Lhasa
44. 라싸. 하늘아래 첫 동네
44. Lhasa: The First Town under Heaven
“I came back yesterday. I saw so many things there that I still can’t wrap my brain around it. I was just wandering around like a fool. . . .”
—Yun, August 19, 2001
Reading these words may have been the start of my longing for Tibet. I wanted to see all the things that had been reflected in her eyes.
Eighteen years later, I arrived at Lhasa Airport as an ordained minister. Dressed in white khata scarves received as a gesture of welcome from a local guide whose skin was dark from the sun, the members of our meditative pilgrimage boarded two medium-sized buses that were waiting for us in front of the arrival hall. Traveling along the smooth road, we made our way to Tsetang, the cradle of Tibetan civilization.
Untold numbers of young aspen trees were growing in the vast wilderness beyond the bus windows. I was told that they had been planted as a policy measure due to their useful timber and their hardiness in harsh environments. They used all the strength they had to watch over the drying earth.
Passing by lovely fields of rapeseed, we saw freely roaming cows quenching their thirst at puddles and calmly nibbling at the grass. There was no herder in sight under the low, deep blue sky. Stalks of barley swayed in the breeze in spacious fields where manure was ripened into fuel, bordering the fences of people’s homes.
As the buses climbed higher and higher, more than 3,000 meters (9,843 ft) above sea level, I began experiencing symptoms I had never felt before. My head began to throb severely and my eyes felt like they might burst.
Even a moment of exertion left my heart pounding and my breath quick. My stomach felt queasy. These were the symptoms of altitude sickness, owing to the low air pressure and lack of oxygen.
We arrived at our lodgings, where a local doctor went from room to room examining us. Before administering any treatment, he would measure our blood oxygen. I fell within the threshold for treatment, but I told him that my symptoms weren’t serious and I would be able to cope with them on my own. Perhaps taking pity, my roommate Ven. Moksan shared with me half a tablet of acetazolamide, a drug to prevent altitude sickness.
Early the next morning, we performed our seated meditation and had breakfast, drinking barley powder mixed into warm butter tea made with yak’s milk. We then set out, outfitted with little more than a broad-brimmed hat and backpack each.
My headache had not yet gone away, but the energy that filled my body invigorated me like never before. Ven. Moksan explained that this was because the hotel’s site existed along a single energy line shared with Potala Palace.
Over a three-day period, we stopped in turn at Yumbu Lakhang Palace, Ganden Monastery, Jokhang Temple, and Potala Palace. At each stop, I would pay my respects to the Buddha with his bright eyes and sharp nose, stepping back and turning my gaze to the buddha within, before I joined the other practitioners in meditating—sometimes in the dharma hall, sometimes on the stone floor outside the temple, and sometimes seated on the open grassy hills.
Pressing my hand against a prayer wheel inscribed with a mantra, I turned it clockwise and headed down from Potala Palace, sharing casual looks of greeting with locals who were coming up. They passed meditation beads through one hand as they used the other to turn a portable prayer wheel with a drum and stick.
In the distance, darchog flags of white, yellow, red, blue, and green fluttered in the wind. I smiled at the young monks wearing red kāṣāya robes and cheerfully playing with their smartphones.
Our last pilgrimage site in Lhasa was the Thousand Buddha Cliff, where over a thousand Buddha images have been enshrined. Tibetans gather there from the early morning hours to light candles, burn incense, and part the void by performing bows with five parts of their body.
Placing their hands together on their heads, they feel their forehead, then their jaw and chest. Then they kneel, stretch their arms out in front of them, and press their knees, elbows, and head against the ground in succession. This is a Buddhist offering in which they humble their proud selves and repent their endless foolishness.
They understand the truth: that one can only fill one’s heart with this world and observe it when one lets go and lets go some more, releasing every last grain of the foolish falsehood that is “me,” leaving only the original “me” that has no room for fixations on which to dwell. They see that this is love itself.
Bit by bit, the Buddha’s mind and the Buddha’s teachings have become their life. Their hearts are like the clear, blue skies of Lhasa.
