APR-C-10
SHERBULING MONASTERY CLINIC DAY
AFTER CHECK OUT FROM TARAGARH PALACE,
AND A RETURN TO NORBULINGKA
April 28, 2001
SHERBULING MONASTERY TOUR AND CLINIC
FOLLOWED BY AN AUDIENCE WITH THE HEAD LAMA,
RIMPOCHE SITU PAI, AND OUR CONVERSATION WITH HIM,
THEN A LONG, LONG RIDE TO RETURN VIA DHARAMSALA TO NORBULINGKA
Everyone seemed in slow motion this morning, as if dragging a sea anchor,
as we reluctantly gathered for breakfast with our bags packed to be leaving
the Taragarh Palace Hotel. I had made my morning run alone, and was about to
be taping the birds, when the tape recorder screeched so badly just weary from
pulling the tape that it could drown out the sound of the birds with its own
metallic groaning. So much for the top of the Walkman line state of the art
recorder so that I would not have to fret any longer about tape recorder failures.
I am doomed to forever be repairing faulty tape players on the run.
Even though a couple of our number had bailed out early, Christa was trying
to arrange a stay for a couple of weks longer to remain in some clinic capacity
after we have gone. She wants me to fill out the evaluation form, but since
I have no idea what her subsewquent experience will be like, although we are
going to try to meet the folk and setting she would be working in, I will fill
out thefront half and she should have one of them fill out the back half. Raj
Kapur had shown a couple of the students his tiny clinic behind the Guesthouse,
but he is not able to hot anyone in such limited facilities.
Christa always refers to the morning run (which she has missed all but the opening day for reasons of GI distress or fear of it that kept her at the hotel for a day) as “jogging”. She asks “How was your jog this morning?” I do not believe I have ever been a “jogger” as that phrase is meant to be someone who goes out and ambles along at some shuffle. I may some day be backing off to a jogger’s pace, but I do not know many runners who would consider themselves “Joggers”. She also asked, “How is your ‘training’ for your next marathon?” I remember the response of Mark Courtney, the surgical PA who is part of the AMAA who is that group’s fastest runner, and a “streaker.” He has run every day, beginning back in 1970 without a break. On the day he had a groin exploration and biopsy of a testicular mass he had to back off to only two miles that day, but he has run daily for over thirty years. As he and I were in the queue to have our blood drawn after the marathon in Boston, the paper we were filling out asked our time, our number of prior marathons, and asked how long we had been in training for the Boston Marathon 105. I was puzzled and did not know how to respond to that, since I am running as consistently (or “consistently inconsistently”) as I can and ought to be ready to run a marathon on any given day. When I was holding up on answering the training question, I saw that he was having trouble answering that one too. “Well,” he finally said, “I have run every day of the last 7,000—does that count as training?”
This is not a pattern of “training for jogging!” With such a pattern of activity, how could one train in addition? I had told him that I had enough other collections and series in my life so that I am glad I do not have to worry about maintaining a “streak” as well. There were runners in the Antarctic group who were concerned about how to keep their streak going on the boat. I wondered how I could run daily when I was in an aircraft from Manila to Washington watching three consecutive sunrises—should I have run back and forth to the aircraft john? So, I am not a “streaker”; neither am I a “jogger.”
We got a late start for our takeoff from the Taragarh Palace, so much so that we would have to return later to do some of the team’s packing up for them. As late as we were, we got later, since we wandered, lost, in coursing back and forth over the hillside roads searching for the Sherbaling Monastery, given directions at frequent stops to ask that sent us back and forth over the same roads in opposite directions. The whole convoy of our Tatas oscillated forward, like the random movement of the gut with an eventual flux toward the direction of a hidden valley in the hills, when we pulled into a parking lot next to the imposing walls of the Sherbaling Monastery. But we did not get to go into it yet, since we were met by a contingent of the senior doctors who had met us at the clinic and opening day ceremonies with a not very subtle complaint that they had been waiting several hours in the parking lot with very distinguished (make that cash-paying customers) private patients whom they had brought for consultation. Sure enough, there were several well-dressed women who looked suitably pained with the complaints of headache, whom we had to go through the charade of a careful examination in the parking lot. We could give no advice or special medication, since we had come equipped for the treatment of the poor folk and monks in the Sherbaling Monastery, and could advice MRI scans and the like, which these more mobile patients were able to get and afford since they were more mobile than the patient clientele that we expected to be meeting.
