After lunch, we first visited Ramabhar Stupa, the sacred ground of the Buddha’s cremation. It consists of crumbly brick ruins in the shape of cake made by someone who’d never made a cake before, sort of a lopsided and flat-topped hill, with a base around which many colorfully dressed Nepalese lay like reclining Buddhas while a lama, with Tibetan-style book open before him, chanted. From a short distance I saw him twirling a little two-sided drum and holding a gold vajra (dorje, in Tibetan, or thunderbolt, in English) while chanting. The Nepalese looked a bit like Tibetans, and the women wore sarongs and blouses in wonderful bright and colorful prints. Shantum talked with the lama and learned that the group was from Mustang, a small region of Nepal that practices Tibetan Buddhism.
Meanwhile, Thai monks in orange and yellow robes with that alluring off the shoulder look circled the stupa, chanting and creating a pleasant vibration around us. I mindfully circumambulated the Ramabhar Stupa three times, enjoying the chanting. The entire setting was calm and soothing and peaceful. On the backside of the stupa there was a pot of incense and some offerings. While I circumambulated, the Thais stopped chanting and gathered before the offerings. Meanwhile, most of our sangha joined the Nepalese pilgrims by lying on their straw mats in the reclining Buddha pose with heads toward the stupa.
At the ancient stupa ruins, a crowd of beggar children gathered around Val, who put little stickers on their hands; Yvette said it looked like she was feeding pigeons, because of the way the children gathered around Val, who reached out and put the stickers on their hands. As we started heading for the bus, Erika passed out pens to the beggar children: they grabbed at the colorful writing utensils, and she told them all to sit. They promptly sat in unison, like well-trained puppies. When she walked toward the bus, children surrounded her, and Ann commented on how kids are most inclined to approach Erika and Yvette, since they are close to the children’s size.
Due to my enthusiasm for using my camera, Mukesh started on ongoing joke. He says, “Susan, where’s your camera?” My answer is one of the following:
“It’s in my bag.”
“In my pocket!”
“My camera? Oh, no, I must have left it at the last hotel!”
We left the cremation stupa and walked up a path that the Buddha walked. We walked to a Hanuman shrine close to a group of colorful little mud Islamic shrines shaped like stacks of square boxes. In front of the shrines, at the edge of the path, sat Gypsy-like musicians with a drum and a rectangular box of an instrument that sounded much like an accordion and which I later learned is called a harmonium.
We came to a goddess shrine that included a square platform with a life-size blue Kali standing in front. Inside a little house-like structure at the back of the platform, a life-size Durga rode a lion. I tagged along behind, and by the time I caught up with the group, Shantum was explaining, “Women connect with the goddesses that are most like them.” That certainly explains my attraction to Durga, the single and independent woman, and Sarasvati, the geek.
Some of us, perhaps half of the sangha, walked down the road to the Thai temple. Bicyclists gawked at us as they glided past, and of course I had to stop and pet baby goats along the way. On our left, we soon arrived at the very elaborate and gorgeous Thai temple and monastery complex. It is made of white marble with gold trim and has the typical Thai look: a very steep pointy roof like a gingerbread house but ending in curly dragon faces at the corners.
We slipped off our shoes and climbed up the stairs of a temple that was the first building at the monastery, and we came to a white marble balcony where I paused to gaze at another temple nearby, that was a big square full of glass windows topped by a roof made of countless pointy gold domes. We went further up the white marble stairs and stepped into a breathtaking hall with deep blue walls and a shrine at the far end. On the shrine sat a big gold Buddha and many other gold, filigree-like statues and ornaments. We sat down on the carpet, and a monk turned on electric lights, or rather gold and crystal sconces. The abbot Govinda, whom we had met on Vulture Peak, entered the room, for Shantum had made an appointment with him. Govinda sat to our right, in what looked like a French Louis XIV chair.
The abbot gave us a talk and among other things said that his daily schedule includes three hours walking meditation, one and a half hours sitting meditation, and one hour praying. Most of Govinda’s talk focused on the unimportance of money, how it doesn’t buy you happiness.
“Next time, I’ll speak better English. Come back in five years,” Govinda concluded, before the sangha began asking him questions. Rikki asked him how he would teach us if we were his students, but he does not think his English is good enough; he could teach only in Thai. His English sounded impressive to us.
