A Beginning

The journey to Rumtek took 4 flights (with 5 trips through some form of airport security, 20 hours of flying time, and 6 hours asleep on a bench on Bangkok), and a 5 hour drive (with maybe the craziest driving I have ever experienced, made all the crazier because the driver was a tiny Buddhist monk. I'll just be leaving these preconceptions here, thanks, won't be needing them again...). This picture (below) taken in the airport in Kolkata stands for the whole trip, because the rest of the time I was either unconscious or in constant, frenetic motion. 

I arrived at the monastery late at night, and promptly passed out, so I didn't see anything or really meet anyone that until the next morning. When I woke up, it was to this view (below) out of the window of my room. The tallest mountains off in the distance are part of the Himalayas, a section of the border between Sikkim and Tibet.

Those are the same mountains as in the background image of this blog, though that picture was taken from in front of the monastery, as you can see by the prayer wheels (which I learned are filled with long scrolls covered in repetitions of the mantra painted on their outsides. Also, always turn it clockwise, or you are moving the mantra in reverse).

At the bottom of these pictures is some of the town of Rumtek. A lot of those buildings are on land owned by the monastery, but they are private buildings containing homes and shops and small hotels. The monk teachers (who are both monks and teachers at the Institute) that I spend my hangout time with go down to the hotels and restaurants quite often to have tea (which is sometimes sweet milk tea, and sometimes བོད་ཇ་, bö-cha, salty butter tea) or get food.

The ground of the monastery, and all of the movable and immovable property it and the Institute own, are property in turn of the Karmapa, the head of the Karma Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism. There is a bit of a controversy, however, about who actually owns the property right now. Traditionally the property is given to the next incarnation of the Karmapa when he is discovered, but the family of the 16th Karmapa (the current incarnation is the 17th) is disputing this in Indian courts. Part of the issue is also that there is some dispute about who the current incarnation of the Karmapa is (though the Dalai Lama, and most members of the Karma Kagyu sect, are all in agreement), and the government and the family are using the disputed nature of the incarnation to hold up the passing along of the property. The concept of property remaining in the hands of a single person across multiple incarnations had never occurred to me, so I've never thought about how complicated that could get with modern inheritance laws. It seems that the answer is: super duper complicated.

Because of the speed of my internet here, it takes a long time to post pictures, so I'm going to leave this post here. More to come, though, so make sure to come back!