JUN-B-19
A GREAT RUN IN THE
EARLY MORNING PRECEDES
AN EVENTFUL LAST
HALF-DAY IN MCLEOD GANJ
AS WE DECAMP FROM
THE HOTEL BHAGSU
AND RIDE THE BUS
TO CHANDRIGARH
June 27, 2002
Today’s morning run was the best of the lot! This time, we recruited a young big strong buck, Austin from Utah who is a freshman medical student at Creighton University in Nebraska. Jim and Austin and I took off at 6:30 AM before the tourons and shopkeepers and diesel drivers had got up. This is a comfort, since the sacred cattle and the drivers treat you much the same way---they ignore your personal space, and run through it like a virtual image. I can assure you that if I had any “wing mirrors” they would have been clipped off on my first running day in India. I almost ran afoul of a donkey today who had an iron rack on his back to carry rocks up from the valley to the summit for a building project, in a vain attempt to reverse the natural order of things in which these rocks have been rolling downhill in response to the second law of thermodynamics and the entropic collapse predicted for the end of this Kali Yuga by any good Hindu. As I ran toward the road full of donkeys, they jostled, and the ringing noise of the scraping iron racks got this one donkey excited and he bolted, with a near miss at me, which would have struck me as the side arms he was packing—which I did not prefer to the long drop on the side of the road toward which I jumped. These animals are also Oriental---the concept of the “personal space” around an individual is foreign to them, and “violating the close” without so much as a “by your leave” is common among both the primates and quadrupeds.
I ran steadily uphill, outpacing both of my running mates, so that whereas yesterday’s run took 35 minutes to reach Lake Dally, I was there in 22 minutes today! We walked/ran the steep pitch until we got to the overlook for the Indahar Pass, a spectacular sight in the dawn sun, and we ran as far as the school for meditation at the end of the road. We ran back so fast that the time for the round trip of over 10 K was 50 minutes.
NOT-QUITE-SO-SPECTACULAR-A-BARGAIN-YESTERDAY-BACKPACK
AS I ALSO PLUG
INTO MY LAST INTERNET CONNECTION
On the way up to walk the mountain road that brought us to the start of the Mount Triund Trail last night, I had stopped off to se a backpack that looked roomy enough to hold my minimal stuff, yet small enough that I could carry it on the airplane allowing me to check that smaller day pack I had got in Nepal in 1999. The sales girl had said 450 R’s a real bargain at ten dollars. I had said, as she was closing up shop, I could give her four hundred now (I did not want to carry it empty up the mountain) or her asking price in the morning. She paused and then took it inside, figuring I would be back. I went to see the shop Number 8 which she said would be open at 9:00 AM, but when it had not opened by 9:30, I went to the Internet Café I had once used to see if I could mail out the last night’s chapters and the most recent stories from Manali on. I did so with relative ease, noting that a lot of the International Society for Panetics members were counting on me making some connection with the Tibetan Buddhist authorities of the authentication of some of their work. I finished my Internet work, and came over to the Shop Number 8 at 10:00 AM
The shop clerk saw me coming as I took the beige backpack down and brought it in. “Mystic Price!” “What is that?” “Mystic Price. I am not the owner, I am just a clerk, and when I told the owner that you had offered 400 R’s he had told me that the 450 R’s price I had told you was a big ‘Mystic.’”
Oh, I replied, “You mean that the 450 R’s you had said I could purchase this for was a “Mistake.’” Yes, the tiny one over here is 450 R’s and that pone is 1450 R’s” Well that would make the price about $28 and even that seemed worth it, so I put up the same defense, and offered her 50 R’s short, which of course, she accepted. So, I now have a new backpack for the subsequent trips, and one that will allow me to check on the Lufthansa flight the small backpack which I have stuffed with the birthday gifts I had bought for the twins and check it in. This will avoid the suspicion that attaches to someone who boards a plane without checked luggage to travel around the world, and will still be small enough to have me get it through the Metro and Washington Flyer to the Bronco left at GW. So, my bags never did reach me during this entire trip. To make sure that they are seen and carried to the next trip, I took out a few items to put into the bags for forwarding to Ladakh through Hem, including the lecture slides on Tropical Surgery, which they had wanted me to give again in Lei. So, I will see if I am in India for almost six weeks next trip without any support by any bags I have carefully prepared for my use and left here so as to have them” conveniently available.”
AND THE MEETING IN
THE AUDIENCE ROOM OF THE DALI LAMA’S PALACE FOR A DISCUSSION OF PANETICS
As I carried my backpack to the room and stuffed it with the few things I thought I would need on the plane tomorrow, I got the call from the Assistant Secretary and then the Secretary to the Dali Lama, agreeing that it would be all right if I brought my nine medical students (the number now with me after half have left) to the audience for which I am expected at eleven. So, we trooped over to the Palace through the heavy cloud mist that presaged yesterday’ torrential rain of the monsoon’s start. We went through security with all alarms going off, since everyone was packing a camera and I also had a tape recorder. No matter, they would all b e taken off and left so that we could then pass through a body search to be sure we were innocent, and the passports and visa numbers and signatures were recorded for each of us in the book at registration. I told the assistant about the origins of each of the members and then we went up to the audience room for our session with the secretary Mister Tensing Getche.
