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Published: April 21st 2006
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Back to the bucket bath for my first few days in Kathmandu, staying with friends in Swayambunath. It is shocking how little Kathmandu has changed. The dusty streets seemed dustier after five years and the smog thicker. But no signs of progress or care for the city and its people from the king. A sad state of affairs. Yet there are a host of creature comforts for those who can afford it. After the fall in relative isolation in Xining, I indulge with friends in shopping for pashmina shawls, visiting the foot massage ladies, and seeking out the requisite pizza fix at Fire and Ice. All this reached a feverish pitch on a strange New Year's Eve of squirming through throngs of Nepali men in Thamel, trying to find a good bar.
After that, I moved to quiet Boudha, the Tibetan neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. There I began to settle into a routine, working daily with a khenpo (scholar) from Golok and periodically bumping into old friends and colleagues. From a rooftop restaurant, I spot RT in red chubba (Tibetan dress) doing korra with a group of nuns. Later, I run into WB on a hike up
to Pullahari Monastery, where I attended a course five years ago. And it goes on. Each day, I also spend enjoyable hours with DW working on the SI website and make friends with students at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute through him.
Om Mani Padme Hum The mantra Om Mani Padme Hum permeates the air in Boudha. It plays from the music shops as you circle the stupa, which is famous for its prominent eyes looking out in four directions. Tibetans residents and pilgrims recite Om Mani Padme Hum as they circumambulate the stupa, gaining their daily merit. It is the mantra of the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokitesvara, and each of its six syllables is supposed to purify one of the realms in Buddhist cosmology, thereby easing the suffering of others.
A group of friends asked me to join them on a visit to an old lama famous for reciting the Mani mantra. It was my first time attempting oral translation for a group. Featured in the documentary,
Yogis of Tibet, Drupwang Rinpoche is toothless and joyful old lama, who is extremely difficult to understand. On many points, one of the monks had to repeat what Drupwang Rinpoche
said for me. Though I have never aspired to oral translation (and my skills in Tibetan are decidedly literary), my first attempt gave me great admiration for those who do.
The Golok Khenpo It is difficult to negotiate with someone when struggling with a challenging dialect. I am afraid the Golok khenpo got the better of me. He kindly offered to work with me an hour a day. But because the text I wanted to read seemed unsuitable to him, he ended up lecturing on his own text, a series of short essays summarizing the key points of Buddhism. This was an excellent way to practice my listening comprehension in the Golok accent. In Xining, I mainly worked on conversation and reading a text on Buddhist ethics. But there's a catch...
The Khenpo asks me to translate the text (more than 100 pages). It's hard for me to refuse since he is being so generous with his time. And I promise to try, time permitting. The khenpo also manages to involve me in his aspirations to build practice and study centers, one near Sangphu and the other in Nagargot. He has teamed up with his friend, Pema,
a restaurant owner in Boudha, who has bought two hilltop properties. Beautiful pieces of land. So I take two days off to shoot a video for them at these respective sites, actually a lot of fun. But also more work. In the meantime, I am supposed to submit a chapter for an edited volume at the end of January.
Garden Oasis at Rabsel The week-long bandh (strike) comes just in time. The Maoists are trying to subvert elections called by the king. There are isolated protests, which reach the international press. My parents are so worried they contact the state department, and I awake one morning to a phone call from the US Embassy in Kathmandu. The embassy is not worried, I am not worried, and I call my parents to tell them not to worry. Life in Boudha goes on much as usual during the bandh with half closed shutters on shops to signal token compliance. The main road is quiet and tense on election day. Then, the bandh lifts and ordinary life resumes.
In the meantime, I write to the editor that I am running late and use the bandh to hunker down. The Golok
khenpo has left Boudha to teach a group of nuns. I spend hours typing away on my laptop in the sun-filled garden at the Rabsel Guesthouse. An ideal spot to write! Friends stopped by periodically, and I start to meet with an excellent tutor, Dawa, to practice my Lhasa dialect. Otherwise I worked day and night and managed to finish the chapter just before leaving. As usual, I finish in the knick of time: 5:00am the morning of departing for Lhasa with just over an hour to pack up almost two months of sprawl.
Visitors to Boudha: Boudha is an ideal place to recoup from travels elsewhere in Asia and to avoid the crowds of Thamel. There are lots of Tibetan monasteries to visit and good shopping and food around the main stupa. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche offers public teachings every Saturday morning at 11:00am at the White Gompa. Pullahari and Kopan monasteries, perched on hilltops outside of town, offer regular courses in Buddhist topics. Many lamas also regularly receive visitors. There are plenty of guesthouses to choose from, and a great new restaurant opened up around the Boudha stupa, called Cafe New Orleans. They have excellent coffee, apple pie, burritos (is that cajun?) and organic, vegetarian fare.
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