Shantum asked if Thai monks have bank accounts, and Govinda replied only for the sangha, not for themselves. Someone asked who cooks for the monks, and Govinda said they have “no food after noon, and nuns do most of the cooking.” Upon hearing this, I clenched my teeth and thought: big surprise. “The monks only go for alms in India on special days. In Thailand, they wake at five in the morning; in India later,” like eight or nine.
When it came time for us to leave the beautiful room, Govinda asked Shantum, “What country are you from?”
Shantum smiled and said, “I’m an Indian Buddhist.” This conjured a big smile out of Govinda, who is no doubt aware of how Buddhism died out in India. Who knows, maybe with a little help from Shantum, Indian Buddhism will make a comeback and in a hundred years, it could be perhaps even as popular in India as it was during the Buddha’s time.
The sun was rapidly setting by the time we went outdoors. From the balcony we paused to look out on the long white monastery and the temple. Yvette mentioned that both monks and nuns live at this monastery, and I said, “Yeah, but guess who does the cooking.”
We followed Govinda to the domed temple that I had noticed earlier. It’s a shrine that “looks like a big jewel box,” as Erika put it. We went inside, and an enormous glass case in the center contains a relic of the Buddha in one little box and some of his hair in a slightly lower box, both of which looked like standard-sized jewel boxes. We sat on the floor and practiced some chanting and meditation in front of the glass case. Everyone rose from the floor, and I circled the big glass box, reminiscent of Willy Wonka’s glass elevator, and I noticed that at each corner stood delicate-looking dainty gold tables covered with pretty gold things that were like filigree.
The temple and monastery are beautiful, but I was rather unimpressed about the comment concerning nuns and cooking. That jarringly woke me up, though I have read quite a bit about Asian women and Buddhism, enough that I once considered ditching Buddhism altogether. I must remind myself that bell hooks and Alice Walker are Buddhists, and that sanghas are more egalitarian in North American Buddhist communities, where I’m much more likely to participate in a sangha. But this distaste is about women in general, not me; we all are sisters.
The Thai monks can afford elaborate gold temples; this one in Kushinagar had a wealthy donor, despite Govinda’s stress on the unimportance of money. Yet they “can’t afford” to fully ordain nuns and not use them as servants, which really cuts in on the time the nuns should be practicing. The concept of treating nuns like monks is still alien to Thai culture, although from what I have read it is slowly changing. Tibetan culture has the same problem, with nuns working as servants and in many cases only starting to read when they’re in their thirties, whereas monks down the road are very literate and do all kinds of ceremonies and get plenty of donations, since it’s considered better merit to donate to monks than to donate to nuns.
Govinda talks against money and extravagance and emphasizes charity, yet Thai Theravada nuns are subservient to monks even right here at his Kushinagar monastery, while the temples are so elaborate and expensive. Jennifer spoke up about this conspicuous consumption to Shantum as we walked away from the temple, and Shantum reminded her that this monastery has a major donor.
I have read in the Buddhist magazines Tricycle and The Turning Wheel that boys who live in poverty in Thailand go to monasteries and get an education, while their sisters often end up as prostitutes and donate some of their money from prostitution to the monasteries. If Govinda would have thought of it, maybe he could have politely asked the donor to use the money to help improve life for girls from poor families in Thailand, those who would otherwise end up in brothels or on the streets. Compassion is important even, or rather especially, when it challenges the oppressive status quo. Compassion should help open your heart and open your eyes and inspire you to be awake when something is unjust and to do something about it, whatever you can.
Such thoughts don’t come to my mind because I’m under some smug delusion that I’m better than everyone else, as vicious relatives would sneeringly imply not for the first time if they read this, but rather because I genuinely believe in compassion, loving-kindness, and justice, regardless of my imperfect actions. I am at this particular point on the path, and no matter how incompetent I may seem at this point, I really want to change myself and the world. The more open-minded you are and the less in denial you are, the more able you are to embrace truth. Even if I don’t do a perfect job of expressing compassion, I have the sense to know that it is a top priority.
