I have seen the world end.

It was dark when I piled into a taxi with three of my former students this morning. Pre-sunrise Lhasa is a different city. The only sound is the scritch scratch of the stick brooms of the street sweepers in orange reflective coveralls. Pre-sunrise Lhasa reminds you of a sleeping child. It's deceptive of course. Lhasa is really just a hungry beast.

It was cold when our bus filled with an assortment of pilgrims bumbled and shuddered over the dirt path up the mountain to Tsupu Monastery. Icy blasts of wind slicing through cracks in the old bus. When the bus stopped everyone on it had the same idea: make a beeline for the small tea house at the foot of the monastery. Inviting only because yak dung smoke seeped forth promising warmth.

It was uncomfortable when we found ourselves in the midst of the most active monastery I have ever visited. In every room monks bustled about, mumbling, pouring pale butter tea, making statues of tsampa, rearranging the butter melting in the lamps, banging drums, ringing bells, coming up with long and barely intelligible explanations, making change for pilgrims. And intertwined with that melee was the endless circling, spinning, whispering, offering, line of pilgrims ranging in age from birth to as close to death as you can be and still moving. Head ache indusive and repetitive to the extreme I counted over two dozen pictures of the same monk and at least three over two story high metal statues. Just frame someone wearing burgundy or prop something gold up and these people will worship.

It was unsettling to see the expression on the honored child monk's face as he sat on a bench and lifted a wrapped book to lightly pat the heads and backs of each of the pilgrims stood waiting in a snaking, panting, sunflower seed spitting line at the peak of a mountain. Total unrelieved boredom. He accepted kadas and cash, and only registered mild surprise at a glimpse of the foreigner standing politely off to the side out of range of the dropping book. Outside it began to sleet.

Then the world ended. It ended the same way it had done countless times that day already. Only this time I distinctly recognized it.

Another room in another temple. It was crowded enough to be warm already in addition to the flickering butter lamps. We had to ask where to go and were directed to the place. Its walls were covered in the standard oil painting of Buddhist mythology, moldy tangkas hung from the ceiling, and cases of golden statues could be made out in the shadowy dankness of the room. People began to circle clockwise and stick the equivalent of dimes and nickels in any crevice they could find. A monk in burgundy garb and a yellow north face jacket languished against a pole in the center of the room.

Then he spoke. And it ended. The whole world stopped moving. People stopped breathing, stopped chanting, stopped offering, stopped circling and just pooled up in the room in a circle around this young man. Eyes glazed over and the only thing that assured me that they were still alive was their nods and moans of assent every time he paused to take a breath. As long as he spoke in his gravely chanting distorted voice, the world, the whole world, stood still. Perhaps it ended.

My leg fell asleep.

Then he stopped, he resumed fiddling with the butter lamp wicks. People groggily shook themselves back into their spinning, circling, mumbling, offering. Nobody even so much as thought a question for the monk in regards to what he had said. They just accepted whatever had come out of his mouth... after all, he had in a single breath caused their whole world to stop. I rolled my eyes.

The world ended many times today.

It was getting dark again when we got back to Lhasa. An evening spent resting out in a field amidst some mountains and a small village home to a handful of rowdy children in dirty clothes provided a pleasant detour thanks to our bus driver with one gold tooth and a black stain on his shirt. When the bus stopped in Lhasa, I and my students immediately went to eat our fill of fried potatoes and sweet tea. I fell asleep on my student's shoulder once we had caught another bus back to our school.

I have seen the world end... and it was so frustrating I would have ended it myself if I had the ability to. Luckily I don't. Thankfully it didn't really. But you would never have known that looking into their beautiful faces.