The result is a moving & illuminating foray into the mind, heart & soul of one of the pre-eminent researchers of our day in the matters of life & death & what happens after we die.

audio player – press arrow to start listening:

Robert Beer has studied and practised Tibetan Art for the past forty years. He is now recognized as one of the foremost scholars in this field.

Author and illustrator of the Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs, and the Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist Symbols. He has illustrated Indian Mahasiddhas in the book Buddhist Masters of Enchantment.

Over the past fifteen years Robert has been working closely with the most talented thangka painters of the Kathmandu Valley, the Newar artists of Nepal.

He is now curating an exhibition of his work & theirs, currently running at the October Gallery in Old Gloucester Street, until 26th May 2012.

In this interview Robert recounts his life story; he discusses his pivotal experiences including an lsd ‘kundalini crisis’, the death of his little sister &, much later, the death of his beloved elder daughter.

About out of body experiences, near death experiences and lucid dreaming; about his experiences of past lives & the life between those lives, the spirit home.

During the exhibition Robert will be giving four talks, on the 5th, 8th, 18th & 26th of May 2012; details here at October Gallery Events. Entry £Free (donations welcome).

Visit the exhibition, essential viewing; go & listen to Robert’s talks.

“The Jogini waterfalls are basically the sacred bathing place for “Joginis” who are believed to be the unwed daughters of Lord Indra. It is on the first of Baisakh that the locals bring their children for their first tonsure here above the Bashisht village”.

“The Jogini waterfall is near Vashisht village. Every day a large number of domestic and foreign tourists visit it and the Jogini temple. The villagers from the valley visit and perform their rites at the temple and till date follow the custom of serving food in plates made of stone”.

Here he talks about what it was like in Banaras in the early 1960s; later he made a kayak of his own construction and rode it from Banaras to Dhaka, then Calcutta to Puri. Marriage, children, study in Germany & now twenty years teaching Peace Studies (and German) and learning Buddhism & Japanese in Japan, Dr Klaus Schlichtmann is a true renaissance man. His overriding interests these days are his two year old daughter Irena & the development of World Peace & World Federation.

Listen to his interview now.

Publications:

Japan in the World: Shidehara Kijuro, Pacifism, and the Abolition of War. (by Klaus Schlichtmann, Asiaworld,  [2 vols.], April 2009) Amazon.com

Article Nine in Context “… limitations of National Sovereignty and the Abolition of War in Constitutional Law.” (by Klaus Schlichtmann).

Peace Studies lectures in peace (Movement for UN Reform [UNFOR]).

Photos:

Irena & Klaus (Facebook – login required). Klaus with his young daughter, February 2012.

Klaus in Banaras 1965  “In Banaras on the river Ganges at one of the ghats.”

Buku & Klaus in Banaras 1965 “At the Bauddh Kaksh, Sanskrit University.”

Tashijong – ‘Cosynook’ 1976 “I think this picture of Peter Cooper,  Ngawang Tendup, the English Lama, is in front of “Cosynook” near Tashijong.”

Rutherford, Zimels, Abrams “in Klaus Schlichtmann’s room at the Bauddh Kaksh, Banaras, 1965.”

Links:

Japan in the World: (online) read Klaus’ book on Shidehara Kijuro online at Google Books.

Historian seeks clear U.N. mandate for peace (The Japan Times 15 March 2003) “German-born Klaus Schlichtmann is a peace historian. An academic who found his way late in life — a “seeker” in every sense of the word.”

World Peace Movement for the Abolition of War.

World Federation World Government (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy).

The Flower Raj presents a video of Robin Brown, a pilot episode for a proposed series based on his book. Robin has lived in India for decades since the 1960s & has both travelled widely & read wisely about India.

nota bene: as an introductory ‘pitch’ pilot video, this only gives a taste of Robin,  in person  he talks most engagingly about people, places & subjects dear to him and of which most travellers will not even have heard of. Hence I hope to interview him talking and publish the dialogues as audio podcasts on The Flower Raj Blog, If all goes as planned I’ll be engaging with him in Goa this winter (2012).

The Flower Raj will also assist Robin Brown in bringing out “Eating Air…” as a Kindle eBook on Amazon.

