After a good night’s sleep and a quick breakfast at the hotel, we set off for the Potala Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Palace was first built in 637 as a meditation retreat by the 33rd King of Tibet, Songtsan Gampo – the founder of the Tibetan Empire.  Then the Great Fifth Dalai Lama Lozang Gyatso added on significantly starting in 1645 to house the Government. Every Dalai Lama since then lived there, and their tombs are there as well. Although almost all of the scriptures and works of art were destroyed or removed during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai did protect the building. Today it is a museum, although many Tibetan pilgrims mix with the Chinese tourists to pray before the many many Buddhas. It’s less like visiting a museum and more like visiting a Catholic church in Italy. Getting in to see the palace is a real pain – you have to get a ticket for a specified time and get out in a specified time. We got entry at 9a. I had to show my papers to get in.

The building itself is awe inspiring. It is huge and high, dominating the landscape. You have to walk all the way up, about 1,000 feet, which is a long way in this thin air.

Inside an intricate series of assembly halls, chapels, and galleries is filled with various Buddhas.

At every site like this, the Tibetans make their devotions. They murmur, supplicate themselves, bowing before various images. They contribute yak butter to burn in the lamps, water, or tea for the Buddhas. They place bits of barley or even large sculptures to absorb blessings then come back to pick them up later. They creep under shelves leaden with scriptures. They touch their heads to particularly holy spots. (At Sera monastery, below, they get black marks on their children’s noses to keep their children from crying in the night. They believe that as babies their souls still can see their past lives and it scares them so they cry. The black marks scare away the old lives.) They turn prayer wheels, hang prayer flags. They even come from all ends of Tibet, prostrating themselves at every step. They ask for blessings for all living beings – not just all people, but all plants and animals, event insects. They ask for blessings for their families or specific people they know or know about. Lastly, they ask for blessings for themselves. Every family wants to give a nun, or better yet a monk, to Buddhism. This isn’t a weekly event, a book they read. It is central to their lives in every way. Every home has a shrine, where fresh offerings are made daily. The concepts of karma, reincarnation, and luck come out constantly in conversation, in the way Tibetans think about things. When Tibetans die, the body is kept at home for three days. The soul leaves the body at the moment of death, but hangs around for 49 hours. During that time the family offers the body tea when they drink it, so the soul knows it’s being thought about. Once the soul has moved on, the body is cut up into pieces and laid out for the birds to eat. The dead body gives life to the birds. The principles of Buddhism infuse every aspect of the Tibetan culture.

After the long climb and walk in the rain, I was very wet and getting cold and tired. So we went to a completely local tea house. It was packed with old Tibetans taking a break from their walks around the palace. While LhacBa went to get us some tea, I sat down on one of the tiny benches, and clumsily banged the table with my knee, spilling some tea from the glass of an old man sitting across from me. He scowled and I felt awful and worried. But I managed to pantomime a joke about how long my legs are relative to the small benches and tables and that got a bunch of them laughing. The woman sitting next to me came up to my shoulder blade (maybe) and she and the very old and very smiley man she was with thought the whole thing was hysterical. They asked me, I think, where I was from, and when I said America, I was suddenly everyone’s best friend. Tibetans love Americans (and the French). LhacBa was surprised to find that I had made so many friends when he returned and we ended up hanging out there for a long time, talking with everyone. There’s a nail in the corner where customers hang a bag with a cup and bowl because they come back every day. I can see why – it’s a kind of socialization that I wish we had at home.

Because it was still too early for lunch, we walked – clockwise of course – with the locals around the palace. Most of the walkers were older Tibetans who do the circuit every day, many with hand-held prayer wheels.

I stopped to go to the bathroom, which was brand new and surprisingly clean. (Toilets in China really are almost all gross, even in nice office buildings. Many of them are squat toilets. And I will never get used to the fact that the doors are generally propped open. The Chinese approach to hygiene is to avoid touching anything. So they often don’t close the doors to the bathrooms or stalls. Typically there’s only cold water and no paper towels, only automated dryers that seldom are in working order. And if you go, carry toilet paper at all times). This bathroom was a very tasteful slate, but the “toilet” consisted of one long trench with five stalls over it and a steady stream of water that intensified to a”flush” every 30 seconds or so. Hmmm.

Along the way we also passed an exercise park, which is quite common here. These parks are filled with old Tibetans doing balance exercises, and the stairmaster! (Sorry the video is sideways.)

After our walk, we met our driver and went to lunch. He joined us this time, and made a bunch of jokes about how much LhacBa eats (a lot) and that my banana lassie would make me fall asleep in the afternoon. He had me in stitches despite the complete language barrier.

