wild Szechuan pepper, and instructions on how to respond if we saw a bear: if it was a little one, dog-sized, we should drop to the ground face-down and play dead. The bear would paw and nuzzle at us but we shouldn’t move, especially shouldn’t show our eyes, or he’d attack. If it was a big one, we should run like hell downhill or climb a tree. Truthfully, I was more worried about leeches. I’d encountered the little crawling blood-suckers in this region before, and the thought of bushwhacking through dense jungle teeming with them gave me the heebie-jeebies. In meditation the night before, my mind had kept wandering to images of the big green cattle-leeches I’d heard about dropping down on my head from the wet foliage above, swelling up with my blood. I tried to uproot my aversion; wouldn’t it be better to look at it as a little blood donation? What’s a few leeches? It’s not like they hurt, even, and there’s enough blood to go around! Wasn't this like the practice of Chod, in which one envisions methodically tearing oneself apart?  Didn't the Buddha feed himself to a hungry tigress in a former life?  And so on.

Equanimity is easier imagined than achieved, as the next day’s hike proved. From the start I kept looking down at my sneakers to check for the first signs of dark little inch-worm-like squigglers climbing up towards my ankles. Soon enough I started spotting them and bending down to flick them off. My pace quickened up the hill in the dense, grey morning. After a stop for tea in a village house, our halfway point, our path narrowed and the foliage closed in. The leeches were denser here and bigger, and we started finding crawling above our knees and even on our upper bodies. Panic began playing at the edges of my mind, and a surge of adrenaline sent me shooting up the slope. I wanted to clear this sinister tunnel of foliage as soon as I could and reach a point where I might safely stop and pick off the buggers. But stopping meant giving ground-crawlers equal opportunity. I half wanted to turn back, to plunge back down the slope and not stop until
we were back in the village house and out of leech territory. But we were close now, presumably, and thankfully the leeches started to thin out. We saw strings of prayer flags and a few evergreens and soon came to the old wooden house that had served as a solitary retreat for a lama. It was empty but showed signs of recent visitation. The shrine room was still set up for worship but was also occupied by a
swarm of bees. Neraby, the cave itself was outfitted with a simple shrine with a carved black stone image of Tara and a few brass butter lamps and stupa offerings that had been knocked over by an impious
bear, perhaps. Here, finally, was an area devoted to spiritual exploration, as opposed to institutional religious practice. We marveled for a while at the way the root tendrils penetrated the cave walls and fanned out along the floor. in the damp, cool air, a fine white mold grew on them. We sat for a while to meditate on a rock
bench before turning back down the hill to face the leeches again.

We met Sonam on the way down. He had been out foraging wild forest vegetables for the communal evening meal: 3 kinds of fiddlehead ferns, nettles, and watercress. His ankles were bleeding from a few telltale
spots, and he was radiating good cheer to the four directions. We talked long into the evening, the young lama doing his best to answer our many questions about his life and practice, speaking with authority, humility, good will and humor. I wish I could remember half of that conversation, but what shines through is Sonam's powerful presence. Talking later in our room, T and I decided we couldn't remember the last time we had met a 23-year old with such a sense of directedness. His charisma was grounded in wisdom and compassion, the two qualities esteemed above all in tantric Buddhism as the precursor of bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment.

The next morning we payed the unbelievably modest rates for the room and food and walked us down to the jeep that was waiting. We pointed our noses towards Tashiding, site of another gumba, knowing that we had already found what we'd come to Sikkim for. 

As I prepare to post this ramble from steamy Orissa, hundreds of miles South along India's East coast, I think back on cool, quiet, Sikkim, its ancient gumbas, mad lamas and manifest deities.  It's nice to know that the door is unlocked.

Gorkhaland Revisited

Crumbling house in Darjeeling town, "Gorkhaland"

Down the bumpy road from Kalimpong bazar we trundle, out of the stink and relative bustle of the town.  Kalimpong: a former "spies' nest" of a hill station still bustling along modestly with its skein of streets crammed with tiny momo restaurants.  Kalimpong.  This is where my engagement with the Nepali-speaking world began 5 1/2 years ago, though it is an Indian town in most of its particulars.  Kalimpong and the rest of Darjeeling District, despite sharing the state designation of West Bengal with Kolkata and Siliguri and all the vast Bengali-speaking plains in between, is populated in the vast majority by Nepali speakers who have been settled in the region for generations.  This is India, though, as anyone here will be quick to tell you if you make the mistake of referring to him or her as a Nepali.  Nepal, from this vantage point, is a curious and rather backward place, and many Kalimpong residents have never crossed the nearby border.  This is India: in their morning assemblies the school children belt our the Indian national anthem and Indian rupees change hands in the bazars, where the shops are run mostly by Marwaris and Biharis. That much identity is clear.  Moving down to the state level, however, the issue is more complicated.  Technically and administratively this is West Bengal, yes, but since 2008 none of the shopfronts display this fact openly.  Where "West Bengal" was once written, hastily-printed letters now declare this "Gorkhaland."  Gorkha is the name not just for the famed Nepali soldiers who fought so fiercely, khukuris in hand, for the British, but for the Nepali-speakers of Darjeeling District (or what is also, confusingly, called North Bengal) who have also adopted the title to distinguish themselves both from the Bengalis to the South and the Nepalis to the West. 

In practice, daily life outside the bazars is much like that in Eastern Nepal.  The striking difference is one of identity politics: whereas in Nepal a shared Nepali identity is so much a given that the differences between caste, tribal, and ethnic groups stand out starkly as markers of community, here the common plight of being under-recognized works to draw the Gorkhas together as a more-or-less cohesive group while blurring the differences between Rai (all 40-plus subgroups), Limbu, Newar (not to mention the dozens of Newar castes), Chhetri, etc.  Of course it's no Shangri-La: Bahuns (Nepali for Brahmins) are still sometimes resented as the most dominant, powerful group, "small castes" and "untouchables" are still tangibly low on the social ladder despite legislation to the contrary, and the pre-Gorkha inhabitants of the region, Tibet and Bhutan-derived Bhotias and indigenous Lepchas, have become minorities struggling to maintain their own distinct identities, languages, and traditions.  In fact the melting pot effect of Gorkhaland tends to discourage other caste or tribe-related languages as well: it's fairly rare to hear any of the Rai or Limbu languages here, for instance, despite the large numbers of those groups in Kalimpong. 