I admit I found the Thai temples and monastery breathtakingly beautiful and enjoyed wandering around the complex. For a long time I’ve had internal conflict between aesthetics and ethics. I like elaborate art and architecture, even castles and palaces, despite my anti-hierarchy beliefs, and yet part of my mind says this elaborate architecture used up money that should have gone into, for instance, saving Thai girls from sex trafficking. When I read about goofy pseudo-Neoclassical palaces in Kathmandu, I thought such buildings should be torn down and the materials sold to save Nepalese girls from being dragged into such a life. And in Thailand especially, sex trafficking is a huge problem, yet the male-dominated religious institutions get flashy gold and marble architecture.
It was dark outside by the time we left the big jewel box. The monastery, from what I could see, consisted largely of very long one-story white marble buildings. A short flight of steps led up to a little store that sold such things as postcards, where Yvette and Liz browsed.
I heard countless frogs croaking gently, like peepers in the early spring, and I noticed a sort of moat and a white footbridge leading to the short flight of steps to the gift shop. Much plant life that I couldn’t identify covered the bank of this little brook, and inside floated lily pads. I stood on the bridge and watched, and sure enough I saw movement in the water, a frog that created circles on the glistening black surface.
Besides Yvette, Liz, and me, the only other two members of the sangha who didn’t disperse were Jennifer and Rikki, who lingered in order to place a candle offering at a shrine that consisted of a simple square metal structure with a row of burning candles, in front of the short flight of steps leading up to the monastery shop. However, Rikki didn’t have a candle or a match and asked for them at the shop. We all ultimately stood in front of the shrine, and I gazed at the flickering candles, watching them dance and float in the dark night air.
Unfortunately, none of us was really sure which way to go in order to leave the monastery. We backtracked toward the temple where we had started out, and we made our way, in the dark, to the front gates. It was a beautiful evening and not too cold to be out and about, even though the darkness made it seem late. A tour bus was parked out front, but it didn’t take us long to notice that the people stepping off it were not from our sangha. We turned to the left and in the distance could see a few people walking away in the dark, down the narrow road.
“There’s Shantum!” Liz said. Sure enough, he was in the center of this group of people, walking at a leisurely pace. “I recognize his walk.”
“And his hat,” I said.
“Yeah, he has a distinctive walk,” Yvette said. It suggests that he walks mindfully every time he’s walking. We headed in the direction of Shantum and his walking companions, and surprisingly in a few minutes we were actually at the Lotus Nikko Hotel. None of us had had any idea that our hotel was so close to the Thai temple.
Meanwhile, Thai monks in orange and yellow robes with that alluring off the shoulder look circled the stupa, chanting and creating a pleasant vibration around us. I mindfully circumambulated the Ramabhar Stupa three times, enjoying the chanting. The entire setting was calm and soothing and peaceful. On the backside of the stupa there was a pot of incense and some offerings. While I circumambulated, the Thais stopped chanting and gathered before the offerings. Meanwhile, most of our sangha joined the Nepalese pilgrims by lying on their straw mats in the reclining Buddha pose with heads toward the stupa.
At the ancient stupa ruins, a crowd of beggar children gathered around Val, who put little stickers on their hands; Yvette said it looked like she was feeding pigeons, because of the way the children gathered around Val, who reached out and put the stickers on their hands. As we started heading for the bus, Erika passed out pens to the beggar children: they grabbed at the colorful writing utensils, and she told them all to sit. They promptly sat in unison, like well-trained puppies. When she walked toward the bus, children surrounded her, and Ann commented on how kids are most inclined to approach Erika and Yvette, since they are close to the children’s size.
Due to my enthusiasm for using my camera, Mukesh started on ongoing joke. He says, “Susan, where’s your camera?” My answer is one of the following:
“It’s in my bag.”
“In my pocket!”
“My camera? Oh, no, I must have left it at the last hotel!”
We left the cremation stupa and walked up a path that the Buddha walked. We walked to a Hanuman shrine close to a group of colorful little mud Islamic shrines shaped like stacks of square boxes. In front of the shrines, at the edge of the path, sat Gypsy-like musicians with a drum and a rectangular box of an instrument that sounded much like an accordion and which I later learned is called a harmonium.
