Monk battles, monk music, monk kitchen, and Illegal Stuff
If you are Chinese please stop reading this blog now. If youa re old and don't get rap music, also stop reading now. And if youa re udner 18 this is llegal, go away, do your homework, dont' have sex, and dont' argue with your parents.
Macke shows at my place with plans...trekking, monstery visits. Nobody is IN! Everybody just wants to "hang out in Lhasa". WHat the f**k? We decide it's the altitude. At over 12,000 feet, it's hard for lots of folks to simply walk up stairs. To get an idea-- imagine going to the top of WHistler's peak, and heading 3,000 feet stright up from there.
Macke and I head out to ______ Monastery one morning. At the entrance a couple of monks are screwing around with exercise equipment-- flexible bars and pec-builders. They go for our guidebook-- Tibetans don't get to see many photos of their own country, thanks to the Ch*nese media (or lack thereof). One guy yells as he points at a picture of a Tibetan jewellery seller. He grabs the book and runs outside and soon comes back with the woman in question and a horde of admirers. She's a celebrity now-- she's made it into the Lonely Planet. The monks want to practise their fragmentary English and we work on our Tibetan, which is now so mixed with Hindi and Nepali that we must come off as indigent trader speakers of Asian pidgin.
_________ Monastery is ancient and still. The smell of sewage is everywhere. The chapels are full of massive Buddhas. In one, there are one thousand some identical statuettes fo the Buddha. Somebody msut have made money off of THAT order. The outer walls are hot white and inside it is cool dark reds and oranges.
We hike up the mountain with sleeping bags and cups of instant noodles to _______ Hermitage where two massive snarling mastiffs are thank God (if She exists) chained up and a herd of yaks pass us and give us long slow stares. The monks are happy to see us and give us mats to crash on and hot water-- one of the great CHinese customs is getting boiling hot water for tea in your hotel room-- before they show us around their gompa. At 4600m and two hours' walk uphill from ______, the place is beautiful. The monk then leads us to a smaller building, flicks on some lights and there, on the main alter, is a phot of the D*lai L*ma, the spiritual leader of T*bet, (who is officially a traitor to the Chinese and how has been in exile since 1959). The monks' possession of this photo is the kind of thing that would invite the Chinese government to come in and throw all the monks into jail and destroy the place. Wow. This is cool. Hold up that torch, boys.
Later one of the monks makes yak butter tea. He boils water and purs it into a tall think churn. He adds what loosk liek a cubic foot of yak butter and starts churning. I throw cultural sensitivity to the wind and flatly refuse; Macke accepts a cup and guilts me into sipping it. It's liquid butter, not bad, but hwo these folks live on this is amazing. Well, it's locally ecologically sanely produced protein and fat. It's interestign that TIbetans are generally taller and thicker than Nepalis-- it must be the high-in-yak diet.
The next morning we gasp and stumble up to Gambo Utse at 18,000 feet (5300 meters). The place looks like a spiritual graveyard. Thousands of cairn altars-- some ten feet high-- cover the peak and its ridge. Prayer flags flap and whisper. The sun is blinding and plays hide and seek with huge cumulus clouds. We are dizzy and exhausted-- this is more than twice the height of Whistler or Lake Louise ski areas but stunned by the views, and at the simple purity of ordinary Buddhists' devotions and the thousands of simple altars.
We retrieve our stuff and head back down to the valley. Back at ____________ Monastery we follow what sounds like duelling bagpipes into a courtyard where four monks are getting caffeinated and hyper on serial shots of Pepsi and playing their gelinhs (short horns) in eerie modal harmonies that wail like slow bagpipes and swirl seven note octaves around a basal drone. The monks force hits of Pepsi on us.
We walk down through the quiet lanes, walls white-hot in the sun, to a railing where we hear what sounds like a yelling riot punctuated with slaps and cracks. Monk hockey? Monk fights? Turns out it's Monk Philosophical Battles! Groups of monks are scattered around a garden of trees and gravel. One yells a burst of speech, punctuated and rhythmic, and ends by slapping his hands together, WHAP! The other responds and ends with another WHAP! The monks are, uhh, into it. One guy has grabbed the other by the throat and is screaming Buddhist doctrine at him. Another pair of monks needs to be restrained from physically assaulting each other as they yell and smack. Eminem oughta see THIS shit. I'm imagining the battles as something like this:
"Yo I'm tha muthafuckin' MC Chang Tse and I'm'a work yo ass. I'm a show the homes that they no muthafuckin' Eight-Fold Path." SMACK!
