Dharamsala and McLeod
After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1958-59, a large number of Tibetans fled across the Himalayas to India and settled around Dharamsala and the nearby village of McLeod Ganj, including the Dalai Lama. McLeod Ganj was founded about a century ago by the British as a summer "hill station", a cool refuge from the heat of Delhi. Today, Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj are an interesting combination of native Indian villagers and herders, Tibetan refuges and monks, and Western tourists seeking spiritualism or retreat to the mountains.
At first glance, Dharamsala has less of a Tibetan flavor than we expected. Back in China, we had visited villages such as Zhongdian which were largely Tibetan, and there were colorful Tibetan temples, banners, and dress. The people were clearly of Tibetan descent, with dark rugged faces, rather than the rounder softer faces of the Chinese. The clothing was bright, with the women in traditional dress of many layers, finished off with a black and white apron and a vest.
Most of Dharamsala, on the other hand, looks much like any other Indian village. While there are Tibetan banners, monks and dress, they blend into the background. The main visual image is that of the noisy, busy, narrow dirt and rock streets, tiny dilapidated shops, free roaming cows and dogs, auto rickshaws and motorcycles, overhead wiring loosely strung from building to building, leaky water pipes lying bare on the ground, monkeys on the rooftops, and lots of people. The vehicles fill the air with their puttering and honking. The smells are a blend of the open air food stalls, the dirt and the cow dung.
But when you look deeper you find that Tibetan culture is alive and well in Dharamsala, unlike China. While in China we visited several Buddhist temples and were struck with how the rituals and decorations have been allowed to return in the past decade, but the knowledge and spirit seemed lost. After two generations without the ability to pass on an essentially oral tradition, today the Tibetans in China seem to be lost, just practicing the few rituals and chants that they remember, but without the depth of knowledge of the ancient culture.
Dharamsala, with perhaps fewer outwardly Tibetan symbols, preserved the heart of Tibetan culture. Monks and lay people attend the temple rituals, but more importantly attend daily teachings and lectures, and practice meditation. Since the Tibetans who fled China were largely religious refugees, most of the Tibetan men in Dharamsala are monks, in their robes. Tibetan doctors treat the monks and refuges with traditional herbs. A Tibetan art and culture center preserves the traditional music and dance. Recent refuges set up small cafes.
The Tibetan government in exile has a small complex in Dharamsala, with offices providing social services for Tibetan refuges, and a library which houses a small museum of a few of the treasures that were saved from the Chinese. Up the hill further is the residence of the Dalai Lama, and the main temple. We were fortunate enough to be here during the Puja, a religious festival with three days of chanting and prayers for peace. The temple was full and overflowing with prostrated monks and Tibetan lay people, spinning their prayer wheels, chanting, and fingering their prayer beads.
Tibetan Buddhism seems to have more rituals and magic than any religion I know of. Believers earn merits through various rituals. Each prayer they chant earns one merit, but there are ways to earn merits more quickly. For example, prayer wheels are decorated canisters which contain small scraps of paper with the chants written on them. One simply has to spin the prayer wheel once, and he derives the same merits of saying each of the enclosed chants. Some prayer wheels have enormous numbers of scraps of paper in them, so one can earn merit quickly! We even saw one prayer wheel with 500,000 scraps in it!
Tibetan Buddhism is full of magic and mysticism. For the average lay person, none of this is very important since one must progress on their path in Buddhism practice quite far before having the level of mind concentration needed for these advanced teachings. Only some monks reach this level of practice. The teachings are quite secret, including ancient written sutras but also oral instructions that are never written down since the masters only pass each teaching on to the student when they believe he is ready. Allegedly, these teachings allow the practitioner to escape the normal boundaries between mind and matter, so that the usual physical laws we know of do not apply anymore. The purpose of the practice is to transcend the boundary between mind and matter in a spiritual quest. Just using the practice to show off the magic effects is a serious misdeed, but the practice supposedly allows the monk to levitate, to materialize objects, to cause object to heat or cool, etc.
Buddhism has many different variations, from the sparse and ascetic forms of Burma and Thailand to the mystical practices of Tibet. Surprisingly to me, a popular form in the West derives from Tibetan Buddhism. This is primarily due to the large number of Tibetan monks who fled from China to the West and set up temples to continue their practice. Since the 60's these temples have gradually exposed more Westerns to the teachings. It seems to me that the forms of Buddhism with less magic, rituals and mysticism would fit the typical Western culture better, but the accessibility of the Tibetan monks was the key. Many of the more ascetic monks in Southeast Asia confine themselves to solitary caves, which doesn't spread that practice very well! Indeed as we study world religions we understand that most religions do not include evangelism at all--Christianity and Islam are the two big exceptions.
