Today was a spiritual day. The town of Xiahe is the home of the Labrang Monastery, a prominent Yellow Hat Buddhist monastery and college. The streets of the small town are full of monks and pilgrims. We saw very few other Europeans. Our guide Liwanhai says that tourism is way down due to the economy, but also due to the riots in the last couple of years in Tibet and Uighur areas.
We visited the monastery, touring several of the temples and colleges. This monastery is famous for producing hand-written copies of sutras on rice paper, and have a huge library of old copies of the sutras. The college of medicine produces many Buddhist medical practitioners, who spend 3 months each year gathering plants in the nearby grasslands. The college of dancing is also famous, and we watched young monks practicing slow, acrobatic line dances to a drum and flue. In a separate plaza we listened to slightly older monks throat singing. The temples are dark and filled with Buddhas and protective gods, smelling strongly of yak butter candles. The yak butter and the incense sticks cover up (mostly) the overwhelming smell of drying yak and sheep patties used for fuel. One temple area had a dozen yak butter statues, made and painted early in the year for a festival, and not replaced until the next lunar year. The statues are as big as 5' by 5' and are brilliantly painted Buddhas and gods and tales of the life of the Buddha.
In the afternoon we walked past the very small rooms used by monks, pilgrims and visiting families. We spun our hopes into the heavens on the prayer wheels as we passed. Linwanhai had arranged a very special audience for us with BanZhiDa ZanYa, a Living Buddha of high rank in the Yellow Hat sect. He blessed our scarves and served us yak butter tea (a little yak butter goes a very long way with me), tsampa (a kind of barley prridge, eaten in this case with fingers) and dried fruit and nuts. Liwanhai explained our family and where we were from, inviting us to ask for a prediction as to our future or anything else. Liwanhai, in that very Chinese fashion, had grilled me earlier about our family. He was fascinated that our son married another man, that we attended the wedding, and that we loved our son-in-law. And so he apparently related all this to the Living Buddha. The L.B. says we are very fortunate in our loving family (true), that Bayliss and Drew's adoption will be a happy one, and that all our grandchildren will be strong and happy. He also said there are a lot of gay couples in the monastery, and that this presents no problem. Sex of any variety is forbidden, but love is welcome. And we on the outside should do what we want. Are you surprised at this flexibility? I guess I was.
The L.B. also said, in response to a question about relations between Tibetans and the Chinese government: "We have been in a relationship for 1400 years, since the Tang dynasty. There have been and will be good times and bad times, but the relationship will survive, like your marriage."
We had dinner for the second time in a restaurant where the Tibetan girls lined up to flirt with Bill and giggle. Must be something about green eyes. Or, they wanted to practice their commercially useful English, which was pretty limited.
As we left Ziahe the next morning we passed small stupas/towers, stuck all around with home-made arrows. They were placed there by Tibetan young people in a ceremony seeking peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment