Lhasa-tude on the Roof of the World
October 10-19, 2001
Lhasa is, first and foremost, a pilgrimage town, like Jerusalem or Mecca or Varanasi or Santiago de Compostela. With the summer�s grazing finished and the barley crop harvested, late fall and winter are the times for the Tibetan nomads and peasants from the countryside to make pilgrimages to the great religious sites of the country. Since the summer is the best time to visit the high sacred mountains such as Kailash, in the cold of winter cities and low-lying monasteries draw the hordes of pilgrims, and Lhasa, the biggest city with the holiest shrines, is the main destination. All day and all night, singly or in large groups, twirling their prayer wheels to send prayers flying out into the universe, Tibetans young and old march with bowed heads and determined gait around the age-old circuit of religious sites. Their motive is gaining religious and spiritual merit, hoping that their next cycle of reincarnation will see an improvement in their spiritual well-being and that they will move closer to the ultimate goal of nirvana, enlightenment and release from the Wheel of Life and the cycle of death and rebirth.
I didn�t find the Tibetans that I met to be overly religious in the sense of thinking hard about the tenets of their faith, or using Buddhism as a guide to living their everyday lives. Their faith seemed instead to be a mechanical sort of thing, prayers said automatically, incense lit or money given to temples because that is what has always been done. This is perhaps the same sort of thinking that one encounters in other religious countries like Italy or Greece or India: the faith of the people is so much a part of their culture and life that it�s as automatic and unthinking as breathing, and to outsiders it can seem superficial and without meaning. Certainly for the pilgrims, the main thing seemed to be to see as many important statues or sacred rocks or relics as possible while reciting as many prayers as possible. Encountering crowds of Tibetans making their way around the Jokhang, the holiest temple in the country, the air was alive with a buzz of �Om Mani Padme Hum�, the great mantra of Tibetan Buddhism, said so quickly and indistinctly that it acquired the hum of a hive of bees or the drone of distant machinery. I was reminded that our English word �patter� comes from a similarly quick, mechanical saying of the Pater Noster, the Lord�s Prayer, by priests most interested in getting the mass over as quickly as possible.
The focus of Lhasa, for pilgrims and for Chinese and Western tourists, is the old Tibetan quarter of the city. The Chinese, since their invasion in 1950, have expanded the city massively, adding industrial plants and sprawling Chinese suburbs, complete with the inspiring concrete-block-and-bathroom-tile architecture so beloved by the Han Chinese. These suburbs have all the appeal of Mississauga or Hoboken or Ealing or Parramatta, since they have no history and no aesthetic good points. The old quarter of town is relatively small (especially since outlying neighbourhoods were leveled by the Chinese in their construction zeal), a few blocks in each direction around the sacred, ancient temple of the Jokhang. The Jokhang, and the Barkhor (the pilgrimage circuit that surrounds it) are what draws the far-flung nomads to Lhasa, and where the native Tibetan soul of Lhasa still survives and thrives.
There is a big open plaza outside the Jokhang, and on one corner there is the Barkhor Caf� where I began several of my days in Lhasa. I would sit outside on a terrace, shivering slightly in the morning chill, munching on musli and toast and sipping lassi (such luxuries after a month on the bike through the wilds of Tibet) and looking down on the sea of humanity below me. The Jokhang was a couple of hundred metres away, its golden roofs and impressive front portals half-hidden in the constant cloud of smoke from burning juniper branches in the censer in front of it. Passing in front of it were hundreds of pilgrims making endless circuits of the Barkhor, while in the plaza closer to me hundreds more Tibetans, from all walks of life, strolled, milled about or sat soaking up the warmth of the sun under the watchful eye of a dozen Public Security Bureau (PSB) officers. The Chinese authorities keep a close watch on happenings around the Jokhang since it is such a focal point of Tibetan identity, and since it has been the starting point of most of the major anti-Chinese demonstrations and riots in the past.