We then were ushered into the Sherbaling Monastery and went through a formal greeting ceremony, complete with our resting up in a reception room, and having the obligatory “chai.” We drank our chai and sat under three portraits: the Dalai Lama, the chief lama of this important monastery Sherbaling, and the portrait of the 14 year-old Panchan Lama, the heir apparent to the Dalai Lama. There are postcards and other portraits of the two of them together, the Dalai Lama with his hand upon the shoulder of the younger fellow as in a linear succession. The Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet at age two during the height of the Chinese military repression and conquest, and he was already known to the faithful as the chosen one, but he was elected to this high office by a series of monasteries, including Bir (the one I had visited almost by accident) and this one, Sherbaling. The story of Sonam, the Panchan Lama sounds almost exactly like that of the Grand Valley State University student whose newspaper write-up I had carried with me. He is a recent escapee from Tibet, who was somehow smuggled out in some disguise, and has arrived here in the capital of the Tibetan Diaspora. He is already acknowledged as the successor to the current 14th Dalai Lama, at least by one significant lama—the Dalai Lama himself. The biggest and most powerful lama other than the elected Dalai Lama is the head of this important monastery, built here as soon as the Tibetan refugees came over in exile from the Chinese occupation. The name of this powerful chief lama of Sherbaling Monastery is Situ Pai, and we will have audience with him in his reception chambers at 2:00 PM. There was a rumor that we would be called to see his mother who was ill, and also was blind. This was not confirmed, but there was a patient by that description whom we were entreated to see after we were trying to leave the monastery—about as late in leaving as we were in arriving by several hours—but it turned out to be an expatriate living in India who was indeed blind and had multiple ailments, all seen and treated by a variety of local and visiting doctors, and they were just taking advantage of our visit to add another layer of redundant consultation, but there was no discernible relationship to the Chief Lama Situ Pai.
We made a tour of the monastery just as the glowering skies that had rolled over the background Dhaulidhar Range began spitting rain. The monk novitiates were all queued up in two very graceful lines arching around tables in the courtyard with bowls awaiting the serving of lunch. These are boys, and boys will be boys. Several of them wore their bowls on their heads like helmets until they were served. Some of them made faces at us to see if we would reflexly take their pictures. We passed their college style dormitory rooms, with several of them having signs on the doors with tantric symbols and then a phrase or two in mis-spelled English, almost like graffiti. As they were being fed, with a few raindrops spattering their ochre colored robes—like Masai tribesmen displaced a continent away—we went in shoeless to seethe giant hammered gold-covered lama in a large temple, with all the gongs and masks of the sprits who were to frighten way the evils ‘”jins”. There was a special room filled with the tantric paintings of the god of death—interspersed with skulls and gruesome scenes—a very stylized Hell’s Angels tableau. This was interesting to me, since I had seen the very ancient monasteries such as Ki and Tabo, where the old paintings carvings and tapestries are so faded and tattered from being a millennium old that the fire and fear are faded out of the. Because of the displacement of the Tibetan peoples, however, which was all in the last half century, this replica monastery is all recently put together in that era; so all the figures and sacred reliquaries are new.
We circled around the school part of the monastery where squatting novitiate monks in their red robes were all at their lessons, some of them reciting from a slate, others looking on the cloth and wood Buddhist scriptures like medieval illumined manuscripts. The novitiates wore red robes, but as I had said, the Dalai Lama must always have some yellow in his vestments, often under his red robes. This is mandatory for him for reasons of his authority in compromise over the two sects—the yellow-hatted, more liberal “reform party” Buddhists and the red-hatted sect of conservative Buddhism.
I thought we were going to proceed directly to our “morning clinic”, but as we were already late, we were brought into a large hall where we scattered on seats and were served a catered box lunch. When the leftovers could be swept up, the same hall became our clinic. The queues of the curious that had awaited staring discreetly at each of us that was not looking at them during our lunch were our waiting patients, whom we had earlier watched as they had gathered around in two long lines in the courtyard as they had eaten their lunches. We were both voyeurs at each other’s lunchtime leisure.
