Waiting for the Highest Truth

46. 고도를 기다리며

46. Waiting for the Highest Truth

I sat on a bench in the waiting area at the Lhasa train station, resting my arms on the tall suitcase placed in front of my knees. As we put away our luggage, the members of our group were sharing some side dishes we had brought from Korea ahead of our two-day journey by train.

I took what I was given, my backpack starting to look quite paunchy as it filled up.

The pilgrims took turns watching each other’s belongings as others visited the humble gift shops, dressed in our light clothing. At a store nearby, I bought some sunflower seeds and other snacks.

A young boy showed up in the waiting room, dressed in kaidangku, a form of open-crotched pants. I gave him a snack, which he immediately accepted and bit into. His red-cheeked young mother smiled shyly, picked her children up in her arms, and disappeared.

People leaving the high-ceilinged station switched places with the newly arriving visitors heading in the opposite direction. Joy and sadness appeared on the faces of those greeting travelers and those seeing them off. It had been five days since I arrived in Tibet via Chongqing, and it was now time for me to go too.

At 11:30 a.m., I boarded the train bound for Shanghai. We traveled along the narrow aisle and entered our compartments, which each sat four people. We placed our group’s larger trunks that would not fit in the luggage compartment in an empty space at the end of the car.

I noticed a Chinese passenger sitting on a folding chair in the middle of the corridor, looking out the window with a frown on his face. He seemed upset. He explained that he had been disallowed from entering one of the compartments that had three Korean women in it.

Confused, I asked the people traveling with him, and they said it was simply the way the world worked: a young woman might be able to sit in a room with three older men in it, but a man couldn’t join a room with three older women in it.

I was starting to feel a bit peckish, and a guide from the travel agency brought out some gimbap. She’d picked up the ingredients from a Korean restaurant in Lhasa the day before for this very occasion.

We ate them with instant noodles, and the feast left my belly feeling warm and full. The cars had stable air pressure and adequate oxygen supplies, which allowed us to enjoy our trip comfortably, without the symptoms of altitude sickness.

Roughly an hour after passing Nagqu, we could see the broad expanse of Cona Lake. It is one of the world’s highest freshwater lakes, located at 4,594 meters (15,072 ft) above sea level. From the plateau, we proceeded into the desert and then to fields again.

Everything seemed so free and easy: the herds of yak and sheep gnawing at the grass, the occasional house, a herder or two somewhere thereabouts. Throughout the plateau region, we saw stately summits covered in their year-round snow. The landscape had a unique color to it that I’d never seen anywhere else.

While we were sleeping, our “sky train” passed over Tanggula Pass at 5,020 meters (16,470 ft) above sea level. I woke to the sounds of people gasping and shutters clicking at the rising sun.

At around 9 a.m., we transferred to another train bound for Xi’an from Xining Station in Qinghai Province, where the Gobi Desert is located. It was a very simple transfer—we merely needed to find the same car and compartment in the train just opposite us on the platform.

The scenery outside the window soon changed, taking on the familiar color of human intervention. There was a mixture of Islamic mosques, Chinese tile-roofed houses with soaring eaves, old cement buildings, and sophisticated modern structures.

Traveling through Gansu Province’s capital city of Lanzhou, we arrived at our destination in Xi’an at 8:30 p.m. We had traveled 33 hours and 2,684 kilometers (about 1,668 miles) from Lhasa to Xi’an.

The whole thing had been so heartwarming: the friends talking in whispers as we remembered our journey, the fellow travelers who lightened the mood with songs, the practitioners who remembered to meditate even as we traveled the rails, and all those perfectly serene smiles.

The following is the final message shared by Padmasambhava in the eighth century, who brought the teachings of the Buddha to Tibet:

“When the iron birds fly in the sky

and the wheeled horses travel the land,

you people of Tibet will scatter like ants over the world

and the dharma will spread to the red people.”

Countless people have flown on iron birds to see Lhasa, and innumerable masses have boarded wheeled horses to cross the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. As time passes, the people of Tibet will let go of their old ways.

But just as the birds of the air will nest in the branches of the tiniest mustard seed when it breaks out of its body to become great in size, so will the whole world shine with the blue-sky smiles of Lhasa the more Tibet’s narrow gateway opens up.

When that day comes, a layer of skin will be stripped from my heart and its wait for the highest truth.