I had left Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, with my tour guide and driver.  When we arrived in the village of Gyantse, I gazed at a fascinating fortress-monastery perched on a mountain.  It looks impossible to reach and no doubt is meant to look that way.  It’s as if King Ludwig II of Bavaria came to Tibet and designed the fortress-monastery.  Down below it is the charming Palcho Monastery and an amazing stupa that’s Tibetan style below but Nepalese style above.  Many big dogs—Tibetan mastiffs, I surmise—lay around in front of the monastery, and they were obviously strays, given how dirty their coats were.  I thought that stray dogs in India generally look healthier.  Looking at the dogs, I remembered the Tibetan saying that stray dogs hang out around monasteries because they were bad monks in previous lives. 

According to Gyantzing, in the year 1480, King Repten Kunpeng founded the Palcho Monastery, under the first Panchen Lama.  It housed two hundred thousand monks before the Chinese invasion of 1950 (I just can’t call it the “Peaceful Liberation of Tibet”), and it’s down to only sixty-eight monks now.  “Chukhungs” means “house of the Buddha.”  Sangharakshita was an Indian teacher who came before Padmasambhava but couldn’t suppress the demons, according to legend, unlike Padmasambhava.  He was a hundred years old before the king came.  Now he must be much older than that; he’s a Western scholar who wrote a book about Siddhartha Gautama, and it’s called Who is the Buddha?  Oh, I guess that’s a different Sangharakshita, named after the earlier one.  I named a cat Atisha.

I wrote the above notes while Gyantzing was talking and we were sightseeing in Gyantse, which he also told me is a town known for its horse races.  Sure enough, I saw quite a number of horses with wooden carts.  We explored the Pelkor Chode or Palcho Monastery, which was a lot like the other monasteries we previously visited:  colorful murals, a chanting hall that is still used by monks rather than like a museum, and lovely gold statues. 

We first followed the path leading to the temple.  I spun a row of prayer wheels, and then we walked through a gate with old murals to the left and right: snow lions and big orange tigers caught my eye.  Cats, of course.  The entrance to the temple, on the veranda, was flanked by vibrantly colorful, larger-than-life images of the guardian kings of the four directions.  As Gyantzing has pointed out, all Tibetan temples have the four kings at the entrance.  Inside, the fourteenth century murals were seriously blackened with smoke from centuries of butter lamps that used to sit on wooden benches that are like stairs.  Along one wall, those steps still held butter lamps and looked quite charming as the flames flickered in the mostly dark prayer hall.  An enormous Maitreya statue sat on a throne centered in this temple, and his head loomed high above.

Another shrine room displayed a row of Buddha statues, particularly a larger-than-life Shakyamuni in the center.  The statue itself is original, but the crown and other details were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution (or earlier; tour guides are trained to acknowledge that the Cultural Revolution was wrong but to pretend that the Chinese invasion of Tibet was good and peaceful) and have since been replaced.  Along the edges of the room were the huge figures of the eight spiritual daughters and sons of the Buddha—all with gold faces and blue hair and patchwork/appliquéd brocade robes, like at so many temples.  After circumambulating the room, and looking high up at these statues, I said, “I think the reason they’re so big is so that they’re more awe-inspiring.”  In the main room, I noticed a stretch of what looked like quilts, and two of them were reminiscent of American quilt patterns.  But the fabric looked like it was probably more local, and I rather suspect it’s a coincidence.

I briefly parted with Gyantzing, as I entered the six-story Pango Chorten (“chorten” is Tibetan for “stupa”).  The façade is a combination of Tibetan and Nepalese style, with Nepalese big Buddha eyes toward the top, such as those at Swayambhunath and Boudhanath in Kathmandu.  I climbed around inside, ducking to get through the low doorways to little shrine rooms on all six levels of the stupa.  Each shrine room contained at least one large, colorful statue, approximately life-size.  Typically the walls were painted with murals of mandalas or bodhisattvas.  

The Pango Chorten was really like a mandala, with six different levels; visitors can go up to all of them except the very top.  Gyantzing warned me to duck because the doorways, except on the top floor, were very low.  When I got to the first one, I ducked into the room and gasped at sight of a colorful and lively bodhisattva along one wall, and colorful murals covering the other walls.  I turned to head out and promptly bumped my forehead on the doorframe.  A couple of chupa-clad women with a baby and a toddler saw me, and I comically rubbed my forehead while laughing, and they all laughed with me.  As we continued circling around, the toddler would look at me and rub her forehead with her head in a round O.  Good thing I didn’t bump my head hard. Fortunately, I remembered to duck after that initial gaff.  The low ceiling forces pilgrims to bow as they enter the shrine.    

I kept going around the stupa, and the first level was mainly fierce deities and dakinis.  Another level was mainly Taras (an especially popular female bodhisattva in the Tibetan pantheon) of different colors, though I cannot recall whether she came in all twenty-one colors.  Another level displayed sculptures of lamas, such as Tsongkapa in his peaked yellow hat.  At the top (a fantastic lookout point!) were Buddhas and murals of very detailed mandalas.  On all levels were very loud pigeons.

In Gyantse there were indeed a plethora of horses, two of which stood eating out of a sack pulled over the muzzle.  Many of the horses were pulling carts, whether we were still on the “highway” or in the center of the little village.  A couple of wooden horse carts, one in front of the other, stopped and stood next to me.  A white horse pulled the front cart, in which sat an older man with a very little girl; the cart behind that had at least three people, and I suspect the two carts together formed a family.  The carts contained colorful blankets or something like that, and the people wore, like almost everyone in this town, traditional dress.  If it weren’t for the plastic water bottle that the little girl held, the scene would have been the same a hundred years ago.

At least nobody’s wearing Mao suits or Mao caps.  I’ve seen so many photos from Tibet in which people still dressed like that, but I’m thinking that’s rather dated.  And I’m not seeing portraits of Mao, like Vikram Seth saw when he came to Tibet in 1981.  Now it’s normal for Tibetans to wear traditional and/or Western dress.  I have seen many chupas.

Books:

Sangharakshita.  Who is the Buddha?  Windhorse Publications, Birmingham, England: 2002.

Seth, Vikram.  From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet.  Vintage Books, NY:  1983.

For information on Gyantse:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyantse

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/tibet/gyantse