Himachal Music 1988 – a playlist of music by Baul musicians, sounds from the Vashisht Mela & the Kullu Town Fair, and, at the actual wedding, Rajasthani Shehnai & drums, Rohini’s female Kashmiri relatives, Bauls, The Mighty Tigers military wedding band & more Bauls. Hypnotic, entrancing.

Wedding Month – photo coverage Himachal 1988. Relatives, wedding guests, musicians, views of Vashisht Mela.

(all material on the wedding trip courtesy Margo Sagov, who also digitised the original cassette tapes & ftpd & sleuthed assiduously).

Bhaskar Encyclopaedia Page – The Flower Raj Wiki, with links to work info & obituaries.

Bhaskar Photo Album – The Flower Raj Photos (we need more).

The bus pulled away and disappeared into the night and left me standing by a wide empty road lined with massive old stone buildings. Some streetlights worked: yellow reflections shivered on the paving stones of the sidewalk. Wisps of mist drifted by. Like a city in a dream, Calcutta made no sound or movement. India was not supposed to be like this. I’d known my flight would be landing after midnight and it wouldn’t be hot and bright and uproarious, but still, arriving in India was supposed to be wild. It hadn’t been easy dressing for it in a Pan Am economy-class toilet. Now, alone in a pool of yellow neon light, I stood in my mustard-yellow flares and boots for one long moment – long enough for my eyes to get used to the gloom beyond and see that I was not alone. All along the sidewalk, away from the light, people shrouded in white cotton were lying fast asleep next to their cloth bundles and tin trunks.

Two in the morning on January 2nd, 1971: I can see it as I write, though the shapes and colours are sharper than they’d be on a photo that old. All around is the grey of mist and stone, over there lies the humped white row of sleepers; and the only man standing, the neon-lit person with the disordered long hair and flares and fringed jerkin and zip-up boots, is me. On the airport bus, a beat-up clangorous thing, the conductor had told me the ‘foreign tourist hotels’ were in Sudder Street, near here. He was small and dark, in frayed khaki, his hands stained by ticket ink, and when he’d done his rounds he wandered down to the front to gossip with the driver and the police guard. The guard wore a Zapata moustache and a khaki beret and had an old .303 carbine with a dark wooden stock slung over one shoulder and chained round his waist – the same World War 2 gun we’d had in the cadet corps at school. One man and his weapon, a thickset profile in the windscreen as the bus bellowed through the wide empty streets of the city. Now I hefted my holdall and set off around the corner into Sudder Street, my boot heels loud on the paving stones, but nothing awoke except an invisible dog somewhere up ahead in the dark. Here, nearly all the streetlights were out. The dog yelped once and scurried away. The sidewalk was narrow and broken and lined with sleepers, so I took to the roadway.

A sign and arrow on a brick wall directed me into an alley, up to a corner, and as I came up to the iron-barred hotel entrance an old tattered man got up from his string bed in the courtyard inside and let me in. On the narrow unlit stairs, as he showed me up to a room, I slipped and had to grab for his arm: it was thin under the coarse cotton sleeve, like a boy’s arm. In the morning as I dressed I heard birds singing and the room boy whistling as he swept the corridor outside with the big rush broom. Then I felt the rush of happiness I’d expected the night before. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, as the poet said, but to be young was very heaven. A crow was clinging to the window bars: with his black stare and hooked beak and important whiskers he looked exactly like my old headmaster. I laughed out loud, and the crow took off backwards into thin air. A radio played and waking noises rose up from the alley. From Sydney to this bare little whitewashed room: India at last. Nearly broad daylight now, and getting warmer all the time, but even on this new morning I wasn’t going to get the I Ching out, I wasn’t going to think too much or pore over divinations or wonder what things meant. Stay cool and on the beam, Oscar always said – and right now I bet he was sitting crosslegged on the mattress in the King’s Cross house under the graffiti on the wall that read The Wages of Gin is Breath. Your India trip is what you make it, he’d be saying. You are the guru.

