On the other side of the world

Today, the sky was that blinding blue that makes me want to curse my lost sunglasses and at the same time, stare vertically up, up, up even if it does hurt.  Anytime I see a sky this blue, I want to immediately jump in a plane and go back to Tibet.  So, I thought I'd share an article I wrote while I was in Lhasa.  I am so glad I can say that I've made that trek.  

The prayer flags wrap around the river, an adorned necklace of tattered spirituality in a nation surrounded by mountainous elevation and mounting contention.

It is here I ascended the white pumus stairs of Potala Palace to walk the path of a Buddhist Mecca. It is here I saw the whitewashed walls of a temple once fragrant with yak butter candles and flaming with the rituals of second sons.

The only monks sitting vigil now are Han Chinese guards, red robed, listening to walkmans and snapping their fingers at the Swedish tourists trying to touch the last of the Tsong Khapa statues sitting celibate in the meditation halls.

On the streets of Barkor Square, Lhasa echoes with the resonance of informal market economics. It is May, a time when Tibetan Buddhists will travel through the pastoral panorama up to 900 miles to prostrate in front of the ceramic urns billowing incense as the chants of monks and the begging of alms crescendo.

The streets of Lhasa were once architectural representations of the Buddhist sects here; all of the buildings trimmed with pictorial crests of Tibetan history. Since the construction of the train from China to Tibet, the stone carvings of tantric faces and guardian demons have been covered up with laminated signs advertising bath houses, pretty young Chinese bodies prostrating in a different way -- neon-electric.

An elderly man, face tanned like yak hide, kneels in the road (small wooden blocks strapped with cloth to his hands), lies down on his stomach, and moves his prayer beads to his mouth. A large truck rolls right over him; he keeps down, eyes closed, muttering something I wish I understood. The truck passes in the heavy congestion. I wonder how long he has traveled to get to Jokhang Temple. "You are 12 blocks away," I want to say.

A bus ride to the outskirts of Lhasa, a long hike to 16,000 feet, and I am facing the gates of Ganden Monastery. It is the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. Scattered orange, yellow, red and gold temples housing one of the last active monasteries in this area.

Inside the main temple, 50 monks are taking lunch before afternoon meditations. I make my way in a clockwise path through the temple, walking through the crowded hallways winding up to the roof. I climb through a small attic opening and step out to the red rooftop. I sit in the middle of a cloud, watching the condensation bubble and roll over the mountains surrounding me.

Against the protests of goat herders and monks, I take a compelling climb to a Tibetan sky burial sight, ascending a steep two miles. I kneel in front of a pile of white rags that very recently housed a body. The sky burial is performed in a modest and quick way. The bones of the dead are broken, the body carried to the highest peak of the monastery. Wrapped in white cloth, the body is left for its next bardos - the spirit taken to the sky and the flesh left for the carnivores that will take it as carrion or back down the hillside.

After a demanding hike back down, and a crowded bus ride to Lhasa, I reach the hostel at dusk. I see monks in Adidas buying new robes from a stand. One of them is laughing into a BlackBerry.

That night, I dream of the river with the prayer flag necklace. There is trash cluttering the stream, tourists tearing off flags and wiping their sweating foreheads, and monks talking on BlackBerries as another man prostrates himself in congested traffic.

Pax.