We were bumping along the road from the bazar.  Bumping along towards Bung Busty, one of several villages within an hour's walk from the Bazar.  From here, where the paved road peters out, I look back to see the town crowded along the ridge between two hills, the gleaming roof of the big Hindu temple, the flattened quadrilateral of the fair ground.  The town's momo stalls and weekly market are a world away here, I think, as I catch a whiff of cow manure and wood smoke and watch the dogs tussling in the dust.  It's quiet and sunny, and all around me are newly-flooded rice paddies and the enormous, lazy leaves of banana trees.  I'm back, and I'm not sure how to feel.  5 years ago, on the Pitzer in Darjeeling program, I was plonked down with a host family in this village after a 2 week crash course in Nepali.  My now-partner and traveling companion, Thandiwe, lived with another family a short walk away, and though we were friendly at the time we didn't see much of each other outside of school hours.  I found my host family nice enough but never really clicked with them in the way I later found was possible.  There was old Aapa, the patriach, an old Lepcha man and a joker who never took me too seriously.  He found my initial stumblings in Nepali hilarious.  (What's that you say?  bhudi dukhyo ki budhi dukhyo? Your stomach hurts or your old lady hurts?  Ha ha ha).  His wife, my first Nepali Aama, was a proud Chhetri (or Ksatriya, a high Hindu caste) woman who had married Aapa in what must have been a passionate and scandalous move in its day.  I found her intimidating, as I could understand hardly one word in ten that she uttered, and many of her utterances sounded like commands.  Their youngest son, Lha Daju, and his wife, my Bhauju (sister-in-law), were closest to me in age, but with a seven-year old daughter they were hardly peers.  As much as with anyone, I connected with the 12-year old Ruben, a madhesi (i.e. someone from the Bengali plains) who stayed with the family and went to school in Kalimpong in exchange for doing odd jobs around the house.  We'd sometimes walk together after dinner with flashlight over the terraced fields to find and fix a blockage in the water pipe, or sit by the fire and do our best to communicate.  It was a memorable time of expanding my horizons and generally everything that a good immersive study abroad experience ought to be, but it was also often a trying one.  I remember waking up in the middle of my first night with my host family, in my too-short bed in my too-short room, opening the window, and puking into the potted plants lined up outside.  There was a lot of puking that semester, and a lot of stumbling communication.
Five years later, I haven't called, my one letter probably didn't even arrive, and here I am showing up at the house again.  I've heard through the Pitzer program staff that Aapa and Bhaauju have both died in the meantime, and have no idea what to expect.  From the outside, though, the place looks much the same as ever: the old building (now the kitchen and dining room) and the newer concrete house with their tidy dirt yard in between; the mango tree and potted plants, the home-made beehive and the kitchen garden below.  With a deep breath and a nervous smile I step into the yard.  Not exactly the bustle of activity I remember; the place is deathly quiet.  I call out a namaste and there emerges from the house a young woman I don't recognize with a baby in her arms.  She greets me with a friendly but slightly quizzical look.

Soon she, Thandiwe, and I are sitting in the little-used formal living room (in my nearly 4 months here I remember sitting here twice) and chatting.  She is Lha Daju's second wife, a Limbu; his second daughter is thus a Limbu-Lepcha-Chhetri mix and almost 7 months old.  The three of them are alone in the house these days, Aama having moved closer to the Bazar to live with a daughter after her husband died almost 2 years ago.  Ruben has grown up and lives in the plains with his family.  The two dogs I remember have died and are replaced by two more, and instead of the broiler chickens I remember, there's a small fish pond.  Life goes on, evidently.  And the timing of my visit is good: Ama, Lha's first daughter, and some other relatives and friends are all due to arrive this evening for the weekend.  I am invited back the next day to meet them all.  The next morning, we arrive to find the place full, with the various generations present forming a pyramid: a solid base of 6 or 7 kids, 3 young-to-middle-aged adults in the middle, and Aama by herself at top.  Upon catching sight of me she takes of her glasses and wipes a tear from her face in one motion.  Seated next to her, we hear in excruciating detail, through Aama's intermittent tears, the story of Aapa's last day.  Of what everyone was watching on TV when he fell down complaining of chest pain, of how the doctors in the Bazar were unavailable and how he was taken in a hurry down to Siliguri in the plains, not to return.  Aama was left behind at the house, waiting to hear the worst.  Here one day, gone the next, and Aama left alone after their decades together no longer wants to live in the house.  It is unclear how interested she is in living at all, although later at dinner she is all coos and smiles playing with her newest granddaughter.

Lha is much the same as I remember, still working on odd construction and other local projects in the neighborhood, though more and more of his peers are shipping out to Qatar or Malaysia to find work.  He is as cheerful and energetic as ever; we don't ask about his first wife's death after long illness from kidney failure, and he doesn't bring it up.  Little Anushka, his older daughter, now twelve, is bigger and no less bold, and seems to enjoy her baby half-sister.  One of Lha's own sisters feeds us lavishly (with us ignoring grumbles that we aren't eating enough) and we are enjoying playing with the happy, bouncy baby ourselves when the back-up power cuts out.  It's getting late, time to go.  We say our goodbyes, making no promises to return again but glad to have visited now.  Aama, proud and beautiful to the last, says she'll meet us in her dreams, in heaven. 

