On the streets of Lhasa during my lunch break, I saw a woman with a long table on which she served ramen noodles from a heaping huge bowl.  In Tibet, Muslim women wear elegant black snoods, and this ramen chef wore such a black lace snood under a sunhat.  I walked up to her table and pointed to first the bowl of noodles and then the jar of red chili.  She took a little bowl, plopped a heaping serving of noodles into it, then mixed in soy sauce and chili sauce and handed it to me, along with packaged wooden chopsticks.  I sat down, opened up the chopsticks and started eating under the fascinated and amused gaze of three children who’d sat down on the bench by me.  If nothing else, my eating left-handed may have fascinated them.  I would prefer that rather than my incompetence with chopsticks.

The cook wasn’t impressed with my method of scooping up noodles that were covered with the hot sauce and then scooping up dry noodles; she picked up my bowl and mixed the sauce up thoroughly, so that there were no dry noodles.  If I had been eating spicy Indian food, I could have eaten from a bowl of bland yogurt and munched on bread or pappadums.  Instead, I had nothing to alternate with the hot sauce.  I plowed my way through and observed the stinging of my dry lips and sniffed because I didn’t want to blow my nose at the table. At some point the cook noticed the condition of my nose and gave me a piece of toilet paper with which to blow it, which, amused, I did. 

While I was eating and making a spectacle of myself (because, incidentally, Lhasa is a place to gawk and be gawked at), I noticed a white juniper stove in which offerings of juniper were burning.  I then noticed the colorful and ornate doorway to a small whitewashed temple.  This was behind the noodle stand, and I eagerly anticipated visiting the temple as soon as I was done eating. I also noticed, to my amusement, that I was practically next door to a real indoor restaurant that even had its name in English.  After I emptied my bowl except for some red liquid at the bottom, I pulled a fifty yuan bill out of my wallet, and the cook pointed at a ten yuan bill, so I gave her that and she handed me back the fifty.  So I think I got a filling meal for a few pennies. 

I got up and headed for the little temple, to be accosted by numerous beggars who sat cross-legged on the ground along the path in front of the temple.  I wouldn’t give any of them money, since I didn’t want to start a riot, and I kept walking toward the prayer wheels.  As a ragged young male beggar approached me on the right, I held my water bottle slightly out, and he took it out of my hand, although I had not meant to give it to him.  This struck me as very funny and I suppressed a laugh.  The bottle in fact only contained about two inches of water. 

I walked the few more steps into the temple and spun the two-foot-tall gold prayer wheels with gusto; the temple contained a concise line of the wheels.  I then joined the crowd of pilgrims circumambulating around an Avalokiteshvara shrine that seemed tiny after my morning at the Potala.  But it was still quite ornate:  the gold-painted bodhisattva wore a gold crown incrusted with turquoise and coral.  I circumambulated around the shrine three times; this involved fervently murmuring pilgrims pushing me through a narrow and darkish corridor behind the shrine.  I then headed back out and down the street to the hotel, where I used the Internet for half an hour.

Sera Monastery

As we rode to the Sera Monastery, which is on the outskirts of Lhasa, Gyantzing told me that it housed five thousand monks before the Chinese invasion, and now it only has eight hundred monks.  To me, that still seems like an awfully big number, but at the same time I don’t think it’s appropriate for the colonial government to limit the number of people who want a spiritual and communal life (or at least supposedly spiritual:  not all monks are good, and because of the Chinese occupation, monks and nuns aren’t allowed to study as deeply as they should, and as they do in Dharamsala).  Gyantzing explained that boys have to be at least sixteen years old to become monks now, and the Chinese authorities look at their background first, to make sure they have no relatives in India or relatives who are political protesters.  I think that generally boys who become monks when they’re only five years old aren’t old enough to know whether that really is their calling, but on the other hand I’ve read that there’s so much for them to learn that it’s supposedly best if they start at such a very early age.  Authorities checking potential monks’ backgrounds strikes me as much more oppressive and intrusive than the authorities making them wait till they’re sixteen.  Strangely, I didn’t think to ask how old girls had to be to become nuns, but I guess it didn’t occur to me because we were at an all-male monastery and my male tour guide has yet to say anything about nuns.

Gyantzing told me that the Chinese destroyed the statue of Padmasambhava in front of Mount Kailash, a huge statue, right after it was built.  Power tripping much?  They did the same with another statue.  This is a recent policy; when the Chinese government doesn’t approve of a public statue—like they’d approve of something Buddhist anyway!—then they tear it down.  As I pointed out, it’s all thanks to power-tripping politicians.  But China’s not the only country that has power-tripping politicians—the USA has a blatantly power-tripping Whiteboyworld ungovernable government. 

We were on the road to the monastery, when I spotted yaks for the first time, standing around amid a thicket.  The narrow road was lined with merchants who had simple little booths.  They didn’t look like they made a good living, with their dingy clothing and unkempt hair.  The road leads directly to the monastery, where visitors buy tickets as though the monastery was an amusement park.  That’s how the Chinese treat Buddhism in Tibet: as an amusement for tourists, a Buddhist Disneyland.  Bad karma, no biscuit.

At the end of the narrow road stood the looming whitewashed monastery, such a different world from the Chinese streets of Lhasa.  After we got out of the car and Gyantzing purchased the tickets, we walked up steps at a dramatic slant.  I saw whitewashed buildings to my left and to my right.

