A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
— Chapter 27, Dao de Ching
Wednesday morning, we took off for Shigatse, site of Tasilhunpo Monastery and the tallest wooden Buddha in the world at 75 feet tall. The face and hands of this blue-haired Buddha are covered in 300 kg of gold leaf. The monastery is the designated official home of the Panchen Lama. Because of political conflict between Tibet and China, the current Panchen Lama is under house-arrest in Beijing.
Because of construction delays, melting snow that that turned brief parts of the roads into mud, and the threat of Public Security Bureau checkpoints (which never materialized), it took more time than we thought to get to Shigatse.
We took our lunch Wednesday on the beach of a huge lake, Dralang Tso. Its water is royal blue and aquamarine by turn. We sat on round river rocks, and after lunch, skipped a few on the smaller ones on the lake. The next day, lunch was under some trees in a walled garden. We gave some of our food — fried chicken, hard-boiled eggs, and pears — away to some farm boys who wandered by.
From the seats of our bus, we had views of scenery few Americans see. At 16,500 feet, the mountains turn brown and rocky, and are topped with sun-melted snow. If you look close enough, you can see some ochre moss on the slabs of slate, and if you're lucky, the purple heather between them.
There was a long-running debate as to whether we saw Mount Everest. Well, at least we were in the right mountain range, the Himalayas.
Back in Lhasa on Friday, we visited Dre Pung Monastery, the monastery with the most Buddhist monks in the world at 500. At one point, nearly 2,000 monks were in residence. The monastery as a whole is dedicated to the Buddha of the Future.
At the monastery, we saw some of the pilgrims as they walked around the main chapel. As they passed the brass-adorned columns, they rubbed their prayer beads on them and some pressed their foreheads against them. They wear wood blocks on their hands and tie cloth around their knees because they prostrate themselves — across the plazas of the monasteries, on the busy streets of Lhasa, and along some of the dirt roads out in the country.
We were lucky: we witnessed about 250 monks doing their form of theological debate. Standing and sitting under some short trees, they debate each other's knowledge of the sutras, the Buddhist scriptures. When one made a good point, the other was obliged to clap his hands. From a distance, it was a marvelous sound coming out of those trees. Maroon-robed monks talking, laughing, and clapping.
— Charles M. Israel
Superlatives (based on informal polling):
- Persons voted most likely to go native in Tibet: Anna Helms, Andrew Batten
- Person voted most likely to pull practical jokes on professors: Khelen Rhodes
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