R.I.P.  Nima Tshering Lepcha
           Namkomit Lepcha

Nepal panorama

<< Leaf plate vendor in Asan, Kathmandu

Continuing with the attempt to cram weeks of helter skelter into a few hundred words...I have some more coherent, thoughtful posts on the docket, but for now, an attempt at a panoramic shot of the last few weeks, in which I've closed a loop that began 5 1/2 years ago, when I first visited Darjeeling on my initial foray to India and Nepal.  We're always closing loops in space through time: every time you return to the same room in your house you close a loop on the four-dimensional map of your life.  Those places we live become a tangle of small, overlapping, intersecting loops, and then the occasional lone line shoots out to a far place, across an ocean perhaps, to where another tangle begins.  My tangle in Nepal of the last couple years is now part of a finished loop that begins and ends in Darjeeling; soon the thread will head back into uncharted territories to the South.  Puri, Varanasi, Rajasthan, who knows?  
               I left off aboard a sleeper class train to Gorakhpur, near the Nepal border.  We stayed there for the afternoon, Thandiwe and I, to check out the Gorakhnath temple, which commemorates the founder tantric Siddhi who founded Hatha yoga.  But this proved to be something of a dead-end.  Nothing very interesting happening spiritually that we could unearth, and when a Brahmin priest beckoned me over it was only to try and coax large bills out of us for a tiny puja.  Ah, India, the land of extremes, love-child of spirituality and materialism.  The highlight of that day at the temple complex wasn't the life-size likenesses of Gorakhnath's lineage holders or trying futilely to round up some information, anything, on the significance of the place and the teachings, but rather going for turn on a peddle-boat in the square pool with a local school boy excited to practice his English.  A few hours after arriving at this place, one I had been quite excited about, we were ready to leave.  This, of course, is the other side of spontaneity in traveling.  Onward, onward.  The next stop on our sometimes-pilgrimage is Kushinagar, where the Buddha reached Mahaparinirvana.  i.e. died, at the age of eighty, having turned countless of his countrymen and women onto the road to liberation that he uncovered.  The site was long forgotten and has still not reached the popularity of the other major Buddhist pilgrimages, and we are there at the height of summer, when the place is half-abandoned.  Lucky us, actually.  We are able to visit the 25-century-old Buddha statue in peace, and meditate a while under a Pipal tree a stone's throw from the stupa that marks the spot of his death.  A powerful place, resounding in its tranquility.  The only activity around us the slow, steady labor of the man cutting the grass with a machete.  We tour the various temples, Japanese, Burmese, Chinese, spend a sticky night in an otherwise empty guesthouse, and pose for a photo op at the request of a troup of visiting monks from Burma.  The next day, we cross into Nepal, and with the transition comes a  palpable sense of homecoming as I shift from halting, limited Hindi to fluent, comfortable Nepali. From Kushinagar it's ahead 80 years to the place of Buddha's birth in Lumbini.  A stark contrast to the emptiness of Kushinagar, but not in an unpleasant way.  The expected temples from every Buddhist country--each claiming a share in this particular meritorious pie--were present, and rather oddly thrown together in the Japanese-designed park grounds, but the open layout and abundant green space keep the place from feeling too Disneyland.  We pedal around the grounds on creaky Indian cycles rented from our funky guesthouse, and make our first stop near a little straw hut whence an old man has emerged and is beckoning to us.  Definitely not disneyland.  We squat on the earth floor of his shelter or sit on straw mats, and listen to the man speak Hindi as he explains his existence, unquestioned, to us.  His life consists of worship, sadhana, little else, it seems.  He rises early and visits the site of Buddha's birth a short walk away, prays, perhaps meditates, cooks for himself, prays more, sleeps.  He indicates a few fried flatbreads from his breakfast, hour before, and indicates that we eat.  I'm hungry and do so gratefully, savoring the simple food and open-hearted generosity of the man, and hoping my stomach is ready for this kind of generosity.  Leaving the man with a few rupees for supplies--oil, flour, rice, dal, and salt his only necessities--we stow our cycles for a time and enter the main part of the complex.  At the heart of it all is the ancient complex of Stupa ruins that marks the place where the queen of Kapilvastu gave birth to Gautama by a pool, in the heart of her prosperous kingdom.  Again, the time of year and time of day (early) allow us a few moments of relative solitude at this normally crowded site, and we are able to sit and calm our minds in Samatha meditation under a huge Pipal tree that housed the shrine where visitors pay respect.