I liked the Barkhor Caf� because, from my elevated vantage point, I could observe and photograph people without being noticed. I kept my camera and telephoto lens handy and always shot off half a roll of film over breakfast. There is a tremendous diversity of people and costumes to observe in front of the temple: huge nomad men in sheepskin robes, worn with one shoulder exposed as a concession to the relatively tropical weather in Lhasa; their wives, with elaborate hairdos of dozens of braids intricately arranged and held in place with gold ornaments sporting small boulders of lapis lazuli and wearing home-spun black woolen skirts and multicoloured ornamental aprons; children with outrageously unkempt hair and Technicolor runny noses; the wealthy city women of Lhasa in their silk finery; young monks in their scarlet robes with the air of schoolboys playing truant; old monks, well-fed and imperious; grey-clad nuns with shaven heads; Chinese tourists in packs wearing matching neon baseball caps; Western tourists in eye-catching red and yellow and blue Gore-Tex jackets; Uighur Moslems from the far west of China, their Turkish features a complete contrast to the Tibetans selling nuts and dried fruits (and, allegedly, hashish) from stands at the end of the square. If I kept the modern attire of the Chinese and Westerners out of the frame of the picture, the resulting photos looked like the ones taken a hundred years ago by the journalists accompanying the British invasion of 1904, and probably pretty similar to what the first Western visitors to Lhasa, Jesuit priests in the 1600s, would have seen. It�s this timeless air, along with the mass devotion of the pilgrims, that most captivated me in the Tibetan capital.
Breakfast over, I would sally forth in search of new places to explore. My first explorations, naturally, were of the Jokhang and of the Barkhor around it. Tibetans are inveterate traders and merchants, and with so many of them gathered along the Barkhor, it�s hardly surprising that the entire length of the pilgrim circuit is one huge street market. One stretch will specialize in religious paraphenalia: prayer wheels, amulets, musical horns and skull drums used in services. Another stretch will feature jewelry, one of the great passions of Tibetans, both male and female. Next to this are stalls of cheap Chinese-made shoes and sweaters, of radios and boom boxes and pirated tapes and CDs. Chinese acrylic blankets are big sellers; home-spun yak-wool blankets are warm and beautiful, but so much work to make! The pilgrims walk past in family groups, some grimly set on completing a few laps, some turning it into a chance to do some shopping for goods unavailable in their home ranges, a few weeks� travel away in the vast, scarcely inhabited plateaux of northern Tibet. Here and there are small temples hidden by the market stalls where pilgrims stop to turn outsized copper prayer wheels and to tuck money into the corners of the sacred images.
Occasionally I saw prostrators, the hardiest of the pilgrims. Instead of walking around the Barkhor or around the city of Lhasa, these men and boys make their way in a series of prostrations, clapping their hands and raising their eyes heavenward before sprawling forward on their bellies, arms outstretched, touching their foreheads to the ground and then pulling themselves to their feet again at the furthest point reached by their hands. This endless cycle of lying down and standing up is considered to be the highest form of devotion, and the front doors of the Jokhang are always blocked by throngs of pilgrims prostrating themselves towards the holy temple. These prostrators along the Jokhang, however, set themselves a much tougher task and it takes a toll on them. They wear leather aprons to protect their torsos, wear wooden sandles over the palms of their hands, sport kneepads made of shreds of car tires, and build up the toes of their shoes with more strips of rubber, but it still looks like physically exhausting work. Their foreheads have huge circular bruises and welts on them from tapping their heads so often on the ground. North of Lhasa I saw a man and his son prostrating their way towards Lhasa along the road. I don�t know how far they had come from, but they still had a good couple of months of prostrating to go in order to get to their destination. Some cyclists who rode from Yunnan to Lhasa two years ago met a man prostrating his way the 2400 kilometres from Chengdu to Lhasa, who had been on the road for four years. Whenever someone says to me that I must be physically tough to do the bike trip I�m doing, I always think of the prostrators and think that they represent true toughness and sheer willpower and devotion. The faithful always give them a coin, by which means they�re able to support themselves on their arduous pilgrimages. This encourages some charlatans, like a father and son combination I watched who would do a few minutes of prostrating piously, then gather their takings and skive off to a teahouse to while away the hours until it was time to go back to work.