McLeod Ganj is a growing town. New refuges continually arrive, and new guest houses spring up for the Western tourists. Many buildings are under construction. The construction is rather unique to watch. The buildings are concrete, but they don't quite put up forms and call in the concrete truck like back in the States. Instead, donkeys carry the sand up the hill two sacks at a time. The gravel is just rocks collected nearby, carried in baskets on the heads of women. The two are mixed together in a large pile (maybe 2.5 meters or eight feet across) by men with shovels. The concrete is mixed directly on the ground as water is poured into the mix and stirred with shovels. Needless to say, the quality is not great, but there is also nearly no cost since labor is so inexpensive.
The forms for the buildings are nothing more than scraps of lumber and branches nailed together to shape the pour. For strength, all of the concrete work contains steel rebar, which is bent by hand and tied together with wire. In this manner, the forms create vertical posts and horizontal beams producing a base structure resembling an open, multi-level parking structure. Later, the interior and exterior walls are added, fashioned from homemade bricks, which are trimmed to fit the wavering dimensions of the posts and beams. Plumbing and wiring are just tacked on the outside of the wall.
The actually pouring is accomplished by shoveling the wet concrete into baskets and women carrying them on their heads up the steps or ladder to the top of the forms, where men pour and work the concrete. I'd guess the basket weighs about 50-60 pounds. This theme of women carrying the heavy loads on their heads seems very common here in northern India.
Above McLeod Ganj are a couple of meditation centers. We signed up for a ten day retreat at the Vipassana Center. Also, McLeod Ganj is at the base of the Himalayas, so we get in a few hikes. But mostly we stayed here to treat Fran's shoulder with physical therapy, acupuncture and Tibetan herbs, and give it time to heal. We spent our time in Dharamsala slowly. We read, hiked, meditated, talked with new friends, and attended the daily lectures. We might have moved on sooner if not for Fran's shoulder, but it was a pleasant, peaceful stay.
McLeod meditation
Part of the reason we came to McLeod was for another meditation retreat. The experience in Thailand was not successful, in that we did not learn enough to establish a meaningful meditation practice. We had already reserved places in a ten day retreat at a center in McLeod that practices Vipassana meditation, a technique based purely on breath and observing the body's sensations.
The Vipassana center in McLeod Ganj is one of a large number worldwide. In fact there are two in
California and one on I-5 halfway between
Portland and
Seattle. The leader is Goenka, originally from
Burma (
Myanmar) and now in
India. Burmese Buddhism is very traditional, and allegedly is one of the closest flavors to the original teachings. Much like the Buddha, who refused to get too interested in metaphysical conjectures, mysticism, or organized religion, Goenka just focuses on helping the individual develop concentration of the mind. In fact, Goenka tries to avoid teachings of any particular religion and emphasizes that the development of the mind is non-sectarian. To read more, check out
www.dhamma.org.
The Center itself is at the top of the hill overlooking McLeod, looking up to the Himalayas. Heavily forested with Deodar cedar and some pine, with birds and monkeys, the setting is quite serene.
The facilities are relatively new. Until 1997, it was just a set of tarps in the woods! Now it has a meditation hall, a dining hall, and a few concrete guest rooms. Still, most of the people sleep in huts made from tarps, as construction continues on the center.
During the retreat, the men and women are completely segregated. In the mediation hall the men sit on the left side, and the women on the right. All other facilities are completely separate. This does help provide an introspective atmosphere, especially since many participants are in their early twenties, or are couples.
Of 45 men and 25 women on the retreat, over 25 are from Israel. Indian nationals rank second, and then there is a scattering of people from all over the world filling out the remainder. The large number of Israelis in India was surprising to us, but there are a large number of youthful Israeli tourists and many guest houses and restaurants catering to them. Apparently, after youth have served their compulsory three years of military service it is very common for them to travel for 3-6 months, with India and South America being popular destinations. As might be expected with this age group (especially after military service), there are many that are in search of the pleasures of parties, drugs and the opposite sex, and in places they have a bad reputation of being rather rowdy and disrespectful. However, there are also many, such as those at this retreat, who are instead (or at least also) seeking to grow spiritually. Some are troubled by the dichotomy between Buddhism and Judaism, some accept the teachings of Goenka that there is no real dichotomy, and some are closet Buddhists, even with tattoos of a lotus flower on their back.
This retreat is intense. There are the basic rules that one must accept for ten days: no talking; no food other than the basic gruel they serve; no physical exercise, yoga or other distractions; no writing or reading; and various customs such as never pointing your feet toward the teacher.
The daily schedule is to rise at 4:00, meditate from 4:40 to 6:30, take breakfast, meditate from 8:00 to 11:00, take lunch, meditate from 1:00 to 5:00, stop for tea, meditate from 6:00 to 7:00, listen to a teaching and then meditate until 9:00. Basically, there is just one thing to do: practice meditating. That is ten and a half hours a day of sitting in meditation. That amounts to over a hundred hours of sitting on the floor!
There are many different types of meditation. At the simplest, meditation can be used just to relax the body. But generally meditation is focused on calming the constant chatter of the mind. To understand, just try this simple experiment: try to just pay attention to your breath going in and out, with no other mental activity. No thoughts, no feelings, nothing. Just observe the breath. It sounds simple, but for most people after just one or two breaths, a thought arises, a pain shows up, or the mind goes off somewhere. So, the first step in most meditation is calming the mind, so that it can be focused. The value of meditation is in developing concentration, and the first step is to calm all the junk that keeps arising on its own. As an analogy, it is as if we are all riding in cars but have no control over the steering wheel --calming the mind to develop concentration is the first step toward taking control of the car so that we can use it to go where we want.
