Sera Monastery

As we rode to the Sera Monastery, which is on the outskirts of Lhasa, Gyantzing told me that it housed five thousand monks before the Chinese invasion, and now it only has eight hundred monks. To me, that still seems like an awfully big number, but at the same time I don’t think it’s appropriate for the colonial government to limit the number of people who want a spiritual and communal life (or at least supposedly spiritual—not all monks are good, and because of the occupation, monks and nuns aren’t allowed to study as deeply as they should, and as they do in Dharamsala). Gyantzing explained that boys have to be at least sixteen years old to become monks now, and the Chinese authorities look at their background first, to make sure they have no relatives in India or relatives who are political protesters. I think that generally boys who become monks when they’re only five years old aren’t old enough to know whether that really is their calling, but on the other hand I’ve read that there’s so much for them to learn that they have to start at such a very early age. The part about the authorities checking potential monks’ backgrounds strikes me as much more oppressive and intrusive than the part about making them wait till they’re sixteen. Strangely, I didn’t think to ask how old girls had to be to become nuns, but I guess it didn’t occur to me because we were at an all-male monastery.

The Chinese destroyed the statue of Padmasambhava in front of Mount Kailash, huge statue, right after it was built. Power tripping much? They did the same with another statue—this is recent stuff if the Chinese government doesn’t approve of a public statue—like they’d approve of something Buddhist anyway!—then they tear it down. As I pointed out, it’s power-tripping politicians. But China’s not the only country that has power-tripping politicians—the USA has a blatantly power-tripping Whiteboyworld ungovernable government.

We were on the road to the monastery, when I spotted yaks for the first time, standing around amid small bare trees that I hesitate to call a forest. The narrow road was lined with merchants who had simple little booths. They didn’t look like they made a good living, with their dingy clothing and unkempt hair. The road leads directly to the monastery, where you buy tickets as though the monastery was an amusement park. That’s how the Chinese treat Buddhism in Tibet.

At the end of this road was the looming whitewashed monastery, such a different world from the Chinese streets of Lhasa. After we got out of the car and Gyantzing got the tickets, we walked up steps at a dramatic slant. I saw whitewashed buildings to my left and to my right.

The first place we visited was the printing press, a room that has traditionally been used as a printing press I’m thinking for centuries. The walls were lined with shelves and shelves full of carved wooden blocks. Some shelves contained modern books in Tibetan but I also saw stacks of the long, slender pages of Tibetan traditional scriptures, not only on shelves but also on the floor.

There were low glass cabinets forming a square in the center of the room, like in a shop. On top of the back glass cabinet were stacked black-printed banners on yellow fabric lying stacked on top of the glass cabinet. Gyantzing explained to me that these are pinned onto a door for good luck, and I decided to purchase a banner for me and another for my brother. The banners I purchased are quite different: the one with Manjushri at the top protects you from illness, and the one that I got for myself is a mandala. At some point while I wandered around this fascinating room, I noticed a couple of monks staring at me. They were doing it the same way as villagers visiting the Potala had stared at me, but it was disconcerting to be stared at by monks.

In more or less the center of the monastery is a shell of a building that was bombed after the Chinese invasion (supposedly during the Cultural Revolution, but in fact the Chinese started bombing Lhasa in 1959). One wall facing the entrance stood, still white stone blocks with black-framed windows, and it was disconcerting to see weeds growing out of the windows. Weirder still was looking through the windows and seeing the sky and the hill slanting upward, instead of seeing the interior of a building with brocade banners and gold Buddha statues. I walked around the corner, and there was very little of the opposite wall or side walls remained. It looked like an ancient ruin, and yet it had been intact before the late nineteen-fifties. It is a great shame that the Chinese won’t even admit that this sort of thing happened before the Cultural Revolution. Liars. Oh, yeah, we can’t let honesty get in the way of ideology.

We took a walk through the main part of Sera Monastery, with a functioning prayer hall and little rooms containing statues of Shakyamuni, Tsongkapa, and the like. After our visits to Ganden Monastery, the Potala, and the Jokhang Temple, the art and décor in Sera Monastery’s temples and shrine rooms seemed redundant, though nonetheless beautiful and stirring. There were a few other tourists, particularly a group of Germans. Most of the tourists in Tibet are Chinese, and this is only March, so the tourist season won’t actually begin for a couple months.

Large red double doors lead into a courtyard surrounded by a whitewashed stone wall. Inside the courtyard are some trees, and when Gyantzing and I entered it, the courtyard was also full of red-clad monks, most of whom looked between the ages of sixteen and forty. They were practicing the traditional Tibetan debating, which to an outsider looks quite comical. They split into twos, and one monk stands before the other and asks a question, stretching out his arms and slapping his palms together. The other answers, and as he finishes his answer, he stretches out his arms and slaps his palms together. This is often done with smiles and laughter. Sometimes one monk questions a group of four monks. After watching this for about half an hour, we wandered into another section of courtyard, where middle-aged monks debated in a much quieter and gentler manner, while sitting cross-legged on the ground. That wasn’t nearly as interesting to watch.

Between three and five in the afternoon, monks entertain tourists at Sera Monastery by practicing their traditional debating (Michael Palin calls it kung fu debating) in the monastery’s courtyard. Before I left on this trip, I read an online report presented by the International Campaign for Tibet; it was specifically for people who were about to be tourists in Tibet, and among other things it explained the monks at Sera Monastery still debate as they had in the past, but now it entertains tourists and the topics of their debates are much simpler than they were before the Chinese invasion. They aren’t allowed to study as much, and they are not allowed to study Tibetan Buddhism with the depth that previous generations studied and practiced. The gurus, the Rimpoches, are in exile and teaching practitioners outside of Tibet, not in it.

We walked slowly up a path that went up, up the mountain. The mountain itself was a light brown color and crumbly with rocks, some of which were quite large. Not much plant life grew high on the mountain; that’s a clue that we’re at a high elevation. Above, I gazed at bright and colorful pictures of bodhisattvas painted on rocks, some of which were very high up. I imagined robed painters climbing up to precarious locations just so they could paint Buddhas and bodhisattvas on mountain rocks.

In the distance is a yellow-painted stone temple that Gyantzing explained is in front of Tsongkapa’s favorite meditation cave. I remembered the small Tibetan temple in front of the Buddha’s austerities cave near Bodh Gaya, India. During Tsongkapa’s time, the meditation cave would have been a simple cave without any ornate temple in front of it.

We climbed up and got closer to huge painted rocks and to a tall skinny empty tower from which a huge thangka is hung on Losar. It was very narrow, with slightly slanting walls and the obligatory black-framed windows, but Gyantzing explained that inside the tower is empty; there’s a staircase but no furniture or artwork. Of course, the building’s sole purpose is to display the giant thangka.

In front of the tower was a plateau, and I stepped near the edge, amid the shrubbery, and standing at this lookout point, I gazed at the distant Potala. One of the enormous, flattish stones next to the tower was covered with several bright Green Taras. We turned to head back toward the lively monastery, and I noticed a woman sitting on the ground and wearing a brimmed hat and colorful striped shawl, and I thought she looked Peruvian.

I’m hearing a yowling tomcat out in the parking lot or some such place, somewhere outside my window. I think I heard him last night, too. He probably smells me and thinks I’m a female cat.