We came to a goddess shrine that included a square platform with a life-size blue Kali standing in front. Inside a little house-like structure at the back of the platform, a life-size Durga rode a lion. I tagged along behind, and by the time I caught up with the group, Shantum was explaining, “Women connect with the goddesses that are most like them.” That certainly explains my attraction to Durga, the single and independent woman, and Sarasvati, the geek.
Some of us, perhaps half of the sangha, walked down the road to the Thai temple. Bicyclists gawked at us as they glided past, and of course I had to stop and pet baby goats along the way. On our left, we soon arrived at the very elaborate and gorgeous Thai temple and monastery complex. It is made of white marble with gold trim and has the typical Thai look: a very steep pointy roof like a gingerbread house but ending in curly dragon faces at the corners.
We slipped off our shoes and climbed up the stairs of a temple that was the first building at the monastery, and we came to a white marble balcony where I paused to gaze at another temple nearby, that was a big square full of glass windows topped by a roof made of countless pointy gold domes. We went further up the white marble stairs and stepped into a breathtaking hall with deep blue walls and a shrine at the far end. On the shrine sat a big gold Buddha and many other gold, filigree-like statues and ornaments. We sat down on the carpet, and a monk turned on electric lights, or rather gold and crystal sconces. The abbot Govinda, whom we had met on Vulture Peak, entered the room, for Shantum had made an appointment with him. Govinda sat to our right, in what looked like a French Louis XIV chair.
The abbot gave us a talk and among other things said that his daily schedule includes three hours walking meditation, one and a half hours sitting meditation, and one hour praying. Most of Govinda’s talk focused on the unimportance of money, how it doesn’t buy you happiness.
“Next time, I’ll speak better English. Come back in five years,” Govinda concluded, before the sangha began asking him questions. Rikki asked him how he would teach us if we were his students, but he does not think his English is good enough; he could teach only in Thai. His English sounded impressive to us.
Shantum asked if Thai monks have bank accounts, and Govinda replied only for the sangha, not for themselves. Someone asked who cooks for the monks, and Govinda said they have “no food after noon, and nuns do most of the cooking.” Upon hearing this, I clenched my teeth and thought: big surprise. “The monks only go for alms in India on special days. In Thailand, they wake at five in the morning; in India later,” like eight or nine.
When it came time for us to leave the beautiful room, Govinda asked Shantum, “What country are you from?”
Shantum smiled and said, “I’m an Indian Buddhist.” This conjured a big smile out of Govinda, who is no doubt aware of how Buddhism died out in India. Who knows, maybe with a little help from Shantum, Indian Buddhism will make a comeback and in a hundred years, it could be perhaps even as popular in India as it was during the Buddha’s time.
The sun was rapidly setting by the time we went outdoors. From the balcony we paused to look out on the long white monastery and the temple. Yvette mentioned that both monks and nuns live at this monastery, and I said, “Yeah, but guess who does the cooking.”
We followed Govinda to the domed temple that I had noticed earlier. It’s a shrine that “looks like a big jewel box,” as Erika put it. We went inside, and an enormous glass case in the center contains a relic of the Buddha in one little box and some of his hair in a slightly lower box, both of which looked like standard-sized jewel boxes. We sat on the floor and practiced some chanting and meditation in front of the glass case. Everyone rose from the floor, and I circled the big glass box, reminiscent of Willy Wonka’s glass elevator, and I noticed that at each corner stood delicate-looking dainty gold tables covered with pretty gold things that were like filigree.
The temple and monastery are beautiful, but I was rather unimpressed about the comment concerning nuns and cooking. That jarringly woke me up, though I have read quite a bit about Asian women and Buddhism, enough that I once considered ditching Buddhism altogether. I must remind myself that bell hooks and Alice Walker are Buddhists, and that sanghas are more egalitarian in North American Buddhist communities, where I’m much more likely to participate in a sangha. But this distaste is about women in general, not me; we all are sisters.
The Thai monks can afford elaborate gold temples; this one in Kushinagar had a wealthy donor, despite Govinda’s stress on the unimportance of money. Yet they “can’t afford” to fully ordain nuns and not use them as servants, which really cuts in on the time the nuns should be practicing. The concept of treating nuns like monks is still alien to Thai culture, although from what I have read it is slowly changing. Tibetan culture has the same problem, with nuns working as servants and in many cases only starting to read when they’re in their thirties, whereas monks down the road are very literate and do all kinds of ceremonies and get plenty of donations, since it’s considered better merit to donate to monks than to donate to nuns.