We had no analgesics and only four kinds of antibiotics, and a few ointments and creams as we began, but fortunately, there was the monk assigned to the duties of the sick who had access to some things and could send out for others that was assigned not us. As we began, I kept looking up at the queue of fascinating faces—one in particular. Here was an old weather-worn woman, her lower lip pulled down revealing what I thought were surprisingly good teeth, until I saw that they were ill-fitting dentures, which is why her lip was pulled down to expose them. She was vigorously twirling her prayer wheel, and would give it an extra swing or two at each patient as they left our consultation with a nod as if confirming our treatment. She leaned forward attentively and watched us through the whole clinic, serving often as the background for foreground patient photographs until it was her turn.
The young monks had what you would expect youth to have anywhere—skin rashes, cuts, bruises, aches and GI distress. The older people had arthritis and it was rarely necessary to ask where, since they had already seen a local practitioner and had the moxabustion marks upon them that showed evidence of the dry or wet cupping. This theory of counter-irritation, which was also a part of Western Medicine’s “Humoral Theory” until the early days of the US has hung on a little longer in Chinese traditional medicine. One of these branding scarifications was right over the supraspinatus tendon—a rather pinpoint precision application of the same kind of treatment I would do for it, except that I would draw up solu-Cortef into 1% lidocaine and inject that right into the calcific tendonitis—I still remember as one of my earliest and most spectacular instant “cures” in Nigeria when I was the same age and stage of the students I am now supervising here.
Some of the young monks needed glasses, a handicap they had from poring over Buddhist scriptures for many hours. There was one who had cholangitis, with shaking chills and jaundice and a negative hepatitis B antigen; this one needed an urgent ultrasound and operation, and we referred him for that through the health-aid empowered monk assisting us. There was bullous impetigo. There was a relatively young peptic ulcer patient who had had hematemesis and a 65 year old woman wearing a kimono who had the opposite problem of achlorhydria who also had an ulcer—but this one a gastric ulcer, and quite possibly malignant.
Then came the 85 year-old woman twirling her prayer wheel, whose chief complaint we were never quite able to obtain. When I would ask her special questions as to what it was that brought her here and ask a few kinds of problems, she would burst out in giggles after it had gone through translation. It turned out in all probability that she had come for entertainment, and that she was getting it in almost overwhelming doses. She was very happy with the attention she was getting and did not need much more than that to mark this day out as a very special one in her life which otherwise was a rather monotonous iteration of the Buddhist Tibetan equivalent of “Same ‘Ole/Same ‘Ole”. She got what she had come for, and so had we.
We packed up all our remaining medicine and equipment, and gave it to the monk who would be holding our “follow-up” clinic to see if the treatments had resolved the problems for which they ha sought relief. WE gave him instructions in what we were leaving and what it was for, and since we had gone over with him the patients and their problems as we had gone along, it seemed he had been quite attentive and had anticipated our answers to his questions. I think we may have improved the “health service” in the monastery, more through his instruction than through the leftover pharmacy that we had left.
We were summoned to come quickly to a room where we were ushered into a waiting chamber. There we had to remove our shoes, and wait, as several other waiting pilgrims who had preceded us were told to wait until this delegation of visiting volunteer American doctors had been finished with their audience which was a special one with Lama Situ Pai. We were then ushered around a curtain, and into a room with a thousand small golden Buddha statues in alcoves behind an elevated dais, on which a friendly man in a yellow robe, bare arms, horn-rimmed mod glasses and a Rolex watch beckoned to me to come and sit on the cushions aligned before him in two rows, one to his left and one on his right. Ravi took the first of the cushions on one side and directed me to take the one on his other side. We then introduced ourselves and where we were from. H had something to say about each state that was named. He had been to Atlanta recently, and had been to the US several times, “But not nearly so often as the Dalai Lama who appears to me to be in Washington in general and in George Washington University specifically more often than he is in Dharamsala”—a source of some chuckles, which I can appreciate from jokes at my expense headed in the other direction.
