12 Aug 2024
I wander around the gompa .
The door is open.
Just a while ago, Khandro La’s attendant told off a party consisting of me, Ani S______, and L____ Lay. We all promptly accepted this rejection and went away.
The reason is that we are all very respectful people.
Khandro la, an oracle, commands status and respect among fellow Tibetans. L____ Lay’s daughter told me privately that the deity who possesses her is high up in the hierarchy.
I have no clue how I am here; I am near the gompa again.
This time I am alone.
I struggle to go in. Am I intruding?
What if they get angry with me?
I have my doubts.
Like a deer enchanted by music, I drift into the gompa.
I go up the wooden stairs like I am in the midst of a strange dream.
The two-story wood and mud gompa stands jutting out as the tallest structure on this hill.
As I go up the worn-out wooden stairs, I am still expecting to be shooed away.
I see the attendant’s big brown leather shoes outside. The door to the shrine room to the right is ajar.
She’s seated inside. She motions for me to come in.
I walk inside.
It is the perfect remote Himalayan shrine room—the kind you can only see in movies.
The vibes are ratchet. The room is small and cramped, filled with religious objects that are easily hundreds of years old.
The windows behind open to capacious mountain vistas.
The gompa is perched on the top of a rocky hill, and it is the only thing stopping you from the strong Himalayan winds carrying you away to unseen lands and fortunes.
It is a small enclave of perfect refuge against the jagged terrain, with inhospitable weather and wild animals like bharal, foxes, leopards, and even bears.
(I am not exaggerating; we could hear a skulk of foxes howling in the evening.)
She tells me to sit and coveys that S_______, her attendant would be coming soon.
I sit opposite her on the floor, on thin cushions covered with a carpet.
She is also seated on a similar arrangement. These floor seats are standard across shrine rooms, perhaps everywhere in India, Nepal, and Tibet.
She says she doesn’t speak Hindi with a hand gesture for less. She asks me if I speak Tibetan.
I say that I only knew Tujhe Chhe, which means thank you in Tibetan, and we both chuckle.
Then we both sit in silence for a while. I try to meditate in her company.
She looks elegant and dignified sitting in a simple meditation posture in her chuba, a long flowing Tibetan robe.
Behind her, from the window, I can see tall, immovable mountains, and just empty space.
Her attendant, S_______ comes in.
He will act as a translator, so we can both converse now.
She asks me, “Am I interested in Buddhism? And how did I become interested in it?”
I reply, “I was suffering a lot because of familial issues, and then I found Dharma through Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.”
She straightens her back when she hears the name of Rinpoche.
She continues, “We all want to avoid suffering and experience joy, that’s the basis of the whole Buddhist path.”
She adds, “You are in Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, etc.
Don’t be narrow-minded; explore everything and go deep.
These paths may differ in ideology, but the result is the same.”
She speaks in Tibetan with powerful gestures. Her attendant translates them into broken Hindi for me.
Here I am, an alien in an alien country of Ladakh, in an alien landscape of Phokar Rzhong, sitting before a lady who’s a wisdom master, receiving the sacred dharma near mountain caves where Lord Padmasambhava himself meditated while being hosted by Tibetan people who speak patchy Hindi at best.
It is nothing short of a dream. I realise how beautiful it is, but simultaneously, I know it is ephemeral. It is arising now and it will dissolve without a trace in the same space.
She continues, “People are Buddhists but know nothing about Buddhism.
People are Hindus but don’t know anything about Hinduism.
Go deep in whatever you choose.
In Hinduism, there’s atma.
In Buddhism, there’s anatma; no essence.
Because this ‘I’ is the source of so many problems;
it is better not to cling to it.
But we can inspect it-
where’s this ‘I’?
You can inspect it in your experience-
you cannot find it.”
I try to follow her instructions and inspect for this ‘I’ which constantly hangs over our head like a looming dark cloud, angry and threatening.
We hear a knock on the door. They are calling us for dinner.
She says, ______________________________________________
________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________
She concludes with,
“Now let’s go for dinner.”
Afterword
As dinner was being made in the concrete structure we were housed in, I fervently made notes of our meeting in my notebook in the only dim light available at that hour.
The narrative above is built by rewriting the diary entry I noted that day.
The last bits left blank are the teachings I forgot.
I still recollect how magnified I was by her whole being and personality.
She ate everything in a small plastic bowl; if I am not wrong, they served her and Ani la before everyone else ate.
On the same day, at lunch, I think she sat a little ahead of me in the concrete shelter.
She looked at my reflection intently with the back of her spoon by swivelling the spoon carefully back and forth.
I intently noted my warped reflection in the spoon racing across the curved surface.
It was an enchanting and mysterious moment.
I could not fathom why she was interested in me.
In hindsight, I realised she might be doing mirror divination or melong.
It could also be why she decided to impart a few teachings to me.
I can also be wrong…