Inside the Jokhang, there�s another, smaller circuit around the central chapels, and here the atmosphere is more serious than outside in the Barkhor. The strides grow more determined, the prayer wheels are spun with renewed vigour, the faces are set in determination to get their 12 or 108 laps in. The dark wall murals, the flickering lights of thousands of yak-butter lamps, the mutters of �Om Mani Padme Hum�; it�s a moving sight. It seemed sad to me, though, that the holy of holies of the Jokhang, a 1300-year old image of the Buddha as a 12-year-old boy, had almost no pilgrims in it. In the past this was the high point of any pilgrimage to the Jokhang, but when I was there, only two Tibetans and a handful of Westerners, guidebooks in hand, were inside the central enclosure, while the pious faithful contented themselves with walking around the outside, never setting eyes on the famous Jowo Sakyamuni. I don�t know if this is always the case, but it seemed to rob the Jokhang of the essential reason for its existence, keeping the pilgrims away from the holy image. In fact, for most of the time I spent inside the Jokhang, the small chapel holding the Jowo was locked and only got opened for an important monk who wanted to see it.
On my first evening in Lhasa, while I was having dinner with Toby and Greg, a pair of British anarchist bicycle tourists, a Swedish tourist came into the restaurant looking for another traveller willing to split the cost of a jeep trip out to the holy lake of Nam Tso. Since I wanted to see the lake but had little desire to bike 230 km there only to have to ride back again, I jumped at the chance. The drive was long but rewarded by seeing lots of pilgrims on trucks or on foot (or prostrating) their way to the capital. The lake, one of the many lakes with no outlet which dot the high plateaux north of Lhasa, was spectacular. At an altitude of 4700 metres, the air has a supernatural clarity, sharpening the natural colours of the surroundings and making them unbearably photogenic. The lake is huge, 70 km long and 30 km wide, surrounded by a wide brown grassland with mountains beyond. The views seem to go on forever, and the treeless plains and wide expanse of water allow huge winds to whip up, generating glistening whitecaps on the surreally blue surface of the lake. The mountains to the south, which we crossed via a 5400-metre-high pass, culminate in one of the most beautiful mountains in Tibet, 7088-metre Nyangchen Tanghla. The view of the snow-capped mountain rising over the harsh brown plains and blue lake is one of the prettiest scenes I saw in all of Tibet. We (a group of 5 Western and Chinese tourists) spent the night at the lake, walking around the meditation caves and the pilgrim trail that goes along the cliffs of a pilgrimage spot known as Tashi Dorje Gompa. The caves and fantastically-shaped rock pillars of the area , along with the thousands of carved stones bearing the familiar �Om Mani Padme Hum� and the stark beauty of the surroundings, have such an atmosphere of spirituality about them that it�s not surprising that Nam Tso is one of the holiest lakes in Tibet. The view of sunset from the top of the cliffs was breathtaking, although as soon as the sun went down the temperature dropped precipitously and sent us scurrying to the warmth of the guesthouses kitchen.
The next day, on the way back to town, we saw rare black-naped cranes in the marshy ground along the edge of the lake before rolling on to Tsurphu Monastery, getting stuck in a traffic jam (how does that happen in a country with no traffic? Construction, a narrow detour and a truck stuck in mud) along the way. Tsurphu was one of my favourite monasteries, not a major tourist destination because of its remote location far up a dead-end valley, but still the headquarters of one of the main sects of Tibetan Buddhism, the wealthy Karmapa Kagyu, or Black Hats. This sect provided a major embarrassment to the Chinese in 2000 when the latest incarnation of the Karmapa Lama, the head of the sect, an 18-year-old boy hand-picked by the Chinese to be a docile puppet, fled over the Himalayas to join the Dalai Lama in exile. The Kafkaesque �Rules Governing Worship of the Karmapa Living Buddha�, drawn up by the Tsurphu �Democracy Management Committee�, which I saw on the wall of the temple in Tibetan, Chinese and English, may have played some role in his flight. The rules essentially said that the Karmapa Lama could never be alone with a foreigner or a Tibetan visitor without an official of the local Communist party being present; the Communist party had the exclusive right to say who could see the Karmapa and who couldn�t; all gifts to the Karmapa had to be vetted by the Party; if someone was granted a meeting with the Lama, he couldn�t prostrate himself and offer obeisance unless that had previously been approved by the Communists; and so on endlessly and bureaucratically. The poor kid must have felt like a complete prisoner.