There are many different techniques for meditation. Some use verbalizations, such as chants or mantras, repeated over and over. Christianity has many of these, especially Catholics, and reciting Hail Mary and using Rosary Beads are examples. This helps focus the mind by giving something to concentrate on, and Eastern devotees of this technique also believe that the proper selection of a mantra can put the mind and body into a resonance with the overall universe. Other techniques include visualizations, such as creating and studying an image in your mind of your God or deity. Tibetan Buddhism in particular is one of the most elaborate practices in terms of vocalizations and visualizations. Also, during meditation, many people experience spontaneous images of light or other pleasant feelings, and some practitioners meditate just to delight in these, without progressing any further.
Vipassana mediation is rather different from these. There are no vocalizations, no visualizations, no short cuts or helps of any kind to meditate with. Instead, there is just a focus on the natural sensations of the body. That is enough. The belief is that since the mind does not create anything new, it becomes sharper and more concentrated. It is also quite a bit more difficult to keep the mind focused, and Vipassana is a practice that may take longer to develop than those using mantras or visualizations. Within the mind, thoughts or images naturally and continually arise, and the practitioner learns to simple let them float by, without following them. Very gradually the mind calms, and these distractions abate on their own.
The key aspect of concentrating on the body's sensations is to be very alert and attentive, so that you feel both the harsh strong sensations (pain, heat, and so forth) but also very subtle sensations that many be occurring at the same time somewhere else. The trick is to get the mind to be aware of every tiny sensation. Generally we focus just on the harsh ones. The other key aspect is to remain detached from the sensations. For example, our natural reaction is to scratch an itch, or move to reduce a pain. Instead, to develop concentration it is important to become detached and just observe each sensation without any particular reaction. In that way the mind remains calm and alert, just observing. In doing so, you find that the sensations all come and go on their own, and do not require any reaction anyway. The itch dissolves, the pain subsides, the tingling ebbs. You just teach the mind to do one thing: observe.
Our experience at the center was both difficult and rewarding. Fran's shoulder was hurting pretty badly at this point (she injured it some months back and it didn't heal, and has been getting worse recently). Sitting for that much time also caused a flare up of Rod's back pain (the old car whiplash injury). So it was quite difficult for us to sit that many hours, motionless, and concentrate. The concept of remaining detached from pain is clear enough, and we could both feel the usual pains such as the ache in the knee or ankle from sitting so long, and indeed those do just arise and then pass if you sit and observe them. But we both had some rather more intense pains that didn't seem to come and go. They just stayed and hurt. After sitting motionless for long periods of time, at the end of the session, it was difficult to move. The legs would be numb, and the back hurting too much to be able to use the arms to move the body. Sometimes the best I could do is simply topple over onto my side, let the legs come back to life, gradually relax the back, and then begin the set of routines the physical therapist taught me in Pasadena. That would generally get the back working again in time for the next session.
The first few days were not so much learning meditation as discipline. I now know that I can tolerate quite a bit of pain. And the technique of remaining detached and just observing really works well for that. You neither deny the existence of the pain, nor react to it. It is just there. That's it. You observe it, and just watch with your mind. Has the pain spread over there? Does it feel less intense here? Does it radiate down the arm? You just watch the changes as it goes along. Remaining detached and just observing, it is possible to put up with quite a bit. The ability to calmly observe pain is a useful skill, I presume, particularly because often times once one starts reacting to the pain it intensifies and becomes all-consuming.
Fran has a very intense experience. While meditating, she develops a twitching in her face muscles, progressing to spasms distorting her face. The instructor brushes it off as a common thing not to worry about, but it is very disconcerting and Fran is worried that it is instead a sign of some medical issue.
After a few days, even the intense shoulder and back pains began to subside. Buddhism would say that all pains will disappear if you concentrate the mind on them, study them and remain detached with no reaction. There is probably something to that. Buddhism further says that the pains arise as a result of previous misdeeds (karma), and that if you react to them you reinforce these misdeeds, but if you let them pass then the bad karma subsides and does not reappear. I find that a bit far fetched, although it would be handy to think that all of your misdeeds would be forgiven by calmly sitting for a few hours as pains arise and fall. It does seem quite true that people who meditate seem to be more at peace and radiate more vitality that those that do not, so there is something to the development of the mind. Learning patience, tolerance, and focus seem to me more likely to be keys to that peace and radiance than depletion of the list of prior sins.
I don't know if we will make meditation part of our lives forever. The practice takes an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. Some days it goes easily, some days it is difficult. The mind is a funny thing. Despite practice, some days it just wants to wander on its own despite my best efforts. Other times it remains calm and focused. For now we are just taking a day at a time, and keeping up the practice.