Oscar’s India, as he knew it, was a wild vivid place that gave you enough rope. It didn’t judge you and it didn’t put you down: it watched while you did what you did, and if you fucked up, it just went on watching. It was indifferent, like nature. In India you were lost to the world you knew. This made the famous and very hip India trip sound a wee bit grim to the innocent audience gathered around his mattress – but in fact, Oscar went on, it was great to be lost to the world you knew. Then you could change and grow and not get stuck in the mud. Also – to descend to purely practical considerations – the cops cared not at all about dope, no one hassled you for what you looked like and no one ever called you ‘a fag’ – Oscar was American – for having long hair. Many Indians had long hair. Godmen in dreadlocks roamed the land, smoking like locomotives. These godmen were the coolest people for Oscar, they were tough proud free and didn’t give a damn, theirs was the real India – this real India being the trigger for one of Oscar’s unstoppable raps, India the land of peace, poor but good, whose ancient culture beat ours hands down in range and richness and wisdom, and which led the world in nonviolence, Gandhi having led the most dramatic and peaceful of all independence movements into a nationhood which was free of banana republicanism and coca-colonisation and – best of all – free of the Bomb.

In South America you were a gringo and in Africa you had to stay in the same hotel as the straight tourists. In China you could only go to approved tourist destinations. Southeast Asia had been coca-colonised; in Singapore they cut your hair right there in the airport. True, Cambodia had the Angkor Wat and Indonesia had Borubudur. Oscar had seen Borubudur and done incredible mushrooms there, but India had all this and more, entire abandoned temple cities that were an unbelievable hassle to get to – and therefore free of straight tourists. India, land of the free.

About now, well into his rap, Oscar would pause for breath and someone in the circle would hand him a fresh joint and he would thrust it into his wild Rasputin beard and take a deep toke, expel the smoke, smack his lips and tell us the one about Allen Ginsberg in Benares.

A couple of people swore they were going to India and never coming back, but I didn’t know about that. I was going there to see it and be it as Oscar had seen it and been it, you had to do the India trip like that, but afterwards I was going overland to London. I’d been brought up in New Zealand, but born in London, and that was my nirvana. The cheapest way to get there was to fly from Australia to Calcutta via Hong Kong. So far, I’d got as far as Sydney. My girlfriend, who was also from New Zealand, called Sydney the Last Homely House, as in The Lord of the Rings, because it was on the edge of the known world. Even so, after Auckland, it was pretty exotic. The first night she and I had arrived, a  genuine Italian mafioso had been shot dead in the pub across the street. Now we had a room at Oscar’s place in King’s Cross, where American servicemen on R & R from Vietnam roistered nightly in the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar. They were still jumpy, though: if a passing car backfired, they all dived to the ground.

Down the hill in our house we were all working on New South Wales Government Railways and saving for that giant step off the edge of the known world – a step we were no way going to take without direction from Oscar the living guidebook. We looked after him tenderly. There was, you see, no other guidebook. No one else we knew had been to India. There were books, but they were for people who went there to see tourist places like the Taj Mahal. Oscar had never bothered with the Taj Mahal. It wasn’t on his map, he said.

His name for this map, mental map, was palimpsest. A palimpsest was a medieval book in which new pages got pasted onto the old pages beneath it. Thus, India was a palimpsest. Nothing ever died there or got superseded and finished up in a museum, Oscar said: it merely had another layer pasted on top of it. Centuries didn’t pass, they coexisted. On the very top lay modern India: but through this you could easily see an earlier layer, one your grandfather would have recognised, still full of life. And beneath that, layer below layer, the pattern got older and deeper and stranger and still living. On shiny new diesel trains you crossed Victorian bridges over rivers where people from antiquity performed obscure rituals, you passed temples where tribesmen worshipped stones they called gods. Entire unimagined worlds of revelation lay in wait for us, Oscar said, just as they had for him.

This fascinated and overwhelmed us. We hadn’t been away from New Zealand very long. We rolled Oscar another joint. He was the real thing, we all agreed, and to be the real thing, you had to be American. Oscar came from Montana, where a big sky opened over a big country but there was nothing to do. His brother had already gone off to be a Beat. Then when he was eighteen that same window on freedom opened for Oscar, and he leaped joyfully through it and fled to the Haight-Ashbury, to Monterey Pop, Woodstock, the attempted levitating of the Pentagon, and a few riots. But too soon the window closed again and left Oscar outside. Now he was in Australia, the last frontier, advising draft-dodgers and trying not to mourn. His time had gone, a time that hadn’t been just a time but a cause he had given himself to. The revolution had been betrayed. Charles Manson had poisoned the water. The best people had been done in by the System. And the war – Vietnam, always simply ‘the war’ – was still going on.

