Grease stained clothes: Ganden Monastery

My earliest memories of Ganden will forever be marked by the tangka painter's muppetesque hello's, time spent in the kitchen watching one man shovel enough potatoes for three hundred monks into a pot while slurping fresh butter tea, and my monk friend's very tangible frustration over the fact that I couldn't escape the cold chills and looming atmosphere of evil residue from the first temple we had been in.

During that trip it was butter tea spilled from a shaky hand which stained my clothes.

This time accompanied by five sweet students (one of whom was severely car sick during the hour of switchbacks up the mountain to the monastery) different sensations come to mind. The sweaty buttery smell of the pilgrim bus as the sun rose that morning, the meanderings through rooms and temples that I remain unconvinced of their public access, the snack of squishy meat product and dried instant noodles during our hike on the kora and easily the most impressive view of Tibet to be found with such relative ease, the embarrassment caused by being the only foreigner in a tea house full of rowdy men, the sting of incense smoke, and the absurd inclination to lift my students from their prostrate posture before an endless army of golden statues.

And there was this scene: After a whole day of watching my students giving money and offering kadas and bowing and mumbling through some memorized spell before literally thousands of statues, pictures, chortens, books, and anything else that was in a case... we enter into yet another tiny stinky room totally consumed by a two story statue of someone/thing. I offer to hold their bags as my students throw their bodies to the floor and one girl looks at me and says, "Ms. Kelly, you should pray." My gentle response was, "Oh, I do pray, but not to this one (gesturing to the gold monstrosity before us) I do not believe in this..." Before I had a chance to offer any further explanation another student pulled herself up from the floor to nudge the first girl, "oh yes Ms. Kelly, we know that you believe in Yesu."

Because the truth is, if these girls know even that much then they know more truth about what I believe than anything of what we did that day. Of the thousands of things that they bowed before and offered money to these girls knew the names and meaning of maybe half a dozen, in every temple the only thing that they knew was what they were told by some monk trimming butter lamps or cleaning his ears, they followed obediently all of the rituals that they have no doubt been drilled in from birth but not a single one of them conveyed any knowledge of meaning, if there had been any meaning to begin with.

Picture a loaded bus stopping at some minuscule monastery in the middle of nowhere on the way back from Ganden. Picture the entirety of its passengers looking in confusion at the sign on the door. Picture them shrugging their shoulders and dutifully getting in line to march clockwise through a few rooms of the same gold statues and stinky butter lamps as they had just left, bowing and offering any remaining mao to something that ten seconds before they had not even known existed. Picture my students joining in. Picture me wanting to vomit from the sheer meaninglessness of it all.

During this trip it was sha momo juice squirting in unpredictable directions which stained my clothes.