The monastery itself was beautiful in the late afternoon light, and was one of the few monasteries I visited that really felt like a living, working institution rather than a pretty movie set erected by the Chinese for the edification of tour groups. We wandered around, looking at the various chapels and the monastery printing press (churning out copies of prayers using hand-held wood-cut blocks), and at the impressive golden chortens around the outside wall of the monastery. Some monks were holding services, a rather disorganized affair involving lots of high-speed chanting of scriptures while bobbing their heads back and forth (I was reminded of orthodox Jews doing the same in Jerusalem), interspersed with noisy blasts on long horns and the thumping of a huge bass drum, with frequent tea breaks. I was invited up to visit the Karmapa Lama�s (ex)-private quarters, spartan accommodation distinguished principally by the eclectic collection of books presumably donated by foreign well-wishers: The Wonders of Modern Science, Achieving Peace Through Meditation, The Beautiful Scenery of France and The World�s Fastest Sportscars jostled for position on his desk. One of the other tourists found a monk who spoke a bit of Chinese and heard from him the usual horrible tales of the atrocities carried out during the Cultural Revolution by Chinese Red Guards and by brainwashed local villagers in the area: nuns raped, monks forced to murder other monks, priceless statues and works of art smashed, chapels dynamited or smashed with sledgehammers. And the Chinese wonder why the Tibetans still want their independence. And speaking of independence, the massive fight we had with our jeep driver about how much we owed him once we got back to Lhasa reminded me how much I valued the independence that having my own wheels gave me in Tibet.
Back in Lhasa, I set out to explore more of the multitudinous pilgrimage sites of the city. The oldest things to see date from the time of Songtsen Gampo, the first Tibetan king to embrace the then-foreign religion of Buddhism. A meditation cave named Drukla Lagang, its walls covered with beautiful Buddhist carvings of gods and of the king himself with his wives, was wonderful. The few Tibetan pilgrims who make it there make a quick circuit of the cave, stuffing 1-mao (about 1 US cent) banknotes into all of the main statues and then setting off for more attraction, so I had the place to myself for most of my visit. The vast array of rock carvings on the cliffs outside were impressive for the sheer volume of work that went into them; there are still artisans sitting chiselling mantras and figures of gods into slabs of rock at the foot of the cliffs.
From the cave there was a great view across to the brooding mass of the Potala, dominating the skyline of Lhasa from atop its high ridge. The next day I set out to explore the inside of the huge palace and was a bit disappointed. From the outside the Potala looks fabulous, like something out of a dream, huge and tall and coloured white and ochre, topped with gold roofs. Inside, though, it�s dark and gloomy and a bit tatty, with some of the most important chapels and tombs of Dalai Lamas locked up by the Chinese authorities. A lot of the artistic highlights listed in my encyclopedic Tibet Handbook, published in 1994, have vanished since then; the Chinese seem to be stripping it of anything that might suggest Tibetan independence or which might look good in a museum back in Beijing. The calendar for 1959 that used to hang in the 14th Dalai Lama�s private quarters, a momento of his escape to India in that year, has mysteriously disappeared; I wonder why? The 13th Dalai Lama, who restored Tibetan independence in the 1910s and 1920s, also has his tomb under lock and key, maybe so that pilgrims won�t be reminded of his existence. The real highlights for me were more meditation caves, also from the time of Songtsen Gampo, deep in the bowels of the Potala where the rock of the ridge protrudes into the building itself. I really liked the old sculptures, and by now I was getting to recognize the various incarnations of Buddhas and Boddhisattvas from their appearance and attributes.
With the Potala dark and gloomy and probably insanitary, it was no wonder that the 13th and 14th Dalai Lamas preferred to spend their time, as much as possible, in the more modern, airier palaces of the Norbu Lingka park on the outskirts of town. The gardens and ponds of the grounds would have been a perfect antidote to too many smoky, tiny chapels. I was sad that the old cars which the 13th Dalai Lama had been given as presents, and which had been taken apart and transported by yak across the Himalayas before being assembled again, had disappeared from their old resting place behind one palace. No sign either of the movie theatre which Heinrich Harrer (of Seven Years in Tibet) had built for the Dalai Lama in the late 1940s.
The hills surrounding Lhasa are full of monasteries, and I devoted a day to four notable ones. Sera and Drepung, two of the Great Six principal monasteries of the Dalai Lama�s own Gelugpa (Yellow Hat) sect of Buddhism, were disappointments. They used to house thousands of monks and were the seat of real power in Tibet for generations. Now the huge complexes have been repaired after the neglect and destruction of the Cultural Revolution, but the population of monks is a tiny fraction of what it once was. The monasteries seem really to be run for the purpose of extracting money from tourists, and most of the main buildings seemed to be permanently locked up, reflecting the lack of religious activities going on. Like Ganden, which I visited on the way to Lhasa from Dali, Sera and Drepung were hollow shells of their former selves, best admired from afar where their white and ochre buildings, huge chortens and golden roofs are at their most impressive.