Next we went on to the Sera Monastery which tied with the visit to LhacBa’s home the night before for the highlight of my entire trip. Sera is very popular with tourists because from 3-5 each afternoon the monks debate in a spectacular way. We went earlier, and got the treat of sitting with over a hundred monks as they prayed. Amost 6,000 monks lived in Sera before the Cultural Revolution, and now it’s about 500. Outside the assembly hall there were a dozen Tibetans prostrating themselves. Inside, there were about 8 tourists when we arrived, and we joined them to sit on a 4″x4″ on the floor to the side of the door. This is what the monks sound like.

You can’t take photos, but here’s one from Wikipedia which is close to what it looked like:

It was an extraordinarily moving experience. As an atheist, I find the ubiquitous Buddhism slightly disturbing – particularly in its most superstitions  forms. But the monks praying was deeply soulful and moving. I’ve been lucky enough to have had a few experiences in my life in which I felt a tie to something much bigger than myself, that I would describe as deeply spiritual. Two were in churches – one in LeCorbusier’s Ronchamp and the other in Chartres Cathedral (forget trying to capture an image that even hints at that space). This was similarly moving, but also more powerful. You could feel something very real happening.

When the monks pray in this way, they only eat one meal a day. Startlingly, after we’d been there for about 15 minutes, 10 or 12 of the youngest monks jumped up and ran out of the hall. They were running to get food to serve. Every monk had a bowl, and first it was filled with butter tea. And they each got two rounds of fried bread. For a second course, their bowls were filled with yogurt, topped with white sugar.

Unfortunately, the mood was broken by an onslaught of loud and obnoxious Italian and Chinese tourists. The buses had arrived for the photo opportunity, and 50 or so people tromped into the temple, wearing shorts and hats (both rude), talking loudly, and even walking between the rows of praying monks. Although LhacBa didn’t say much – he never said a bad word about the Chinese or anyone in all the time we spent together – I could feel his fury. He did tell one man to take his hat off. I can’t imagine – no matter how nutty I think a lot of it is – how it must feel to experience every day such disrespect.

We quickly took off to tour the temple. We circled the the monks as they ate to reach the chapels, and I got a big grin from one of the oldest. Generally, they look unusually happy, with deep smile lines. They are very playful, joking and pushing each other impishly.They are completely approachable – many times in our two days LhacBa would ask them a question, or just hang out for a while and talk.

We went outside to wait for the monks to move to the debating courtyard. First we took a look at a construction site near the assembly hall, where young girls were carrying stone to build walls. Women are as common as construction workers here as men are.

There is a shrine in a separate building that the people circle. The image of Buddha is said to have emerged itself rather than being created (there are a good number of these around).

Debating such questions as “what is the meaning of religion” is a very typical teaching method in the monasteries. At Sera, there is a special courtyard for a particularly dramatic version. The younger monks gather in pairs, one seated and one standing. The standing one asks questions of the seated one. The debates can get very heated, with shouting very animated movements, but the monks also laugh and are clearly having a great time. I wished very much that I could understand them.

It started to rain and we left after about 15 minutes, leaving the hoards of tourists clicking photos (I felt a bit uncomfortable being among them).

After a brief rest at the hotel, we set off again for dinner, walking through the park across the street from the hotel. The park includes a fitness area, where an elderly woman was working out on a bright yellow mechanical version of a stairmaster, basketball courts, and a football stadium. Today, the stadium is a military encampment, filled with army tents. I wanted to take a photo but my guide freaked out completely when I took out my camera and said that they’d take me away if I took a photo. He was genuinely fearful and hustled me off quickly. It’s quite an experience as an American to be prevented from taking a photo. Services like Ushahidi can change the world. (Check out MobileActive about and Accountability 2.0 as well.)

We walked to dinner near the Bharkor, at Lhasa Namaste Restaurant, which served excellent food – Tibetan, Nepalese, Indian, Chinese, and Western. I had the best Tandoori chicken I’ve ever had, and a delicious tomato soup (easy to order here because the word is the same in Tibetan!). Unfortunately they played horrible music too loudly and the decor was right out of  a cheezy New Jersey Italian place, complete with fake brick walls. We got into a conversation with a couple sitting at the next table – his goal was to someday be a driver for tourists.

After dinner we walked over to the huge square below the Potala Palace to see the great night views, with a show of spraying fountains. But I was exhausted and decided to go back to the hotel before that started. I did get some good photos of LhacBa and his cousin.

On the walk back it started raining and LhacBa said the he could see in my face that I was tired, so after LhacBa haggled with a couple of drivers,  the three of us climbed in a rickshaw and rode the last couple of km back to the hotel. I slept very soundly.

[A note on sources: I'm no expert on Tibet, Buddhism, the Cultural Revolution, or any of this. These posts are based on what I've read, observed, or been told. If you know better, please comment.]