In spring 2020, Sudas travels to Kathmandu and visits the surrounding area (Part 1)
In search of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
In February 2020, I participated in a 21-day silent retreat at the Osho Nisarga meditation centre in Dharamshala. I then headed down to Delhi for a few days before embarking on a visit to Nepal. I wanted some time in the mountains prior to returning home to my normal life in Denmark. I have previously spent time in Nepal, and have some connections there, with whom I might hook up during my stay, depending on my mood and so on. Delhi is fun, with time for shopping, as the city is really a kind of retail mecca.
Already on the flight to Kathmandu there are restrictions; face masks are becoming the norm. Something in the air has changed. It is just a short flight, maybe eighty minutes between the two capitals, so it all goes fast. I taxi to my pre-booked lodgings in downtown Kathmandu, the modest, but comfortable hotel where I usually stay when I’m here. The effusive manager Mr. Tulsi and his staff are excited to see me again after a one-year interval.
Following custom we shake hands, but then I inform him that I will not be shaking hands again, due to the plague that is arriving in our midst. He seems rather shocked by my announcement, and it is also an unusual utterance from my lips, but one that seems to make sense in the light of what is being reported in international media. There is a rising global tension in the air.
I have an uncontrollable urge to smoke a cigarette; I go to the shopping area and pick up some tobacco and papers. Later as I sit on my terrace I become engrossed, considering how to respond to all the new developments around me.
Kathmandu has one of the best Tibetan Buddhist bookshops in the world. Eighty percent of the books are about Tibet, its religion and people. The other twenty percent represent the latest in world class modern literature, with a smaller selection of classics. I happen to know the manager and ask for his recommendation. He points to a high stack and says this is the one for me.
Between smoking and reading and being alone again, by page eighty I know I must find out where the author lives, and if it is possible to meet him. There are some passages in the book which I find intriguing and I have some questions to ask.
After a good night’s sleep, I am at the bookshop early the next morning. The manager lets me know that the author of my book lives in a Tibetan monastery on the outskirts of the city, at the back of Monkey Temple Mountain, also known as Swayambhunath Stupa, a renowned landmark in the Hindu World.
The book I am reading is called In Love with the World. The author is a Tibetan lama called Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche; he’s the young abbot of a Tibetan monastery.
His book tells of how he absconded from his life of spiritual and temporal responsibility in the middle of the night, lived as a vagabond in India for four years, then came home. The book has made it to the New York Times bestseller list. I read it in my first twenty-four hours in Kathmandu.
As I have been coming to Nepal for some years, I have made some local friendships. Nepali people are easygoing and accessible. Similar to many poorer Asian countries, there is a high level of emigration from Nepal. Richer families send their sons and daughters to the USA and other Western countries for higher education.
One of my Nepali friends, one who was educated abroad and then returned, was born into a high-profile literary and political family. There are statues of his grandfather in Kathmandu, and he himself had studied at prestigious colleges on America’s East Coast. Like his grandfather, who is called the Yug Kavi, the poet of his era, my friend has a poetic nature and was not interested in pursuing an academic career in America. He feels more at home on the streets of Kathmandu, and even more so at his country retreat, growing vegetables, meditating and leading an almost solitary life. He is a kind of Nepalese Ralph Waldo Emerson, pulled to the simple life, revelling in obscurity.
I phone Abhash and ask if he can meet me with the family car. We were going to the Tergar Osel Ling Monastery, at the back of the city. Within an hour Abhash is parked outside my hotel, and we down a coffee as we catch up briefly on the intervening year. We get in the car and head to the west side of town. I love the colour and noise of the city after one month of silence at Dharamshala.
He had rushed to town from his rural allotment where he is developing a poet’s retreat, free from the noise, pollution and partying of Kathmandu. His extended family home is in Freak Street. He has an extremely outgoing nature and is connected to many different social groups in the city, both cultural and political. All prominent families seem to know each other, a kind of universal in any city or country.
They say that the hippie trail of the 1960’s and 1970’s ended in Freak Street, and there is truth in that. The name derives from all the hashish dens and hippie gatherings, which, in the day, were welcomed by the Nepali government. Then the USA pressured Nepal through its aid programs to close down the tea houses, which had provided a no-holds-barred culture, giving space and permission for drugs and licentiousness to dropouts or those who wished to distance themselves from social and political movements in the West during that time. The May 1968 Student Rising in Paris may not have ushered in a political revolution, but it certainly precipitated a social revolution. The Vietnam protests in the USA were also creating a groundswell of movement into other cultural and social explorations.
Abhash’s family own two large adjoining six-storey houses in the middle of Freak Street. He had grown up surrounded by poets, musicians, drug dealers and free spirits. It was a rich environment – the place was a magnet for socialising, sex and intellectual discussion
Driving away from the city centre, as we head towards the Tibetan Monastery, we have more time to catch up on our lives. I only have a vague sense of the geography of Kathmandu, with its one million inhabitants. I know Durbar Square and the Royal Palace, the French Bakery on Paknajol Marg, the glamorous Dwarika Hotel, Kathmandu Guest House of Beatles fame, the lanes of Thamel, the plush Garden of Dreams and bits of Patan, and of course the historical Bhaktapur, east of the city.
