Yes, this one’s a bit boring. It’s part of the new railway line built by the Chinese up from Qinghai Province onto the Tibetan Plateau then all the way to Lhasa. It cost about 3.45 billion euros to build. It’s a marvel of engineering, but with global warming accelerating, it will be a nightmare to maintain as the permafrost on which it is largely built starts to melt. After being opened in July 2006, in its first two months of operation it carried 450, 000 passengers, many of them tourists. Mind you, it’s not an easy journey. The route rises to a height of 5, 072 metres. In first class you have oxygen by your seat. In third, you have a man with an oxygen bottle who watches you for signs that you might be about to pass out!
This huge influx of tourists is rapidly changing the face of Tibet. I reckon that in another five years Lhasa will be just another tourist destination like Kathmandu. Already there are warning signs of what it may become. One day we went to the Jokhang to make offerings to the Jowo. The monk officials turned us away, saying that this wasn’t for tourists. We explained that we were Buddhists, but still they barred our way. Finally the magic words ‘Dagyab Rinpoche’ persuaded them to relent.
Increasingly in large sacred sites there will be times for the locals to practise their devotions and separate times for the Chinese and Western tourists. If you are a western pilgrim you are likely to be lumped in with the tourists. That will be sad, because some special shrines will be opened to Tibetans and closed during tourist times. Also part of the spiritual benefit of these places is witnessing the incredible devotion of the local people. Even the Jokhang is not quite itself without the queues of jostling locals and pilgrims, prostrating, turning their prayer wheels, reciting mantras, and making offerings. The atmosphere changes when you are accompanied round the temple by a crowd of Chinese tourists led by a small woman with a flag, which she pokes at the murals, while giving a high-pitched running commentary. I shudder to think what she is telling her charges about Buddhism.
One day I was in the Jokhang, meditating quietly. A Nepali guide with a small group of westerners came and stood alongside me. He pointed at the great statues of Guru Rinpoche and Maitreya, the future Buddha, which dominate the main temple space to the left and right of the Jowo shrine. €œThat one,€ he announced, pointing left €œis Songtsen Gampo, the early Buddhist king of Tibet€. Then, waving airily to the right €œAnd that is Dipankara, the Buddha of the past.€ When people cannot get even basic identifications right, what kind of impression can they give people about Buddhism as a spiritual path to freedom? This is a shame as, although Tibet certainly has spectacular scenery, many Chinese and western tourists are clearly drawn to make the journey by a sense of magic and mysticism. While that isn’t what Buddhism is really about, that sense of there being more to life than materialism, of the power of the mind to bring about wondrous transformation, if nurtured and fed with reliable information, can transform into a true spiritual quest, an exploration of the wonder and mystery of consciousness.
This one was taken from a bus travelling to Samye, the oldest Buddhist monastery in Tibet. We have just crossed the Brahmaputra river (or Tsangpo in Tibetan) by ferry. You can see the five white chortens on the rocks above the road to our left. These mark the place where Guru Rinpoche, Padmasambhava, first met the King of Tibet. In the namthar or life story of Guru Rinpoche, this is a very dramatic incident. The King feels that the guru, newly arrived from India, should bow to him. Padmasambhava thinks it inappropriate for him to prostrate to a mere worldly ruler, when he is a King of the Dharma. So he refuses, and there is a standoff. Then Padmasambhava sings a song proclaiming his spiritual lineage and the qualities of his Awakening. At the end he produces flames from his hand. Awestruck, the king and all his courtiers prostrate to him ‘as if they had been cut by a scythe’. (There are five chortens because Padmasambhava is believed to have produced flame from each of his fingers.)
I found it had a strong effect on me, being in places where incidents which I had read about in Buddhist texts were believed actually to have taken place. This incident with Guru Rinpoche, which I had taken as myth, took on more the feeling of a historic event from seeing those chortens. In general, one of the benefits of the trip was that I now find reading texts by Atisha, Je Tsongkhapa or other great teachers of Tibetan Buddhism has even more impact on me. The human and historical background to the texts has more weight, because I can visualize the places in which the teachings were given. Somehow that helps the Dharma content to affect me more.