The world was never going to change: that was how Oscar saw it in the embattled defiant mood that possessed him now. If you’d ever believed the world didn’t have to be the way it was – sometimes he confused us by calling America ‘the world’ as the GIs did – there was no choice now but to leave it for the Otherworld of India. Oscar’s hopes for his world had been limitless, America-sized, and now he had limitless America-sized Weltschmerz.

Now I was in Calcutta while he lived on in Sydney, gabbing away to his latest disciples, a White Guru on a grimy mattress, not exactly moving on except for short walks up the hill. In the days before I’d left, I’d noticed that more and more often he was taking his embattled defiance up the hill to the Wayside Chapel, famous for its selfless ministry to the lost and the hopeless, and spending all day in a pew smoking morphine. He had to, we said to each other, he had to fly that freak flag so very high, he was American. The rights to life and liberty were in his Constitution. And more than that. He had to pursue happiness, forever.

It was less exacting for us. We too came from a lucky country in the New World – but a small and retiring one in the south Pacific where only modest eddies had ever arrived of the mighty Sixties deluge that had swept Oscar away. Somehow we felt for him, his rage for freedom. We rolled joints of coarse Aussie weed for him – for a man who had once smoked Panama Red.

I doubt if Oscar was ever in Calcutta. It had never been a freak place, only a landing for flights from the east, from Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. It was a ground-down old Victorian industrial port, Liverpool without The Beatles, rich in culture but notoriously poor and short on glamour. Certainly Oscar had never mentioned armed cops on buses or sidewalks so full of sleeping people that you had to walk in the road. These had never been on his map. And neither were they going to be on mine. I’d arrived there because it was the nearest way in from Sydney, and soon I’d be gone – to Goa for the scene or Rishikesh for the godmen, but definitely to London for the summer.

It was broad day now in my whitewashed room, and warm. Crowds were moving in the alley down below. I sat awhile on my bed looking across the room through the wooden window bars at the barred and shuttered windows over the way, at a cluttered flat roof with a tin hut on it. A man came out of the hut in his underwear and suddenly squatted down on his haunches with his arms out in front of him, supported on his knees, and stayed like that. Then just as suddenly he stood up again and went back in to the hut. Small hawks patrolled the sky. I was spaced. Everything would be new today. Oscar had said the best way to enter India was to step back and treat it like a movie: culture shock was for straight tourists. Later you could plunge in and see it and be it – but only when you were ready.

Where did India begin? In the bathroom. I negotiated the ground-level squat toilet and the rusty tin of water, I discovered a plastic scoop and threw more water all over myself, then dried and dressed and went out for a walk. Baby’s first steps. Down a short crowded street lined with canopied fuming foodstalls on bicycle wheels, and across a square where handcarts parked, I arrived at the New Market. It was a single-storey building the size of a city block, made of stone like the buildings I’d seen last night, and just as old. Our house in Auckland had been a hundred years old but these were much older. Exuberant vegetation sprouted from gutters and ledges above; down below, the walls were hung almost all over with bright advertisements and racks of shirts. Wherever the walls were bare they were tattooed with graffiti – Naxalbari Lal Salaam, Power Grows Out From The Barrel Of A Gun – and stained with red spit. Crowds flowed in and out of  many entrances in a babel of talk and hawkers’ cries and screechy music.

Nearby I found a place called the English Dairy and stopped in for some chocolate milk. There were two freaks in there, in baggy white Indian gear – for sure, it was too hot here even in January for my ceremonial velvet and leather and boots, so I went out again and bought baggy white gear and buffalo-hide sandals and a man’s sarong called a lungi, just a cloth skirt like the ones Samoans wore in Auckland, blue and stiffly new with the maker’s name stamped on it in gold. So far, so good for the first frames of this Indian movie, going into shops, feeling the aluminium coins so light in the hand and trying to understand the Indian English, lilting, scraped off the palate and driven along by twisty-wristed gestures.

