Get Thee to a Nunnery...

June 3, 2012 - The Morning

We woke this morning to headaches...acclimatizing to 12,000 feet is happening but it takes a day or two...and jet lag does not help. So we get up around 5:00am, pop two Aleve and some more Diamox and we start our day.

There is a light rain shower and it is cool outside...kind of nice after the hot sun we walked around in yesterday afternoon. The sun here feel quite intense, and you can feel it even when it is behind the clouds.

After finishing up our blog entry about the previous day, we get ready and head down to breakfast. Breakfast is another buffet but this one is very Western in nature, so we fill up and are ready for our first real day of exploring Lhasa and learning more about Tibet, the Tibetan people, and Tibetan Buddhism. Our first experience of the day is the Jokhang Temple. We walked around it yesterday afternoon, and today we will go inside.

The Jokhang Temple dates back to 647AD and was built by the king of Tibet who was the first king to unify all of Tibet. As mentioned in the post from yesterday, this is the holiest temple in all of Tibet, and therefore it is a very popular destination for Tibetan Buddhist pilgrims. This morning when we arrive shortly after 9:00am, we see hundreds (more probably thousands) of pilgrims who are already walking the Kora around the temple. The pilgrims are dressed in traditional Tibetan clothes, and they have sweet but well-worn faces that show how hard the life of a rural Tibetan must be. Both men and women carry their males, or prayer beads, and many of the women are carrying and twirling their prayer wheels. Some are mumbling prayers that we can hear faintly as they pass us by.

The large incense burner is already billowing white smoke from the Juniper incense that pilgrims bring with them or buy in the Barkhor market. The smell is sweet and pungent, and because there are numerous large incense burners located throughout the market and along the Kora, this is a smell that will be with us all morning.

Pilgrims are prostrating themselves in front of the temple again this morning. We learned what the physical movements mean as the pilgrims perform the prostration...the hands to the forehead are a gesture to benefit the gods, the hands brought to the heart are to benefit the pilgrim and remind him or her that they have to believe in their prayers from the depths of their hearts, and the prostration is the demonstration of respect for the gods.

We enter the temple and see more Buddhists crowded into a small courtyard prostrating themselves. Across the courtyard are huge prayer wheels, as tall as a person, they are spinning clockwise. As we enter the temple we pass the altars for the four directions...North, South, East and West; and then we enter an interior courtyard. Once we leave this courtyard we will not be allowed to take photos, so you'll have to bear with our verbal description of the interior of the temple.

Going into the interior of the temple itself, we pass through a corridor with altars of protection on the left and the right. The doors that enter into the temple itself are made of sandalwood that must be nearly a foot thick.

It is dim in the temple itself, with illumination provided only by candles that burn vegetable oil and a few shafts of light from small windows near the ceiling in the three-story main room. The central area of the temple is the seating area for the monks when they come to pray and chant. There are several rows of low padded platforms facing each other on which the monks sit while they pray. At one end of this arrangement is a huge and beautiful thangka, which is a religious painting done on silk. In addition there are large textile columns hanging is bright colors and with gold thread woven in.

All around the outside of the monks area are ornate glass cases filled with statues of various gods and prominent Buddhist religious figures. Most of these statues are original from the 7th century. There are also small rooms, like the small altars in the great cathedrals, thick hold more statues in ornate wall cases. Each of the cases has a slot for donations and the slots in front of the most prominent figures are quite full. Some pilgrims have slid their one-yuan notes through or under the doors that enclose the statues, and some have stuck the small paper bills into the window frame.

We see most pilgrims carrying small thermal carafes and learn that part of the offering that they bring is warmed vegetable oil. Pilgrims will pour the oil into the large oil lamps, which are like large bowls with several wicks, or they will take their oil offering to the main temple statue and a monk will pour it into large buckets where it will cool and be used in the lamps throughout the temple at a later time.

After we take in the interior of the temple and the rituals of the pilgrims, we make our way to the roof of the Jokhang Temple. As we climb the stairs, we arrive first at a mezzanine level outside the temple building...

We proceed up the last, steep staircase to the roof, and the views are really extraordinary. From here you see the juxtaposition of the temple and it's highly ornamented roof against the snow-capped Himalayas in the distance...it really is quite striking and is, for us, the classic visual of Tibet that we had envisioned before coming here.

From our rooftop perch we also have a magnificent view of the Potala Palace, the home of the Dalai Lama, and the highlight of our itinerary for tomorrow. The Potala Palace is the singular visual image that has represented the Kingdom of Tibet for centuries...and it really is quite striking in its bright white, burgundy and gold colors, perched so mightily on the hill overlooking what was the old part of Lhasa...

Our experience at the Jokhang Temple was in many ways confirmation of some of the notions we had about Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism...and in so many more ways it was a place that taught us so much more about Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan people. We were struck by the fervor of the pilgrims we saw, not only in the temple, but on the Kora surrounding it, in the market and square.

Tibetan Buddhism is about earning your way into the afterlife by performing acts of reverence and devotion in the hopes that these will eventually outweigh any transgressions you may have committed during your lifetime. From the little we learned so far, we now understand that Tibetan Buddhism is a complex intertwining of mythology, religious belief, historical persons of prominence, superstition, ritual and devotion.

When we left the temple, we took a stroll through the market where everyday Tibetans living in Lhasa do their shopping, and where rural Tibetans bring their produce, products and trades to sell. It is a somewhat overwhelming mix of people, sounds and smells.

One of the continual scents is that of juniper incense which seems to be everywhere...we turn a corner in the market and we see yet another incense burner and small shrine...and a vendor selling the juniper...

We saw things which are completely foreign to us in the U.S. like Yak Butter. We read about yak butter when we're getting ready for this trip and it's use in Yak Butter Tea, but here it is being sold in large quantities in the market for Tibetans to use in their everyday food preparation...

Our wanderings take us down a small alleyway, and we find this very small temple which might otherwise look like a fancy house if it were not for the incense burner...well, and the drum beat and chanting emanating from within...

Our destination is a nunnery...the equivalent of a monastery for women. When we enter the nunnery from the alleyway,we are greeted by a row of prayer wheels which believers spin in a clockwise direction with their hands as they pass by...so of course we give them a spin too...each wheel has a prayer embossed on the exterior of the cylinder, and Buddhist prayers on small scrolls tucked inside.

We sit for a few moments while we wait for entry into the nunnery, it has turned out to be a very comfortable sunny morning...

Inside the nunnery we find 20-30 women, with very closely cropped hair, dressed in burgundy robes, sitting in rows and praying in their temple area...we are able to go in and observe, even take pictures, but somehow it feels very much like we are intruding on something sacred...

In this nunnery, there is a special room in which the nuns write out the Buddhist scriptures on small scrolls, in very small writing, and these are sold to the monasteries. The monasteries will use them when believers bring statues or prayer wheels to the monastery for blessing...at that time, the believer leaves their item for a few days and part of the blessing includes insertion of one or more of these small scrolls.

It was quite a morning with all of the sights and sounds and smells...we will post another entry about or afternoon and evening...!