How to smell like a temple:

The short answer: walk down the street.

This month is Tibetan Sacadawa. The month where anything good you do earns one million times the normal merit, and anything bad earns one million times the normal demerit. The month where people avoid eating meat because killing an animal causes too much demerit. The month where the incense fires are lit round the clock and smoke blots out the sky. The month where most people are dizzy for all the circles they've walked clockwise around some building. The month where they celebrate the birth, death, and buddhahood of buddha himself.

The slightly longer answer: agree to go with some friends to the Jokhang Temple the day before the most auspicious day of the month.

The Jokhang Temple is perhaps the most important temple in all of Tibet because of the buddha statue that it houses given from the Chinese wife of their most famous king. Year round it gets pilgrims from all stretches of the Tibetan peopled world. On the day that I went, half the population of Lhasa also decided to go.

The outer courtyard was deceptively quiet, because once past the gate it was a buzz of motion and activity. Masses of people, pushing, edging, chanting, even prostrating their way around the temple up to the main altar. Monks shoving the filthy hoards through the lines, endless pouring of butter into the lamps lighting the musty darkness, the choking sting of incense, the grabbing of anything that might steady one on the butter slick floor. Room after room of idols.

Enter one white girl into such throb of humanity, squeezing between the devoted and a pillar decorated with human teeth.

Dodging the blessing of one monk, only to be offered a kada by another, only to be handed a bag contaning some barley that had been offered to the buddha statue, only to refuse all of the above to the sincere bafflement of everyone present. Small children cling to mother's skirts as a drowing person in a flood. Wrinkled clawed hands reach out for help up from the floor after a few crowded prostrations. The six syllabal chant becoming the metronome of life within as even the temple walls seem to thump in its rythym.

A distinct metalic rattling of chains sends chills like blades of ice through ones bones. My imagination? No. Surrounding every door to every room of idols are literal chains, curtians of heavy iron chains.

He brought them out of darkness and gloom and broke their chains apart.

And yet they remain in darkness and gloom surrounded by chains.
I'm still washing the smell out of my hair.