He was a good-humored well-spoken man, fingering his prayer beads with his right hand as he sat for the entire audience in cross-legged lotus position, a pose that others among us could not do for that length of time. He made little jokes about the appropriateness of the Dalai Lama making social visits, which he said would be the same as the Pope or George Bush making house calls, diluting their impact. He spoke of the time he ha been in Hawaii at the Mormon University there when they had wanted to do a TV interview with him. They brought in someone to apply pancake makeup for his face, which he thought peculiar. They then were alarmed that he had bare arms, and sent out for a long sleeved shirt. In came a new grey long sleeved shirt. On the subject of cultural sensitivity, he pointed out that he cannot wear grey, must wear at least some yellow, and could not cover his arms.
He asked me questions about the Mormons, and about the leadership in the church. He was interested in the Mormons since his visit to Hawaii and I told him the American story of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and the center in Salt Lake City with the subsequent Temples built in the US, and through the world—such as Johannesburg as well as the one he had visited in Hawaii. He knew the Pope was head of the Catholics, but who was the head of the Protestants? Since no one else other than Ravi and I had questions or was willing to respond to his, it became a three way conversation with the others listening. I said something about the reformation causing splits into denominations with some efforts at ecumenical councils, but the authority of the church was one of the contentions that led to the reformation in the first place. He and I had a little discourse on church history and whether some elements of the rather schismatic past were good or bad. I mentioned similar “denominational” disputes within Islam. He was interested that I talked of Islam and he asked about conversion rates and ecumenicity among Moslems. I told him the story about the Presbyterian Mission board support for Paul Harrison MD, Tim Harrison’s father; when asked how many converts he had made after his long career in the Middle East among Moslems, he had responded “Only Allah knows!” He enjoyed this little joke, and mentioned that there were over 6 million gods in Buddhism and even more in Hinduism. He said that there are 6 million Tibetans—more now outside than inside Tibet—so that each could have his or her own deity!
He had told us that he had been in Washington DC, the college of William and Mary in Virginia—from which Carrie graduated, and in a Buddhist temple in West Virginia I asked him about the decisions on succession of the Dalai Lama. He said that there were several ways of determining this, since there was a lake in Tibet that always had an image—as clear as that which you see on TV—of the next Rimpoche, and that was one of the reasons they know of the next incarnation of the leader. When he had learned that I had been to Tso Morari and would be going again in July, he was envious. He said he had once ridden a horse around the lake. While he was there, a great mysterious thing had occurred. A giant agitation of the lake erupted from its center. I asked if we should not perhaps bring over the equipment now dedicated to searching for the Loch Ness Monster to check out Tso Morari? He said that he was quite sure it was not a “sentient being” but quite possibly a large eruption of gas from the center of the lake. I had said there have been such in the large CO2 bubbles in an African lake and in some of those I had visited in the Mammoth Mountain area of the Eastern Sierras, but I thought that they occurred in fresh water lakes and that the Tso Morari is a saline lake. He had not known that and seemed to be genuinely interested to be learning something with this audience, which he had expected to be a senior group of old, American retired doctors or a group of the usual tourist in search of enlightenment and a blessing.