I didn’t always get it. I went to look in a jeweller’s shop and the next minute I was wearing a silver earring. I’d only asked to look at them. But the sale came on in a rush, the jeweller’s boys giggling and tussling with a can of ether, the can spraying wildly at my head, the jeweller thrusting a sleeper, a temporary earring, through my earlobe. Afterwards I bought something to drink, but it went straight down my shirt front. The ether had frozen me from the neck up, and my mouth was gone; it was like being nuked by a dentist.

Somehow I found the hotel again, but it took all afternoon to get my head back. I lay on the hard little bed while the shadow of my window bars rose inch by inch up the opposite wall and the guys in the room next door argued over who got to play the new sitar first. Eventually someone won and began trying to tune up. I fitted my fat new Hong Kong headphones to my fat pumpkin head and reached down towards the tape player on the floor for the Play button. First up, Janis, Piece of My Heart. A memorial moment. I’d been been leaving the park in Sydney when I saw the newsstand: Queen Of Rock Dead.

Next morning I woke up feeling great. Bestriding the bathroom like a native, I switched to the proper earring at the cracked mirror and then went out to a hutch-like stall along the alley and bought a cheap cotton singlet with a slit pocket on the front for my tickets, passport and money – the holy trinity – as well as a yellow cotton prayer shawl with Om printed on it. Then I got the guy to unstitch the Mr. Natural patch from my leather jerkin and stitch it to the vest. Back in the hotel I stashed the jerkin away in the holdall for London with the rest of the western stuff. Transformed, an innocent abroad in baggy white gear, I set off again into the great swallowing city.

You never saw such a crowd. The sidewalk was full of people washing, eating, feeding babies and reading the morning paper; the road was full of earnest office-goers and plump housewives. Everyone had black hair. The bikes – Enfields and Czech Jawas – and the old cars and bicycles and thin cows and handcarts just had to creep along with them. This they did, patiently. Imagine the tears of rage in Auckland, in Sydney, if it was like this. I came to the New Market and stepped inside. Oscar’s palimpsest a few layers down: India as advertised, sensory overload, a low-lit Aladdin’s cave packed with stalls selling unheard-of things, stalls and more stalls stretching away in a hum of chat along aisles intersected by more aisles and on into the dim fruit-scented labyrinth. To my left, foot-high perfect cones of coloured powder; to my right, harem pants. Directly ahead, a humped bull calmly eating a banana while the stallholder beat it furiously across the buttocks with a banana stem. In my country, bulls were dangerous – though I saw the man was carefully not beating its pendulous pink scrotum. Stout shopkeepers in white with sculpted moustaches, some with red dots affixed to their foreheads, attended stately matrons in billowing saris as they cruised the stalls, each one followed by a basket-bearing coolie wearing an official big brass coolie badge.

It was somewhere in the New Market, at a stall he calls Shop No. 246, that Cal Teale came unstuck in 1970, a year before I arrived. I met him two years later in Brighton, in England, where he told me his story. It stayed in my head, was one of those stories that made me want to write a book about India one day; and twenty years later it ended up with many other stories in an oral history called “A Season In Heaven”.

‘From the moment I did that deal in Shop No. 246’, Cal told me, ‘I was meat: to be exact, turkey. I was walking away from the New Market, home free, I was walking away, when suddenly I had an idea and turned around and went back. No warning bells went off. Why not? The flaw in that idea should have been obvious, obvious. Even now I can hardly bear to think about it. Each time I do, I am the theatre audience that knows what’s going to happen next: Behind you! But it’s too late. A life-trashing experience is on its way. I go on stepping over discarded banana peels on my way back to Shop No. 246.’

He went back to the shop, to henna-bearded Abdullah, who was among other things a hashish exporter, and gave him a photo of himself, so Abdullah could glue it to one of the fake student cards he kept at home. In those days in India a student photocard got you train tickets for half price. Later that afternoon Abdullah gave the completed photocard to his boy, to deliver to Cal’s hotel; and the boy still had the card on him when he called in at the post office with two kilos of tourist-grade Nepali hash hidden in a pair of wicker stools, properly wrapped up together in parcel cloth with Cal’s home address written on it.