"Yo, Chang, we got the MC Hung Wah in da house, word up, yo style, "it's like dyin' in my sleep-- I dont' feel it" the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path, muthafucka is the WAY, nigga, the WAY, what you talkin' 'bout?" SMACK!
(or here is Inder Nirwan's version:
"Yo nukka, you can't be in mah crib.. buddah said."
"Thats it foo' time to smack you upside the head"...
"Break it down!")
(etc etc-- the closest thing we have to live intense debate in Western society is rap battles- OK maybe the monks don't swear but it sure sounds like it from the yelling). The point of this is learning scripture and udnertsanding. If you can defend it in argument, you know it.
Later I see the monastery kitchen, where pots big enought to stew entire hippies sit silently in the darkness and a lone monk reads a comic book.
At the entrance, another group of monks calls us over. One of the local kids is wear crotchless training pants and rolls around on a sack of rice like a pedophile's wet dream. The monks buy us water (!!) and seem kind of surprised that we made it all the way to the top of Gambo Utse.
We catch a ride into town on a bus driven by a sane man and at my hotel I find The Polish Chick in my room with her German friend. She immediately goes off on the shamanic energies available in Ganden Monastery. Luckily Macke shows up. He's been eyeing a pair of luscious Israelis and corrals me into dinner with this pair. But since everybody is exhausted and we barely share a language, dinner is a bit awkward (especially when Macke tries to explain the weirdnesses of apple tree reproductive biology to the ladies-- did you know that any given apple seed from an apple tree can turn itno any other breed of apple tree? that's why growers all graft trees). We finish the evening withTibetan streetfood-- spicy meat skewers and flatbread and beer in the smoky street.
Our plans-- a remote monasteries tour, and then a trek involving TWO 18,000 foot passes, oh, yeah, and then magically overthrowing the Ch*inese g*overnment and giving the Tibetans their own land back. Wish us luck.
Macke shows at my place with plans...trekking, monstery visits. Nobody is IN! Everybody just wants to "hang out in Lhasa". WHat the f**k? We decide it's the altitude. At over 12,000 feet, it's hard for lots of folks to simply walk up stairs. To get an idea-- imagine going to the top of WHistler's peak, and heading 3,000 feet stright up from there.
Macke and I head out to ______ Monastery one morning. At the entrance a couple of monks are screwing around with exercise equipment-- flexible bars and pec-builders. They go for our guidebook-- Tibetans don't get to see many photos of their own country, thanks to the Ch*nese media (or lack thereof). One guy yells as he points at a picture of a Tibetan jewellery seller. He grabs the book and runs outside and soon comes back with the woman in question and a horde of admirers. She's a celebrity now-- she's made it into the Lonely Planet. The monks want to practise their fragmentary English and we work on our Tibetan, which is now so mixed with Hindi and Nepali that we must come off as indigent trader speakers of Asian pidgin.
_________ Monastery is ancient and still. The smell of sewage is everywhere. The chapels are full of massive Buddhas. In one, there are one thousand some identical statuettes fo the Buddha. Somebody msut have made money off of THAT order. The outer walls are hot white and inside it is cool dark reds and oranges.
We hike up the mountain with sleeping bags and cups of instant noodles to _______ Hermitage where two massive snarling mastiffs are thank God (if She exists) chained up and a herd of yaks pass us and give us long slow stares. The monks are happy to see us and give us mats to crash on and hot water-- one of the great CHinese customs is getting boiling hot water for tea in your hotel room-- before they show us around their gompa. At 4600m and two hours' walk uphill from ______, the place is beautiful. The monk then leads us to a smaller building, flicks on some lights and there, on the main alter, is a phot of the D*lai L*ma, the spiritual leader of T*bet, (who is officially a traitor to the Chinese and how has been in exile since 1959). The monks' possession of this photo is the kind of thing that would invite the Chinese government to come in and throw all the monks into jail and destroy the place. Wow. This is cool. Hold up that torch, boys.
