If my posting seems even more sporadic than usual, it’s because I’m starting a two-week trip in Northwestern Yunnan/Southwestern Sichuan this week. It’s part of a course on Tibetan Studies offered by IES. We have seven students who will be trekking in the area; taking classes on Tibetan culture, history and Buddhism; and living the majority of the time with Tibetan homestays. It’s a very cool class and I’m excited to be a part of it.
Yesterday we flew from Beijing to Zhongdian with a nearly eight hour layover in Kunming. It was enough time for us to stash our gear and head out into the city on what was a truly spectacular day. I love Beijing, I’ve lived there off and on since 2002, but given the right opportunity I’d have a hard time saying no to a couple of years (or more) in the Yunnan capital. It was a gorgeous late spring day with temperatures in the 80s and a nice breeze to keep things from getting too hot. I spent most of the day strolling around Cui Hu Park and the streets around Yunnan University, including the obligatory salad and smoothie at Salvador’s.
We finally arrived in Zhongdian last night around 9:00, checked into a decent guesthouse downtown and then headed out to find some late-night grub. With Noah’s Cafe a 100 yards away from the guesthouse door, it seemed a logical stop. I’d been thinking of one of their burritos (more like a taco salad in soft wrap) for the better part of the flight up from Kunming and it was a nice way to take the edge off the day that had me going from near sea level in Beijing to 6000 feet in Kunming and then to around 11,000 feet here in Zhongdian. I’m usually pretty good at altitude, but lugging the group gear up four flights of stairs last night required some quick hydration and the aforementioned Mexican food before I felt quite right again.
Today we’re doing a tour of the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery just outside of Zhongdian. It’s the largest monastery in Yunnan and one of the most important religious centers in eastern Tibet (broadly defined). Built in 1679, the monastery was heavily damaged during the Cultural Revolution before being renovated in the 1980s. Currently about 600 monks live at the monastery. Our Tibetan studies professor, who has lived in Lhasa for the better part of 15 years and is currently finishing his PhD at Oxford, is one of the best resources I have ever met on the subject of Buddhism in general, and Tibetan Buddhism in particular. I think it’s good for the students to have somebody who can really explain the forms and functions of the structures, and images in the temple and help the students understand the differences between different temples and monasteries in a broader context.
This afternoon we will then head northwest of Zhongdian to the villages of Napa and Ta on the shores of Napa Hai. Our students have been coming to these villages for many years, and we have a really good relationship with the villagers. Students will spend the next five days living, working, and interacting with our Tibetan hosts and its really a joy, as a teacher, to watch a group of intellectually curious and culturally aware university students make the effort to reach out and try to appreciate another way of living and way of understanding the world.
Of course, I’m guessing that I probably won’t have ready access to the Internet during that time, so my next post won’t be until Thursday or Friday at the earliest. After leaving Napa, we’ll head north toward Sichuan and the town of Yading before beginning a two-day circumambulation of “The Goddess of Mercy,” a holy mountain in Southwest Sichuan. We’ll be camping out on one of the high meadows in the shadow of the mountain, and as someone who grew hiking the (comparatively tiny, but still quite cool) mountains of northern New England, I’m really excited for this part of the trip.
More to come…
Beijing to “Shangri-La” http://bit.ly/cv64v7
RT @fx_cn: #GFW Beijing to “Shangri-La” http://bit.ly/cv64v7 http://bit.ly/d3wAfn #ccp #fuckgfw #vpn
It’s certainly a lovely part of China. Be sure to share some pics on facebook. A monk we chatted with at the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery a couple of years ago intimated that things had become repressive there in recent years.
I’m not the best person to comment, but I ran your story by K, our resident Tibetan Studies professor, and the situations is very complicated. Probably more so than I can do justice in the few minutes I have left at the Cafe. But the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery, like much of the Kham region, has ties to/affiliation with/belief in a protector spirit which the DL since 1976 has sought to purge from Tibetan religious practice. This has caused quite a rift in the Tibetan religious community, and K believes that some monks (and monasteries) are subtly opposing the DL (and in a few cases doing so to show some loyalty to the state) by worshipping this protector deity. As I said, I’m sure I’m mangling this to some extent, and I should probably look back over the literature (especially Donald Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri La) and write a more thorough post later.
This is very interesting. When we were at the monastery in fall 2008, I was doing a little talking w/ a Ganden Sumtseling monk (Ai Laoshi helping to translate0 about good religious practice (I’m Zen). In between advice about what I should be chanting on a daily basis, he, appropos of nothing started very openly kvetching about not being allowed to even talk about what the Dalai Lama would say, and then mentioned not even being allowed to say his name. So, for at least this one monk, he seemed pretty disturbed about the levels of official interference.
Look forward to that, Jeremiah. I wasn’t aware of the “belief in a protector spirit” or the DL’s purge. Interesting.
Shangri-La is definitely a beautiful place I always want to go. Please share some pictures later.