Now we are heading west, into an area I have never previously seen. The Monkey Temple would not have attracted me, as I am uneasy in the presence of free-roaming hordes of monkeys, spiritual or not.
Finding any place in Kathmandu is challenging. Due to renaming of streets, changing traffic systems, ongoing road works, it can be challenging, even for a local, to navigate. The road works are a constant, with large holes in the middle of any busy highway, not to mention a high incidence of traffic accidents; delay and chaos is the norm. I am amazed at the patience of the citizens of Kathmandu, almost as much as I am amazed by the citizens of New Delhi. Living in Denmark, where we experience a 15-minute traffic delay as a national emergency, bears no comparison to the conditions under which residents of a city like Kathmandu struggle daily.
Passing the Monkey Temple, we drive up a very steep and narrow mountain road. There are sheer drops on each side as we wind higher and higher into the sky. Abhash is not an experienced driver, and my meditative state is on high alert for any sudden movement which takes us closer to the cliff edge. Trust in Allah, but tether your camel first, indeed!
Meeting Mr. Ricard, “the world’s happiest man”
At a very frightening part of the climb, in a narrow place full of ominous twists and turns, a Range Rover comes towards us. We need to pass each other, with millimetres to spare. Abhash pulls towards the cliff edge. Then the car starts to roll back. I jump out to give some direction – and that helps. I stand on the road and wait for the Range Rover to pass.
As it passes, I exchange eye contact with the front seat passenger. He’s a European Tibetan lama with a bald head, who wears John Lennon spectacles. There are two ladies in the back. They look like New York socialites on safari. Our eyes – the lama’s and mine – lock into each other for maybe twenty seconds. He has an extraordinarily good vibration, striking and unexpected. I feel a wave of energy coming in through the car window. It is very tangible, very high and very positive. I wonder who he is, and then their car moves off down the road. I would like to know more. But there is no time.
Abhash continues driving up the mountain. I decide to walk the rest of the way. I want to think about what has just happened. Firstly, there is the stress of being on such a dangerous road. Then, there is this subtle exchange on the roadway, a glance, a glimpse into a pool of bliss. I walk up and up, and within ten minutes I reach the gates of the monastery, where Abhash is waiting.
Perched on this mountaintop is a very typically-styled Tibetan monastery, with the classical red, black, white, gold and yellow colours. There are manicured gardens in front and, I guess, behind. Tibetans sure know how to create order. We walk up the path to the main gate. A guard is there, who only speaks Tibetan. We try English, Nepali and Hindi. We are asking if he can open the gate and let us in. He seems amused by our request.
I never experience Tibetans as aggressive. Maybe that is only shown somewhere private. No, their seemingly unflappable and placid nature may well be connected with centuries of dealing with physical and elemental hardships in the Himalayan highlands, combined with their cosmology and sense of place and position in the bigger picture of things.
The guard giggles, even though it is clear he does not understand. We become slightly frustrated, until I suddenly realise the gate has been open the whole time, and we just need to walk through! The barrier we imagine has been created by ourselves. When we do open the gate and go in, he looks at us and laughs. He rejoices in our achievement, and his laugh becomes a welcome.
We walk through the gardens, tentatively, as if we are intruding. There are some younger monks around, but in typical Western fashion, we look for the office or the reception. We move around for 15 minutes, poke in corners and windows, open doors leading nowhere, then find the path which leads to Yonge Mingyur Rinpoche’s compound within the campus. But then there comes a sign: No entrance beyond this point.
I wish I could say I continued and knocked on his door and had a chat. But being respectful and polite, we turn back and never go further. I realise that he is shielding from this snowballing pandemic, this Covid-19, whatever it might turn out to be. Abhash and I sit on one of the lawns and enjoy the view over Kathmandu. There are many houses, so many people, and so little green space. It is a veritable concrete jungle. Nepalis like to stay close together.
After a thankfully uneventful return back into the valley, we saunter towards Durbar Square, close to the old Royal Palace. Nepal’s feudal system came to an end when the Crown Prince gunned down his family during a summer-season party in 2001. The family were assembled and young Prince Dipendra shot his parents, brother and sister and other family members, before he shot himself. He died three days later.
Apparently, he executed his family in a drug-fuelled fit of rage, as they would not allow him to marry the woman he loved, and were forcing him to marry someone from a Nepalese family in order to cement a political alliance deemed necessary for the continued security and continuity of the monarchy. Amazingly, even after wiping out his family, and whilst lying in a coma, Dipendra was proclaimed king. Tradition can be such a stupid thing. After Dipendra died the late King Birendra’s brother became king, in fact the last king of Nepal, before it became a Republic in 2008.
Part 2: Enjoy this moment
Notes
In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Helen Tworkov
Matthieu Ricard is a French writer, photographer, translator and Buddhist monk who resides at Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal. He received a PhD degree in molecular genetics from the Pasteur Institute in 1972. He then decided to forsake his scientific career and instead practise Tibetan Buddhism, living mainly in the Himalayas. He is the author of numerous books, including, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. en.wikipedia.org
Emma Beddington interviews the Buddhist monk and bestselling author, Matthieu Ricard, about his latest book, Notebooks of a Wandering Monk, the story of his spiritual journey. He discusses joy, suffering and how to foster happiness and health, in this Guardian article: The world’s happiest man? Matthieu Ricard on the secrets of a serene, successful, satisfying life
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