Next day the Customs, damning evidence in hand, turned up at Cal’s hotel, and Cal went down in chains. But that’s another story.

A year later, and my fourth night in India. In the afternoons, I had found, shops closed for siesta. At five they would open again and finally close for the night at nine. It was amazing to see then how the street noise died away and Calcutta became the night-city I’d encountered on arrival, stony, brooding, empty. Unsettling. I was pleased when the Old Student came loping into the courtyard of the Modern Lodge, where I sat in a collapsing chair. I ordered tea.

Everyone called him the Old Student. He’d been at the university, caught TB, couldn’t get a job, and had simply stayed on in his student room for years, unmolested, until a relative got him the hustler’s job at the nearby Shilton Hotel on the strength of his excellent English. His job was to lure arriving foreigners into Reception. Every hotel had at least one of these guys, most of them full of fake bonhomie and always at your elbow when you didn’t need them, but the Old Student wasn’t like that. He wore with dignity the ruined jeans someone had given him. He was straight in the sense of honest and was a fount of the sort of local lore that one day would appear in backpacker guidebooks.

He was of course a stoner, and a fixture in The Take. I hadn’t  been in there myself yet, but the sitarists next door said he was in The Take most nights, in search of the kind of high-class literature people carted with them all the way from the west in the hope of finally reading, until they discovered places like The Take and took to reading Furry Freak Brothers comics instead. The Take wasn’t really the place for Proust. It was nothing but a ground-floor dive conveniently near Babubhai’s Corner and discreetly off the street, a low-ceilinged dim room full of wrecked chairs where Indians and foreigners sat all day and night around the record player, listening to Hendrix and smoking up the dope Babubhai’s runners brought in, while Babubhai stayed put on his corner and kept an eye on things. He always sat on a waisted wicker stool like the ones that had once concealed Cal Teale’s doomed stash. Babubhai himself was a barrel-shaped grizzled old thug with no neck, a wide downcurving mouth like a flounder and a cast in one eye. The Old Student said he’d been a wrestler until promoted to street boss, overseer of minor local rackets and payer-off of cops.

The Old Student with his courtly manners thanked me for the tea and went back to his new hobby, German jointmaking. German joints were long, perfectly conical multi-paper spliffs that only Germans could make, but the Old Student’s subtle fingers would get him there one day, you felt, even if all he had for papers were the local Capstans, which had no glue on them to speak of and invariably undid when heated. He crouched over the table, bony hands working away, primping and pasting and prodding; finally he rolled the joint, inserted a cardboard filter, and lovingly licked the whole production from end to end. Now for it. To be perfect, the neat tip of twisted paper at the end of a German joint had to come away in a little cone when lit. The Old Student lit the tip, it came away, the Capstans came apart and their contents dropped into his lap. Carefully he collected up the smoking mix and didn’t even swear. All he said was, ‘I’m off to The Take.’

The other place he hung out was in the Blue Fox in Park Street. Park Street was Calcutta’s Soho and the only place in India, except for once in Goa, where I ever saw a man in a white suit and Panama hat and cane. He was coming out of the Blue Fox as I went in to meet the Old Student. He could get in because he was nicely-spoken, but even unkempt foreigners like me could get into places like the Blue Fox, because Park Street was a little foreign itself. There was Flury’s the Swiss pastry shop, there were Chinese restaurants and drinking dives, and across from the Blue Fox there was the Moulin Rouge with its windmill frontage and doorman in glittery jacket under the flickering neon.

Inside the Blue Fox I found the low red lighting and dark plush seats of the Fifties, and a late-night clientèle hunkered down over tables in shadow deep as shame. A chalkboard at the foot of the little stage gave the name of the house band: Philomena And Her Boys. The air was close and smelled of cheap cigarettes, chicken biryani and old grime. I took a padded corner seat with my back to the wall, ordered the biryani, and as my eyes got used to the dark and could see what lay on the stage, I saw a pink Farfisa organ and a rusty mike stand. So this was the Old Student’s Indian-coterie hangout, as The Take was his foreigner one. Everyone seemed to be local, young or youngish, a real Calcutta mix, I would learn over the coming weeks, of ironical artists, theoretical anarchists, armchair revolutionaries, fierce anti-colonialists, musicians with blues collections they’d got from American sailors, poets who’d met Allen Ginsberg a decade ago, disillusioned romantics, and one or two of those meditative-uncle types that I would meet later in the fiction of R. K Narayan.