The room is big enough to accommodate the ten of us and the secretary and a few others who left after we began. The room is imposing since it is decorated with the medals, certificates and framed pictures of the Dali Lama and his honorary degrees and receptions by other heads of state. His personal secretary is the de facto Secretary of State of a small and not very powerful faction if the moral suasion that comes from perpetual victimization by China is discounted. In front of me at eye level as I sat, was a large gold medal with the portrait in profile of Alfred Nobel. My mentor Joseph Murray at Harvard wore a small medal with a capital N crossed through as his own rather elite “Phi Beta Kappa key equivalent.”
The secretary was at first perplexed as to why we were there, since one of his jobs is to prevent gawking tourists who may have seen Brad Pitt in “Seven Years in Tibet” and decided on the basis of such intimacy to come and shake the hand opf the Dali Lama. He had suggested a bit of stiff-arming us by telling us the Dali Lama could see no visitors since he was leaving tomorrow.
I began by saying our group had completed yet another mission in the remote areas of Spiti and many were disappointed that circumstances prevents His Holiness from being present in Tabo Monastery for the planned ceremonies in which he would be our supervisor for the clinics we had carried out there. This seemed to have eluded him, but he was warmed to the ideas that I presented next.
I told him of the International Society for Panetics, and inflicted suffering as a major component of human grief with increasing control over plagues and pestilences but magnification of power in the hands of inflictors, whether it be in governments such as China in suppressing Tibet, or industrial polluters or unemployment forces, or anyone who wishes to enforce the will of a minority over each individual’s choices, etc
When he heard the discussion from someone not unfamiliar with Buddhism at a fundamental level he warmed up and began to get quite philosophical himself, saying he was not the right person to answer these questions but there were a number of scholars in the US who had studied with Tibetan masters who might be helpful and he named a dozen, of which I could remember only Jeffrey Hopkins at Indianan University and Cesar ----- at Columbia and an Allen Wallace at some place unknown. He said he would correspond with me further, since at least these individuals should be contributing members of the ISP, and he would link me with others who could answer the specific questions I had raised. How can the theoretic principles of Buddhism inform those “men of practical affairs” in shaping practice and policy in the “new Era of Humane Renaissance?” His response was that he did not think that the two spheres mixed---that the theoretic scholarly scientific endeavor which it sounded like both our ISP group and Buddhist scholar monks (a wide variety of whom are at work in the library next door right now, and all of them speaking English well) are at a theoretic level and each attempts to inform practice in life’s problems from such a perspective but without a clear cut way of implementing these principles in practice.
He became quite eloquent on the subject of the Buddhist underlying principle of “Shunya”, which was the first time any of the students had heard such phrases, and they sat in awe-struck silence as each of the two of us gave mini-lectures from different perspectives on the subject of human suffering and its infliction. I had told him of the origins in the work of Dr. Ralph Siu of the principle and terminology of Panetics—from the Pali language that Buddha spoke, and even introduced the methodology of quantification, using the term “dhukka” which I would not do in a western hearing. I then used the Mahabharata term “Ahimsa”—the highest principle of good, referred to as “noninfliction.”
Tensing Getche pointed out that a Buddhist response to those who inflict suffering upon you even thoughtlessly is to regard them as teachers to show you how you should not behave toward other living things around you.
Tensing Getche really warmed to this and it seemed we were speaking our own language which the students had to learn quickly to catch up, much as they have been in the last two weeks, trying to learn the telegraphic Greco-Latin terminology of telegraphic medical communication in the case presentation s at the didactic rounds I had led after each clinic. He thought that the term and concept of “ahimsa” could be used quite practically to inform policy, even at a national level, when I had referred to the “Gross national Dhukka Reduction,” he understood and was eager to try this out. I explained that I had twice met His Holiness, but both times in Washington DC and he had a set of the Trilogy of the ISP written by Siu, and we could be sure that he got an additional set for the library here in the place according to the emails I had sent yesterday and today.
At this point I was sure we had taken as much of his time as we would be allowed at about forty minutes into the interview. I stood, and gave him the ISP website address and our intent to make of it a virtual organization with easy communication with the kindred spirits of Tibetan Buddhism, and inviting his and others contributions and the blessings of His Holiness. I went so far as to suggest that His Holiness would make a wonderful Siu Memorial lecturer at some future point, and that together we might launch the time of the Era of the Humane Renaissance, even pulling in the Kalchatra ritual that the Dali Lama can confer on organizations and groups who are working on peace and understanding among men.