Meditation has been the constant thread through this trip, the stabilizing force, the quiet at the heart of the madness.  Today, weeks after Lumbini and Kushinagar, while meditating in my gust house room in Darjeeling, a fitting image appeared and succeeded in distracting me: our mind as a disk spinning with great momentum.  In the kind of calming meditation called Anapana, the simple act of focusing the mind on the natural breath, we reach out and try to stop the wheel's habitual, seemingly inevitable motion.  It's moving too fast, and we succeed only in generating heat and friction in the few seconds we can manage to grasp at it.  But, with discipline, we reach out again and again.  As our fingers callous and strengthen we grasp harder and for longer, and the wheel slows.  And once the spinning is under control, the next stage of the work can begin.  Having achieved a degree of Samadhi, contol over the mind, one can work to develop Panna or Prajna, wisdom, through the technique of insight meditation (vipasyana).  One can start to examine the nature of the wheel, the patterns that once appeared as a blur.  And one can start to try and change some of those patterns, generating a great deal more heat and friction (physical and mental discomfort) along the way...Yes, I am back in the thrall of Vipassana, as taught in various international centers by S.N. Goenke of India.  His a pure form of Burmese Theravada Buddhism, which means it's a philosophy combined with a method, without the superstructure of ritual to complicate it.  As Goenka-ji presents the Dhamma, or teachings, or path, it is entirely non-sectarian, merely a remedy for universal sufferings that therefore must itself be universal..  The ten-day courses are designed so that anyone, from any background, can come, and, if she is prepared to set aside every aspect of her normal life, all habits and creature comforts from sufficient sleep and food to reading and writing and communicating with other humans.  As I described after my 10-day sit at Dharmapakasa in Illinois back in March, it's an incredibly hard, cold, dry, and lonely undertaking, but one that effects remarkable transformation.  Like life in the chrysalis, I suppose.  On the tenth day, when the vow of silence is broken and Noble Silence is replaced by Noble Chattering, in Goenka's words, the sense of not just relief but love, gratitude, and good will is palpable.  Well.  Four months on from my own experience with all this, I wasn't quite ready to sign on again, but I was eager for Thandiwe to experience what I had (which makes me sound like a sadist, but I know she's stronger than me in some crucial ways, and that it would as worthwhile for her as it was for me).  While she was sitting her 10 days at the center on the edge of the Kathmandu Valley, therefore, I decided to volunteer as a dhamma worker.  Even the requisite three daily hour-long sits was plenty for me, I discovered, and the schedule had its own demands.  I re-discovered that I'm a lousy disciplinarian (the Nepali guys under 30 took almost every opportunity to start chattering!), but felt the rewards of service when I got to reach out to struggling meditators the way a volunteer reached out to me, in loving kindness, and gave me the courage to stick it out on Day 4 when I was ready to quit.  And what could have been a lonely time is redeemed many times over by the kindness and compassion of the other volunteers, all Nepali, from 16 to 67 years old.  The course remains slow, but leavened with a pen and notebook, a couple novels, and work to do, the 18 hour days fairly flew in comparison to my previous Vipassana stay.  And at the end, sweet reunion, sweet communion, sweet exodus.  And Epic theological, geological, and erotological conversations with a rejuvenated Thandiwe, who had the expected Hard Time but also felt cleansed and clarified.