He discussed the fact that Tibetan Buddhism was very local and linked to the culture and that there were four branches of Tibetan Buddhism. He regretted that it seemed with the popularity and spread of Tibetan Buddhism as a bit of a cult fad beyond the Diaspora from the exile, that Tibetan Buddhism was becoming universal—and that was not a very good thing. I asked him if I heard him correctly, I recalled him saying, “If we Indians were to visit Tibet, we would not find it a very easy life, nor would we ant to return there.” He agreed, saying that he was Buddhist, and of the Tibetan Buddhist kind, but he came to India at age 4; if Tibet were not under China, there would be no reason to be Tibetan here. He said, “I am an Indian, and if offered the opportunity to go to Tibet if things were different, he would go only to visit, and out of curiosity and for an historic view of the Tibetan homeland now so different than it once was. But, his life has improved by being an Indian with opportunities he could not have had there. Life is very hard in this high, harsh, cold, dry country, and a 40 year old there looks 80. He was chosen to be the rimpoche of a lama long gone in Tibetan Buddhism, but he would not wish to go back to live his life back then. He outlined the four ways by which the Dalai Lama is chosen and he himself is the Rimpoche of a prior lama: 1) a letter is written and a description of the successor who will follow—who would be the mother and father of such a person and a description of the things the former lama is leaving behind that he considers important; 2) the objects are found and identified by the new Rimpoche, the reincarnate one, who takes unto himself the objects that prior lama left behind as though they were his own, rejecting the more modern “distractors” mixed in with the group; 3) the sacred lake gives a reflection of the image of the new Rimpoche or the Dalai Lama; and 4) the other chief lamas agree to certify the new incarnate one as the Rimpoche of the prior lama, whose ashes disappear from his chorten as the new incarnation is declared and the name is taken. He added the cosmology of the Himalayas as part of the divine confirmation process: there are five peaks of Everest, home (“the abode”) of the gods; there are also some five deities of Kanchenchunga. And I added, “the five Pandavas”—and he burst out: “Ahah! He knows the Mahabharata!”
He seemed to be enjoying the audience, which was already going on longer than the time originally allocated, as the other monks paced or stood behind panels of curtains awaiting a summons. One of the monks was the “health empowered monk” we had given our medicine to and whom we ha discussed the follow-up plans for the treated patients. Situ Pai said that he had hoped to enlarge the Sherbaling Monastery clinic and he had plans to upgrade the skills of the monk we had identified to assist. When we asked if there were any other questions, the chorus came back “Can we take your picture?”
“Why not?” he replied. So we lined up, as a group or singly. Michael Eiffling burst out into a laugh when, just as a picture was about to be snapped, we heard a ringing, not unlike the ringing of my Nokia cell phone which was locked up and turned off in my Bronco precisely 7, 244 great circle miles away on bearing 338*, so I knew it could not be mine. He rummaged around in the folds of his yellow robes in the sides under the sleeveless vest and pulled out—Voila! —His own cell phone! He took the call in a language I did not recognize, and tucked it away again, asking for my card. It was a very incongruous sight—a holy man seated on a large gilded raised dais in front of a several gross of Buddha images like bees in a honeycomb behind him, as he pushed a Nokia cell phone into his ecclesiastic robes with his arm that was bearing the Rolex watch. He smiled broadly and serenely, as if enjoying the trompl’oeil with me.
I thanked him again and the whole entourage filed out into the porch, as the impatient tourists who were awaiting were told that their brief pilgrimage to see the Situ Pai would be shortened, since he would have to be taking other calls. As I looked over the courtyard, and the somewhat clearing skies, over which the Dhaulidhar Range was just now letting some long rays of sun slant over the Sherbaling Monastery I saw something in the sky, which was certainly not a beatific vision—but better! A pair of eagles was soaring aloft on the strong thermal updrafts, with the sun glinting off the underside of their white wings and banded colors of their bodies.
I had enough “chai” thanks to our multiple ceremonial stops, that I tried to scoot across the courtyard toward what I had hoped might be even an “Asian facility”. I passed a dumpster that was reeking of garbage, and as I came around the far side of it, I confronted two beady eyes almost at my own eye level as an elongated body stood up on its hind legs on a ledge between me and the dumpster. I recognized it immediately, as a rather familiar from, even if it was in a place I did not expect it. I was looking at the blonde body of a mongoose, which slipped around the dumpster and reappeared on the fart side, nosing around the lunch leftovers of the monk novitiates earlier ceremonial queuing for lunch.
So, after the rather fascinating audience with Situ Pai, probably the most influential and important lama in Tibetan Buddhism except for the Dalai Lama himself (who is now preparing to visit Washington DC and have two audiences of his own with Secretary Powell and President George W. Bush as America’s retort to the Chinese retention and disassembly of the US intelligence plane that landed on their island after being collided with in a harassment confrontation with a Chinese fighter jet), I find myself every bit as interested in the natural history of the exotic wildlife both in and above the Sherbaling Monastery, in the shadow of the Dhaulidhar of the Himalayan Massif.