Later one of the monks makes yak butter tea. He boils water and purs it into a tall think churn. He adds what loosk liek a cubic foot of yak butter and starts churning. I throw cultural sensitivity to the wind and flatly refuse; Macke accepts a cup and guilts me into sipping it. It's liquid butter, not bad, but hwo these folks live on this is amazing. Well, it's locally ecologically sanely produced protein and fat. It's interestign that TIbetans are generally taller and thicker than Nepalis-- it must be the high-in-yak diet.
The next morning we gasp and stumble up to Gambo Utse at 18,000 feet (5300 meters). The place looks like a spiritual graveyard. Thousands of cairn altars-- some ten feet high-- cover the peak and its ridge. Prayer flags flap and whisper. The sun is blinding and plays hide and seek with huge cumulus clouds. We are dizzy and exhausted-- this is more than twice the height of Whistler or Lake Louise ski areas but stunned by the views, and at the simple purity of ordinary Buddhists' devotions and the thousands of simple altars.
We retrieve our stuff and head back down to the valley. Back at ____________ Monastery we follow what sounds like duelling bagpipes into a courtyard where four monks are getting caffeinated and hyper on serial shots of Pepsi and playing their gelinhs (short horns) in eerie modal harmonies that wail like slow bagpipes and swirl seven note octaves around a basal drone. The monks force hits of Pepsi on us.
We walk down through the quiet lanes, walls white-hot in the sun, to a railing where we hear what sounds like a yelling riot punctuated with slaps and cracks. Monk hockey? Monk fights? Turns out it's Monk Philosophical Battles! Groups of monks are scattered around a garden of trees and gravel. One yells a burst of speech, punctuated and rhythmic, and ends by slapping his hands together, WHAP! The other responds and ends with another WHAP! The monks are, uhh, into it. One guy has grabbed the other by the throat and is screaming Buddhist doctrine at him. Another pair of monks needs to be restrained from physically assaulting each other as they yell and smack. Eminem oughta see THIS shit. I'm imagining the battles as something like this:
"Yo I'm tha muthafuckin' MC Chang Tse and I'm'a work yo ass. I'm a show the homes that they no muthafuckin' Eight-Fold Path." SMACK!
"Yo, Chang, we got the MC Hung Wah in da house, word up, yo style, "it's like dyin' in my sleep-- I dont' feel it" the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path, muthafucka is the WAY, nigga, the WAY, what you talkin' 'bout?" SMACK!
(or here is Inder Nirwan's version:
"Yo nukka, you can't be in mah crib.. buddah said."
"Thats it foo' time to smack you upside the head"...
"Break it down!")
(etc etc-- the closest thing we have to live intense debate in Western society is rap battles- OK maybe the monks don't swear but it sure sounds like it from the yelling). The point of this is learning scripture and udnertsanding. If you can defend it in argument, you know it.
Later I see the monastery kitchen, where pots big enought to stew entire hippies sit silently in the darkness and a lone monk reads a comic book.
At the entrance, another group of monks calls us over. One of the local kids is wear crotchless training pants and rolls around on a sack of rice like a pedophile's wet dream. The monks buy us water (!!) and seem kind of surprised that we made it all the way to the top of Gambo Utse.
We catch a ride into town on a bus driven by a sane man and at my hotel I find The Polish Chick in my room with her German friend. She immediately goes off on the shamanic energies available in Ganden Monastery. Luckily Macke shows up. He's been eyeing a pair of luscious Israelis and corrals me into dinner with this pair. But since everybody is exhausted and we barely share a language, dinner is a bit awkward (especially when Macke tries to explain the weirdnesses of apple tree reproductive biology to the ladies-- did you know that any given apple seed from an apple tree can turn itno any other breed of apple tree? that's why growers all graft trees). We finish the evening withTibetan streetfood-- spicy meat skewers and flatbread and beer in the smoky street.
Our plans-- a remote monasteries tour, and then a trek involving TWO 18,000 foot passes, oh, yeah, and then magically overthrowing the Ch*inese g*overnment and giving the Tibetans their own land back. Wish us luck.
posted by Butch at 9:53 AM
1 Comments:
oh yeah! this might be favourite post so far. I was transported for a moment to that altitude and heard weird short horn music and the sound of monks slapping. Oh no wait, I'm actually here in my cube, damn.
Nice work Butch.
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