Kalachakra

Well, the Dalai Lama has come and gone, and we mortals are still here in Bodhgaya, which is slowly warming up. I've been told that the locals have a delightful 42 or 43 degrees (celsius, which is around 107 or 108 fahrenheit) to look forward to, and you can safely bet that I won't be here to enjoy it with them. We're still hectic down at Root Institute, because the high holy resident lama is giving a course and yours truly is looking after a hundred and fifty people, give or take a few tens, who have come to hear what he has to say. But today the rest of the guys at the office more or less kicked me out, and told me not to come back before evening, so here I am, at the computer (yet again), telling you about it all.

I did actually attend one of the sessions with the Dalai Lama himself. The whole commotion here was about the Kalachakra teachings, and I have to admit (although I am really and truly ashamed to say this) that I still don't know exactly what that is. The word Kalachakra means wheel of time, or something to that effect, and the teachings have something to do with the meaning of existence (which is what the whole Buddhist philosophy is about anyway), but I'm still just as hazy about the exact explanation as I was before. Maybe when I finally get it, I'll be an enlightened being...

So we all got our little green cards saying that we were entitled to enter the Kalachakra grounds, and we pushed (or got pushed) in together with the thousands of Tibetans that have been streaming into town (and are streaming out, now that His Holiness has gone). I've been told that there were a hundred thousand or more people here. The Kalachakra grounds are a big dusty empty lot, right next to where my road-boy friends (and about a hundred of their compatriots) set up their little restaurant. They built some kind of fancy (temporary) house in the middle and set up a bunch of bamboo poles and stretched plastic sheets over them, so that we common folk would have shade while we sat on the ground and listened. There was an area for foreigners and an area for Tibetans. Maybe part of the reason I like being in India so much is the preferential treatment you get in a lot of places just because your skin is white (I hope not). His Holiness the DL speaks in Tibetan and there are "on-line" translators speaking quietly into microphones that transmit to the FM radios which we all have. The first day, we managed to get the french translation and the chinese translation perfectly, but the english translation, which was supposed to be on a frequency between those two - just wasn't there (the next day was better).

While you're sitting there, if you look towards the Tibetan side, you see these long white silk sashes floating into the air. It looks like a school of dolphins, every few minutes another one gracefully jumps forward into the air and streams back down onto the sea of people sitting there. The Tibetan form of devotion and respect is offering these sashes, and if HH isn't right there to accept it, then he can get it airmail. Halfway thru the teachings, a huge group of monks got up and walked over to the edge of the grounds, returning with huge teapots. After they finished handing out tea (who would have believed that they could quietly serve tea to a hundred thousand people by just walking around with big pots) - they handed out money to the monks. It's really weird to see a monk with a wad of hundred rupee notes walking around handing them out to other monks. Everyone just sits quietly, and everyone gets what’s coming to him. And no-one complains. Amazing.

After it's all over, the crush of people getting out is enormous. You don't really have to push to get out, you just have to position yourself among all those monks (who evidently were only taught about patience when you're sitting down) in such a way that you can just coast along on their waves to get out. I wasn't terribly interested in getting back there afterwards (what can I say, I'm chicken when it comes to big crowds of people).

Since then, I've been holed up at our office, checking people in and out, and hearing complaints about leaky faucets and burned-out water heaters. All kinds of things happen here, including a girl who freaked out (just before the Kalachakra events started), declared that she was enlightened, and started to sing and dance around the main temple. Turned out she had a mental history, (as do we all, only hers was documented) and we only just barely managed to convince her to return home and get treatment. She just wrote us this morning, thanking the people here who took care of her, realizing that she could have got herself killed if we had let her do all she wanted to. So it's not a boring place to be.

I plan to stay here at least one more month, I just like being here, and anyone who can explain to me why - certainly has information that I don't have. I think I would pay solid gold (if I had it) for a hot shower that didn't turn lukewarm after a minute and a half, or ice-cold after three minutes. A clean, dry toilet would also be appreciated. And yet, I am already making plans to come back next winter...

In any event, you guys can enjoy your hot showers for me...