Not so with two more obscure temples I sought out. Far up an awful jeep track (luckily I had no luggage on my bike that day), Pabonka monastery perches atop a steep, high boulder. Tibetan pilgrims frequently make the long walk out to it, but I doubt that more than a few Westerners a year make it there. There was a small but active community of monks, and I followed a party of pilgrims around the main chapels, watching them distribute a steady stream of money and butter and barley as offerings at every turn. The monk guiding them around gave the various gods depicted different names to what my guidebook said, and I had the feeling that my guidebook was right and that the monk didn�t actually know what he was talking about. But maybe he was right and I was wrong.
Even more impressive was Nechung, where the old state oracle used to give prophecies. The oracle himself is now in Dharamshala, India with the Dalai Lama (where he still is a key adviser on government policy) but the monastery carries on. The decoration of the monastery is oppressive, like something out of a horror film, full of skulls and demons and death, and it must have been a rather frightening spectacle in these surroundings to watch the oracle go into a trance, don his huge headdress, and suddenly start dancing and thrashing about, foaming at the mouth and uttering prophecies. It was creepy enough as it was, and I was glad to escape back to my bicycle after my visit.
My favourite place in the Lhasa area, though, was the last place I visited, Druk Yerpa, a complex of caves high in the mountains used by ascetics as a meditation retreat far from the clamour of Lhasa. It took hours to bike there, first east along the Kyi Chu river, then steeply uphill along a small side valley. Then followed a stiff climb to a series of temples built around the entrances to the caves. It was well worth the effort, though, since Druk Yerpa is the closest I saw on this trip to the classic mountaintop retreat inhabited by wise men to which pilgrims come seeking words of wisdom. The cave temples were interesting, but the real highlight was sitting outside, perched high above the world, with no sounds but the chirping of birds in the bushes, gazing out over the world below. It was the most perfectly peaceful spot I found in Tibet, and I could see how religious people, such as the ubiquitous King Songtsen Gampo, could spend months or years meditating there on the ultimate meaning of life. I only had a couple of hours before I had to head back to Lhasa, but I would have loved to have camped in the area for a few days, soaking up the atmosphere.
Of course, there were more mundane things to occupy my time in Lhasa, in addition to sightseeing. I got my Nepalese visa, tried (and failed) to get a travel permit to get to the Nepalese border legally (for once!), stocked up on food supplies for the road, spent hours writing e-mail and accounts of the trip, and tried to catch up on deficits in nutrition and sleep. I ate ravenously the whole time I was in Lhasa, usually in the company of a band of fellow cyclists. A number of them had been arrested in western Tibet after September 11th, when the Chinese government closed the Mt. Kailash area to foreigners. Others had been arrested trying to cycle along the same route I had taken from Dali to Lhasa, while still others had flown to Lhasa to do the classic Lhasa-Kathmandu ride. We spent most of our evenings gorging ourselves in the Swiss-run Pentoc Guesthouse, swapping stories from the road and trying to figure out how to get to Nepal without any run-ins with the Chinese authorities. In the end most of the others, plagued by problems with their visas, formed their own tour group, hired a support vehicle to carry their luggage, and left town a day ahead of me. I considered joining them, but I wanted to see a few extra places along the way, and the thought of being tied to a large group didn�t appeal to me. Instead, before dawn on the 20th of October, I bid a sad farewell to Lhasa, not sure if I would ever return, and headed off towards Kathmandu.
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Previous Travelogues
Sept.5-Oct.9: Cycling to Lhasa
July 20-Sept.4: China by Train
June 29-July 19: SW China
June 27: Laos
June 20: Northeast Thailand
June 19: Cambodia Trip
May 27: Ko Tao to Bangkok
May 25: Diving the Similans
April 25: Southern Thailand
March 28: Kuching, E.Coast Malaysia
Feb. 28: Riding Across Borneo
Feb. 18: Brunei
Feb. 9: Diving Sipadan
Feb. 4: Exploring Sabah
Jan. 24: A Mexican Interlude