Govinda talks against money and extravagance and emphasizes charity, yet Thai Theravada nuns are subservient to monks even right here at his Kushinagar monastery, while the temples are so elaborate and expensive. Jennifer spoke up about this conspicuous consumption to Shantum as we walked away from the temple, and Shantum reminded her that this monastery has a major donor.
I have read in the Buddhist magazines Tricycle and The Turning Wheel that boys who live in poverty in Thailand go to monasteries and get an education, while their sisters often end up as prostitutes and donate some of their money from prostitution to the monasteries. If Govinda would have thought of it, maybe he could have politely asked the donor to use the money to help improve life for girls from poor families in Thailand, those who would otherwise end up in brothels or on the streets. Compassion is important even, or rather especially, when it challenges the oppressive status quo. Compassion should help open your heart and open your eyes and inspire you to be awake when something is unjust and to do something about it, whatever you can.
Such thoughts don’t come to my mind because I’m under some smug delusion that I’m better than everyone else, as vicious relatives would sneeringly imply not for the first time if they read this, but rather because I genuinely believe in compassion, loving-kindness, and justice, regardless of my imperfect actions. I am at this particular point on the path, and no matter how incompetent I may seem at this point, I really want to change myself and the world. The more open-minded you are and the less in denial you are, the more able you are to embrace truth. Even if I don’t do a perfect job of expressing compassion, I have the sense to know that it is a top priority.
I admit I found the Thai temples and monastery breathtakingly beautiful and enjoyed wandering around the complex. For a long time I’ve had internal conflict between aesthetics and ethics. I like elaborate art and architecture, even castles and palaces, despite my anti-hierarchy beliefs, and yet part of my mind says this elaborate architecture used up money that should have gone into, for instance, saving Thai girls from sex trafficking. When I read about goofy pseudo-Neoclassical palaces in Kathmandu, I thought such buildings should be torn down and the materials sold to save Nepalese girls from being dragged into such a life. And in Thailand especially, sex trafficking is a huge problem, yet the male-dominated religious institutions get flashy gold and marble architecture.
It was dark outside by the time we left the big jewel box. The monastery, from what I could see, consisted largely of very long one-story white marble buildings. A short flight of steps led up to a little store that sold such things as postcards, where Yvette and Liz browsed.
I heard countless frogs croaking gently, like peepers in the early spring, and I noticed a sort of moat and a white footbridge leading to the short flight of steps to the gift shop. Much plant life that I couldn’t identify covered the bank of this little brook, and inside floated lily pads. I stood on the bridge and watched, and sure enough I saw movement in the water, a frog that created circles on the glistening black surface.
Besides Yvette, Liz, and me, the only other two members of the sangha who didn’t disperse were Jennifer and Rikki, who lingered in order to place a candle offering at a shrine that consisted of a simple square metal structure with a row of burning candles, in front of the short flight of steps leading up to the monastery shop. However, Rikki didn’t have a candle or a match and asked for them at the shop. We all ultimately stood in front of the shrine, and I gazed at the flickering candles, watching them dance and float in the dark night air.
Unfortunately, none of us was really sure which way to go in order to leave the monastery. We backtracked toward the temple where we had started out, and we made our way, in the dark, to the front gates. It was a beautiful evening and not too cold to be out and about, even though the darkness made it seem late. A tour bus was parked out front, but it didn’t take us long to notice that the people stepping off it were not from our sangha. We turned to the left and in the distance could see a few people walking away in the dark, down the narrow road.
“There’s Shantum!” Liz said. Sure enough, he was in the center of this group of people, walking at a leisurely pace. “I recognize his walk.”
“And his hat,” I said.
“Yeah, he has a distinctive walk,” Yvette said. It suggests that he walks mindfully every time he’s walking. We headed in the direction of Shantum and his walking companions, and surprisingly in a few minutes we were actually at the Lotus Nikko Hotel. None of us had had any idea that our hotel was so close to the Thai temple.
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