totallygone

travel, at a tangent


Pilgrim's progress

So, in the space of about ten days, we visited Lumbini, Kapilavastu, Kushinigar, Sravasti, Sarnath, Rajgir, winding up in Bodhgaya, where the Dalai Lama is giving the Kalachakra Initiation for World Peace. Our mode of transport was "luxury coach" which, when I laid eyes on it, I scoffed at. It looked like a Stagecoach bus that had been abandoned in a rubbish tip for a few months, and I was dubious as to whether it'd actually make it through the mountains and jungle and across the plain to India at all. However, a week later, during a local bus ride from Bodhgaya to Varanasi (more later), I realized that, in reality, it was a palace on wheels. So we made it to Lumbini, birthplace of Buddha, on the evening of the 27th, having stopped for lunch in a Nepalese city that looked like a gigantic rubbish dump, with enormous cows roaming freely amongst the litter. Cows were to become a familiar sight - so familiar that I now hardly notice them unless, of course, I bump into one. Holy Cow!I'd made a slight miscalculation when reading the map, not realizing that Lumbini is also the name of the Nepalese state in which the town is situated. So we were all more than ready to arrive when our bus pulled into the unbelievably and incongruously Buddha Maya Gardens hotel. I use "unbelievably" with good reason; in spite of the palatial surroundings and huge rooms (think Southfork), there was no hot water for half of the hotel, and scalding hot water for me. That's what people mean when they say "good karma." We spent a couple of nights there, in between which we visited the site and made puja. The Japanese Peace Stupa, a huge white dome rising above the plain. It was a cool and foggy day with a white sky, so we failed to see the 40 metres of marble until we'd almost crashed into it. We did some circumambulations for good luck, and went on our way, rejoicing.

During the next few days, we made our way around the sacred places of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the weather getting progressively more misty and cold. With the exception of one extraordinarily derelict State Tourist Bungalow (Government Hotel), we were bowled over by the luxurious accommodation booked up by Kopan; it was most welcome, as we must've spent around 50 hours on the bus, driving night and day. Roads in India are SO bad that journeys tend to take much longer than you might expect. The Grand Trunk Road, immortalized by Kipling in Kim, is flatteringly described by Lonely Planetas "bone-shattering". Flattering because this is an understatement. A 40mph drive is like a rollercoaster ride; foot-deep potholes pit the 400km from Varanasi to Calcutta, hurling vehicles across and from the road. I was to make the 240km journey to Bodhgaya from Varanasi three times in the space of a week, first in the "luxury bus," next in a local bus made of submarine salvage or some such bolted-together tin and sanssuspension, and finally through the night, in a small grocery van. Each time took around 10 hours, some of which I actually slept.

High points of pilgrimage included Sravasti, where Buddha spent 24 summers making retreat; there's a huge park there where the atmosphere is so serene that just to walk through it is meditation. Underneath a bodhi tree there tsok, or a ritual offering of food, was interrupted by an army of rhesus macaques attracted by the scent of bananas and cheap biscuits. Within seconds, around fifty of them were circling the site, some hurling themselves into the tree above us for a closer chance at the food. A small gathering of beggars had collected around our group, so they shooed the monkeys away and then fought them for our offerings once we'd finished. At Nalanda, site of one of the first and largest Buddhist monasteries, we walked amongst the vast ruins as the sun set, and at Rajgir, where Buddha taught the ultimate nature of reality, we sat atop Mass of Vultures Peak as Korean and Tibetan monks rushed around and through us, malas clattering, as though we were completely invisible. The Tibetan strategy of "rush 'n crush" reached its peak at the Kalachakra Initiation on the penultimate day of the event, when entry to the mandala was announced. I'd decided to skip it all that afternoon and have a break from the crowd, and returned the next day to the sight of broken windows and bruised Tibetans - the race to see the mandala had become so frenetic that a huge crush had resulted and security guards had taken their batons to the massing crowd. The next day, His Holiness reminded us all of the need to be considerate to others, which was somewhat ironic as the majority of those rushing would have taken Bodhisattva Vows in order to receive the initiation. So it seems that there is a purpose to threatening transgressors with lower realm rebirths, after all!


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