One upshot of this purification: the sudden return to our haunt on the outskirts of the tourist district, Thamel, came as a slap in the face. After one night we flee south, to Patan, and spend our last five days in Nepal based out of a sleepy little guesthouse over the event horizon of that particular black hole.  Still, we decide not to renew our Nepal visas and buy bus tickets to take us to the Eastern border.  After a social last few days, we find ourselves aboard the night bus to Karakbhitta, on the boarder with Siliguri and the gateway to the Darjeeling Hills of "Gorkhaland," Nepali-speaking India.  We've come almost 100 km west from the Valley after a late start due to a Kathmandu jam and have almost reached the turn-off that will take us down out of the hills and to the east-bound, straight road across the Terai.  We've got adjacent seats near the front (leg room!  A small miracle) and are settled in.  The sun is sinking behind the hills on a surprisingly clear evening, and the moving-vehicle trance is enhanced by the beat of the folk music blasting from the stereo.  Soon it is dark, and I doze, waking to a feeling of peace and security in the face of the almost complete unknown.  I feel coddled, soothed by the warm night air, the music, the banana trees flying by, the jarring turns in the road.  I am able to relax completely, to cherish the moment, knowing that it is fleeting.  Anitya, anitya, anitya, intones the voice of Goenke in my head as on the Vipassana course recordings: impermanence, impermanence, impermanence.  Sure enough, the bliss is not to last long.  Before dawn my reverie is cut short by the all-too-familiar sulphurous belches that precede most of my explosive gastrointestinal episodes in India and Nepal.  This time I reach for a Cipro tablet, knowing the time for holistic, preventative management and time for the big guns.  This is a bus ride, hours left to go, and the closest thing to a bathroom on board is the sliding glass windowpane next to me.  Thankfully the rumblings subside into a minor, vague unease, and Thandiwe sleeps on unaware of my brush with hilarity--which is what would have ensued elsewhere on the bus, I can only imagine, when the passengers caught sight of my skinny ass hanging out the window.  Doubly lucky I am, for within hours the bus is stopped at a banda.  Apparently along this stretch of road in Jhapa a few months ago, a man was killed in a road accident, and his family has still not been compensated.  The strategy, as usual, is to shut down all traffic until a satisfactory outcome is achieved.  Glad not be on a schedule, I ready myself for a long stopped in single-file traffic on an unglamorous strip.  But today the appropriate wheels are greased, and we're on our way and rolling within a few hours.  By mid-day we cross the border into India, suspected visa problems amounting to nothing, and catch a jeep for the hills.  The ride is stunningly beautiful as we are whisked up and out of the heat and bustle of the lowlands into the terraces and tea gardens of the hills.  Behind us stretches the gangetic plain, off into the haze.  Ahead lie fog-enveloped ridges, hill stations like Kurseong and Kalimpong draped over them.  The toy train to Darjeeling criss-crosses the motorable road, the air quickly cools, we are in another world.                     

A couple of loose fragments:
Getting intentionally lost in the labyrinthine streets of Patan with a new friend from Vipassana.  Stopping to eat a big clay dish of the famous, rich Bhaktapur yogurt called Jujudhau (imported from the other end of the Kathmandu Valley), and stopping again when we see a jumbled assortment of musical instruments in a shop window.  We bang on drums, pluck at guitars and what looks like a fretless six-string banjo, until the owner distracts us with something even better: an instrument he's made, like a one-headed drum with a long spring attached.  Shaken, the spring vibrates and reverberates against the drumhead, sounding like storm winds.  Another, smaller one imitates a cricket.  Soon we are all jamming, improvising against a typical Newari street-procession beat...............and at the Vipassana center, craving fellowship, I head up to the course office with a bag of good ground coffee I've brought from the states.  Unsure what the other volunteers will make of this (what, you've been keeping foodstuffs in your room?) I'd considered just making myself a cup to get me through the slow day, but decide to chance it.  Everyone turns out to be as eager as I, and I make a strong, black, sweet cup for everyone in the office.  The next day the ritual is repeated, though I wonder if we're not breaking Vipassana law by craving pleasant sensations, and the next evening, when I must decline, until the coffee's gone.  Small pleasures.