The first place we visited was the printing press, a room that has traditionally been used as a printing press for centuries.  The walls were lined with red-painted shelves and shelves full of carved wooden blocks that looked antique, darkened by black ink.  Some shelves contained modern books in Tibetan but I also saw stacks of the long, slender pages of Tibetan traditional scriptures, not only on shelves but also stacked on the floor.  There were low glass cabinets forming a square in the center of the room, like in a shop.   On top of the back glass cabinet were stacked black-printed banners on yellow fabric lying on top of the glass cabinet.  Gyantzing explained to me that these are pinned onto a door for good luck, and I decided to purchase a banner for me and another for my brother.  The banners I purchased are quite different:  the one with Manjushri at the top protects you from illness, and the one that I got for myself is a mandala.  At some point while I wandered around this fascinating room, I noticed a couple of monks staring at me.  They were doing it the same way as villagers visiting the Potala had stared at me, as though I were strange and exotic, but it was disconcerting to be stared at by monks.

In approximately the center of the monastery is a shell of a building that was bombed after the Chinese invasion.  As tour guides will tell visitors, this was supposedly during the Cultural Revolution, but in fact the Chinese started bombing Lhasa in 1959.  One wall facing the entrance stood, white stone blocks with black-framed windows, and it was disconcerting to see weeds growing out of the windows.  Weirder still was looking through the windows and seeing the sky and the hill slanting upward, instead of seeing the interior of a building with brocade banners and gold Buddha statues.  I walked around the corner, and very little of the opposite wall or side walls remained.  It looked like an ancient ruin, and yet it had been intact before the late nineteen-fifties.  It is a great shame that the Chinese won’t even admit that this sort of thing happened before the Cultural Revolution.  Liars. Oh, yeah, we can’t let honesty get in the way of ideology.

We took a walk through the main part of Sera Monastery, with a functioning prayer hall and little rooms containing statues of Shakyamuni, Tsongkapa, and the like.  After our visits to Ganden Monastery, the Potala, and the Jokhang Temple, the art and décor in Sera Monastery’s temples and shrine rooms seemed redundant, though nonetheless beautiful and stirring.  Despite the occupation, I still sensed spiritual energy and a degree of peacefulness.  There were a few other tourists, particularly a large group of Germans.  Most of the tourists in Tibet are Chinese, and this is only March, so the tourist season won’t actually begin for a couple months.

Large red double doors lead into a courtyard surrounded by a whitewashed stone wall.  Inside the courtyard are some trees, and when Gyantzing and I entered it, the courtyard was also full of red-clad monks, most of whom looked between the ages of sixteen and forty.  They were practicing the traditional Tibetan debating, which to an outsider looks quite comical.  They split into twos, and one monk stands before the other and asks a question, stretching out his arms and slapping his palms together.  The other answers, and as he finishes his answer, he stretches out his arms and slaps his palms together.  This is often done with smiles and laughter, so fortunately it’s all in good fun and hopefully not too competitive.  Sometimes one monk questions a group of four monks.  After watching this for about half an hour, Gyantzing and I wandered into another section of courtyard, where middle-aged monks debated in a much quieter and gentler manner, while sitting cross-legged on the ground.  That wasn’t nearly as theatrical to watch.

Between three and five in the afternoon, monks entertain tourists at Sera Monastery by practicing their traditional debating in the monastery’s courtyard.  Before I left on this trip, I read an online report presented by the International Campaign for Tibet; it was specifically for people who plan to be tourists in Tibet, and among other things it explained the monks at Sera Monastery still debate as they had in the past, but now it entertains tourists and the topics of their debates are much simpler than they were before the Chinese invasion.  They aren’t allowed to study as much, and they are not allowed to study Tibetan Buddhism with the depth that previous generations studied and practiced.  The gurus, the Rimpoches, are in exile and teaching practitioners outside of Tibet, not in it. 

We walked slowly up a path that went up, up the mountain.  The mountain itself was a light brown color and crumbly with rocks, some of which were quite large.  Not much plant life grew high on the mountain; that’s a clue that we’re at a high elevation.  Above, I gazed at bright and colorful pictures of bodhisattvas painted on rocks, some of which were very high up.  I imagined robed painters climbing up to precarious locations just so they could paint Buddhas and bodhisattvas on mountain rocks.  I don’t actually know whether monks, nuns or laypeople paint the pictures on rocks; I suspect it doesn’t occur to anyone to let nuns or laywomen do it.

In the distance, high on the mountain, is a yellow-painted stone temple that Gyantzing explained is in front of Tsongkapa’s favorite meditation cave.  I remembered the small Tibetan temple in front of the Buddha’s austerities cave near Bodh Gaya, India.  During Tsongkapa’s time, the meditation cave would have been a simple cavern without any ornate temple in front of it.

We climbed up and got closer to huge painted rocks and to a tall skinny empty tower from which a huge thangka is hung on Losar.  It was very narrow, with slightly slanting walls and the obligatory black-framed windows, but Gyantzing explained that inside, the tower is empty; there’s a staircase but no furniture or artwork.  Of course, the building’s sole purpose is to display the giant thangka. 

In front of the tower was a plateau, and I stepped near the edge, amid the shrubbery, and standing at this lookout point, I gazed at the distant Potala. One of the enormous, flattish stones next to the tower was covered with several bright Green Taras.  We turned to head back toward the lively monastery, and I noticed a woman sitting on the ground and wearing a brimmed hat and colorful striped shawl, and I thought she looked Peruvian.