Mar 2008

In a classroom in Dehradun, second-graders are chanting. It’s dim in there, with just enough natural light for the kids to see. 30 boys behind wooden desks focus intently on the chalkboard.

The youngest of them, a tiny boy of seven, is standing at the front of the room, his nose almost touching the chalkboard. He keeps messing up his pronunciation, making the rest of the classroom giggle. The teacher gently corrects the boy when he fudges the words.

After a few tries, the boy gets it right. When he does, the other students chant after him. Their firm, clear chants have a military quality to them, as though they were ROTC recruits. The teacher smiles and nods in encouragement.

The headmaster, who’s been waiting in the wings, walks up to us and explains what the chant means. They yell again, in unison:

“Where there is war, we make peace. Where there is stealing, we make charity.”

Three miles through town is the Institute for the Research of Meditation and Understanding. In the adjacent Mindrolling Monastery, nuns and monks spend hours observing the contents of their minds, practicing peace until it becomes natural.

A 60-foot-tall golden Buddha looms benevolently nearby. Miles of prayer flags strung between trees make gentle shadows on carefully arranged gardens. The grounds, like the Buddhist mind, absorb movement and sound.

The schoolboys across town continue their chants. They are here every day from 3 to 9pm. Like their older brethren in the monastery, these young monks are learning peace through self-mastery. They are hand-plucked from Nepal, China, India. The school, a charity, sends officials to find the poorest boys in the poorest villages and sends them to this school to become monks. Their heads are shaved; their uniforms maroon robes.

And so they begin their lifelong study of peace.

For Tibetan Buddhists, peace and freedom are a practice. We in the West often think of peace as a utopic ideal. It’s a nervous, nail-biting affair with one eye cast towards the heavens and the other distracted by a Blackberry. We hope and pray for peace to come, yet we often do not practice it. We don’t see peace as something that can be trained or learned. We feel hopeful for a peaceful outcome, but powerless to affect it.

Tibetans, who have in recent years become all too intimate with torture, displacement, and other forms of violence, continue their compassion studies in large colonies in India. Many of these colonies house large orphanages where children learn to sustain the culture of a land they may never see again.

You may have read about Tibet in the news lately. A series of protests on March 10, the 49th anniversary of Tibetan Uprising Day, have led to a martial law situation in Tibet. The Dalai Lama has threatened to step down as political leader of the Tibetan government in exile. Tibet claims that 100 Tibetans, mostly monks, have been shot in China—the Chinese claim the number is more like 16. Arrests have also occurred in Olympia, Greece, Canada, and around the world as protestors vie for media attention in time for the Beijing Olympics.

It doesn’t stop there. Nepal is closing Mt. Everest in early May—peak climbing season—because it doesn’t want anyone waving the Tibetan flag next to the Olympic torch, which will be hoisted up during that time. The Chinese aren’t allowing tourists into Tibet. They’ve prohibited journalists from entering the capital and sealed off all channels of communication to the outside world, save for a few stealthy blog posts or YouTube videos.

And somewhere just outside the Kangra district of India, a group of 50 Tibetans are sitting in an Indian jail for walking across state lines against police orders. Their purpose was, and remains, to walk from Dharamsala to Tibet. They’re on hunger strike until their release, when they plan to walk again.

We spent a little over a week with the hunger strikers in McLeod Ganj, home of the Tibetan government in exile. Back then—so much has happened since on the Tibet issue that is seems like a year ago—they were training and preparing for their long march.

We talked to them, took pictures, figured out what they were all about. We talked to ex-political prisoners, monks who walked across the Himalayas to get to India, a 70-year-old man prepared to walk to Tibet to die in his homeland. We talked to organizers and supporters, holy women and famous activists.

To make sense of it all, we are making a book. Its working title is “Marching Home.”

We’ll include excerpts and pictures from the book in future blog posts. Hopefully, you, too, can get acquainted with the amazing, proud, and very human Tibetans whose faces and struggles have, suddenly, become very public.

We’re living in a treehouse. The Ganges (Ganga) roars hundreds of feet below, through a glacial cleavage in the low Himalayas. We’re close to its source here, so the river is chilly and clean, with big, frothy rapids. Wedding cake temples line the Ganga’s banks. Red-faced monkeys, the smaller, scrappier cousins to the regal gray langurs at Ranthambore, sprint across cables on the footbridges connecting either side of town.

Rishikesh is a spiritual enclave especially renowned among Westerners. The Beatles wrote much of the White Album while staying at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram, located just down the street from us. Waifish yoga teachers and enlightened hippies stroll between innumerable temples, ashrams, yoga studios, and German bakeries. Rafts full of elated tourists tumble down rapids; renunciates in orange robes hike into the holy mountains to find God.

Rishikesh’s main perk is its pervasive sense of peace. Days waft by in fresh air and scented bliss. It’s what hip backpackers refer to as shanti (adj./noun, depending on context). As in, “it’s so shanti at this ashram,” or “that place just wasn’t shanti at all, you know?”

Hotel-wise, found the most shanti shanti in Rishikesh. Our room, which has pillars painted to resemble tree trunks, is located high up on an embankment aptly named the High Bank. We open our front door to a panoramic view of the Ganga’s snaking rapids every single day.

We’ve been here for three weeks, exploring states of increasingly deep relaxation fueled by periods of lounging on the river bank and multicourse breakfasts big enough sustain a Clydesdale. The process has proved that the Prozac people have it all backwards. All it takes to relieve tension is Nutella, brown rolls, a view, and a holy river with white sandy banks.

Once in a while, something surprising punctuates the serenity. Like the snake charmer who lives in the canyon next to our hotel. He showed up one day at the Swiss Cottage German Bakery, our favorite munching grounds, with two black cobras in a round box and a snake-charming flute with Deutsch Marks glued to the front.

The flute sounded like a Scottish bagpipe with a sinus infection. The snakes, upon hearing the flute, remained coiled. Bopal, the charmer, grabbed their heads to steer them out of the container. They reluctantly slithered towards the nearest source of darkness, often a woman’s purse or the space beneath her skirt, so that they could go back to sleep.

At this point, Bopal flicked the undersides of their heads to aggravate them into showing their hoods. They would show a little hood at first, splaying out just enough shape from the sides of their necks to make you suspect they might be real cobras. Bopal would continue to harry them until they jerked their necks back defensively, splayed out their patterned hoods in full glory, and looked for something to bite.

Thus, the snakes were charmed.

When asked whether the snakes were poisonous, Bopal said “No, no teeth.”
“Do you pull them out?”
“No.”
“So they have teeth.”
“Yes.”
“Do they bite?”
“No! No bite.”
“Do you take out the venom?”
“No venom! No teeth.”
“So you pulled out the teeth?”
“No!”
“So it has teeth?”
“Yes! No bite.”

The conversation went on like this for ten minutes. We brought in an interpreter and, another ten minutes later, had no further information, save for the fact that the snakes did not bite because they were under the influence of a special Shiva blessing. The snake peed on our neighbor’s purse after attempting to slither inside it, bringing us no closer to the truth.

The truth of Rishikesh itself, however, is clear. The Ganga’s whispers, 70-degree sunny days, and long hours reading on our balcony’s swinging chair spell out one thing: relaxation. Blissful, restful relaxation, the genuine kind that isn’t influenced by force or drugs. A rare jewel, indeed.

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