At this point he asked me several questions about where I had been and what I had been doing and why among the remote Buddhist peoples, residual fragments of the Tibetan Guge Empire. I suggested that both China and India might have strategic interests in the bordering parts of their conflicting countries, but that did not include much interest in or service to these forgotten peoples. He agreed. I told him of the repeated visits to Dharamsala and remote areas around little Tibet in Exile here in the Kangra Valley, then about my multiple trips into Ladakh and its Gompas, and all through Spiti just now completed and the three prior treks into these regions, mentioning the Gompas in which we worked at Tabo, Dankar, Ki and others. I told him of the two cardiac surgical cases we had found in extremis, and not wanting to claim superiority, I would point out that they had failed the Ayurvedic and Tibetan herbal medicine approaches and would need evacuation with our help to get valve replacements, at least in AIIMS in Delhi and possible one even in the University of Colorado which we were trying to arrange.
He warmed up and extended the interview by another thirty minutes. He could not believe we had come through the roads of the interior, He asked several members if they did not get sick from the altitude, and we had a prime case of Acute Mountain Sickness in Kelly to report to him directly about her experience. He then nodded at me, and I stood again thanking him for his time. As the students field out, several wanting to keep their visitors passes as souvenirs of their visit and saying how enlightening this visit had been, they went back to registration to reclaim their passports.
Tensing Getche waited until they had filed out and I stood with him outlining the ISP website, when he opened a door and motioned me in to it. There sat His Holiness Dali Lama XIV, in a serene posture, but I could not help but thinking he had been eavesdropping. He shook my hand and the secretary held up his hand as if to say, “Do not let the others know since we will have a stampede back to the door. He apologized of r not offering tea, since our quick greetings would be brief, but he wished to relay that the efforts of those interested in Panetics and its application would have the Dali Lama’s blessings, and he would be kept informed on them. With a hurried farewell and best wishes for his coming journeys (“And for yours!”) I hurried to catch up with the group. They were all excited about having heard a deep philosophical discussion with the secretary, and I thought it best not to disappoint them by telling them further of my last minute quick visit.
AND
THE SEVEN-HOUR BUS RIDE OUT OF DHARAMSAL TO CHANDIGARH AND OUR ROOM SERCIE
DINNER AND DRINGKS
WITH
THE FIRST ARRIVAL OF THE NEXT TRIP ALREADY HERE!
The long bus rides get no shorter as they get to be every other day full time in transit. But, this was as uneventful as it might be, despite the fact that the drivers in India have to contend not only with pedestrians waling down the middle of the road, sacred cows and mobs of monkeys, zebu-pulled carts, motorbikes and big lorry traffic, but also the craziness of the unawareness that almost any India subcontinent type shows for the lanes in a road. When we came to the area of the Sikh Temples, there is a big magnificent stretch of divided highway with a median strip. What occurs is mind-boggling. Drivers will see that there are fewer people driving in the direction they wish to go on the opposite side of the dual highway, so they simply cross over into the head on traffic and drive with their lights flashing as though to warn oncoming traffic that they should stay out of the way of those swimming upstream at very high closing speeds! We saw one result of this at a short interval after it happened, with a truck imbedded into the front of a bus from a head on collision. Of course, we did not stop to examine it more closely, since there was already a traffic mess around the two big vehicles stuck together.
We arrive in the boulevarded well-laid-out city plan of Chandigarh, and got the minimal stuff I have to my room. WE went down to the restaurant to find out that it had been taken over by a private party—looking like the “Monsoon Wedding” tableau. As we were diverted to the desk, who should be standing there but Sammy Gorman, who was with me in Ladakh last year and is now in her fourth return trip to India, largely because she and the driver Jimmy, son of Dr. Dawa from Lei Ladakh have a thing going. She has already been here in India a week, as I recall from the from I got from Tuoro University near San Francisco (I believe that is the name of her Osteopathic College in which she was a freshman) which sent me a from saying I was supervising her from June 18 through August 30---a rather healthy chunk of time, particularly considering that I ma on my way home having already spent far too much time in India already this year. So, she is going to Lei by road tomorrow, to see what she can find to do in the Lei hospital awaiting my return to lead her through the paces in the Ladakh trek and then into the Lingshed trek.
We went up top Hem’s room and called in Room Service for beer and a final dinner on the tables and chairs of his room. As a parting dinner, who should wake up in time to give a valedictory? Why, Bill Norton of course, who was the one who had to greet everyone in the opening welcome as the senior most acknowledged leader of this trip and from his vast experience give advice to my students on how it would proceed. Now he could thank them for contributing to his efforts in this one large family. Since there is no one here who does not know that we have had only one large Pickwickian dead weight who was a total noncontributor, his valedictory did not elicit a lot of tearful response.
So, I am about to finish this Spiti-02 trip, and am seen in the streets of McLeod Ganj by a hanger on from the Dharamsala trip three medical missions ago, and I arrive in Chandigarh to see the first of the next trips’ participants already here to start a long course I am supervising also! Perhaps these folks have figured I live here—the way the waiters and desk clerks do at the Hotel Bhagsu in McLeod Ganj!