From them I heard that Calcutta was a city of stone the British had built to make money in; and that across the river in Howrah, some of the giant jute and indigo factories that had made the money were still struggling on, but most had gone. Half-free themselves from the story of decline that they told, the Old Student’s friends seemed somehow both underprivileged, because poor, but privileged, because educated. Their clothes were piss-elegant or just plain tatty, but the waiters stayed polite. Protected only by class, the Blue Fox their faded enclave, they shared a beer between four and lived as the Old Student lived, in barsatis – shacks on flat housetops – or in the back rooms of reluctant relatives, or with mothers who would always feed them, come what may. They argued on and on, smoking Cavander cigarettes while the old town crumbled around them.

The radicals argued about revolution, of course: Naxalites, peasant Maoist rebels, were taking over the countryside, and now the bourgeois suburban mansions needed a Gurkha guard outside. The aesthetes argued that India would always prefer astrology to ideology and that inequality was the natural order here. But all of them said that sometimes they dropped coins into the lap of the beggar lady at the corner or into the blunted leathery hand of the leper in the park, and sometimes they didn’t. They shrugged at unchanging and unchangeable India and ignored the obvious. That’s what you had to do, to live.
I’d never met people like this, of course, in the happy isles of the South Pacific; I kept quiet and hoped they’d let me stay. It entertained them to take the callow honky dressed, as they said, ‘as a farmer’ to the Kali temple where goats were sacrificed, and to confront me with Rat Corner. The rats lived in a warren of holes and tunnels at the very southern end of the Maidan near the Post Office, across a busy road from the city’s central administrative buildings. Somehow holy and immune, they were cared for by a sadhu-cum-keeper to whom passersby contributed scraps of food; everyone watched while he fed the creatures as they basked in the sun, fat and confident, or batted paws with their offspring.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, I never planned to, but did end up spending time in Calcutta, and that turned out to be a good thing. The hard city gave no space to the wilder forms of Indo-Romanticism open to young foreigners in those days; it was never going to indulge your inner child. Self-absorbtion and peer-group play of the kind to be found in Goa and the more indulgent ashrams were not on offer. If you saw India chiefly as an enlightenment opportunity, it showed you her actuality. An Asian Liverpool still living the nineteenth century could never deliver the New Age. Apart from the opium smokers (an old tradition: Kipling’s first published story was about an Englishman stranded in a Calcutta Chinese opium den) few foreigners stayed very long in the city. Many more could be found even in the little beach town of Puri to the south.

I stayed in the city for perhaps two months: for someone brought up in New Zealand, this was the new world. But I was running out of money, and soon I would have to begin the overland journey to London, the nirvana I had been so anxious to reach. The day came, and I remember that on my last morning before taking the train to Delhi I went down to the ghats, the banks of the Hooghly river; with the monstrous roaring coat hanger of the Howrah Bridge looming above them, oblivious ascetics did rituals and washed their smalls and laid them on rocks to dry.

This was where Cal Teale came when his case was over, to do penance. ‘I’d been playing games with the toughest city in India,’ he told me, ‘and I got my comeuppance. So, daft as it sounds, I wanted the city to forgive me. A Hindu might speak of withdrawal of favour by the Goddess: and believe me, I well understood this, though at first I hardly knew what to think about the Great Mother of Calcutta. I don’t mean Mother Theresa. The worship of the Goddess, Ma Kali, well, it did seem to involve some weird dark stuff around skulls and tantric doings in boneyards. Let’s just say I was an uninitiate. So I didn’t try to understand: I simply felt I should ask the Great Mother for release. In fact, all I’d got after months of anxious waiting for sentencing was a small fine, plus a manageable habit from those interludes in Fong’s – but still, I wanted forgiveness. That was the space I was in. Influenced, I have to say, by Allen Ginsberg’s new book Indian Journals, which some angel left for me in the Shilton Hotel.

‘How are you forgiven? You propitiate the Goddess. But instead of sacrificing a goat at Kalighat, I did it my way. I cut my hair and gave away my western clothes and books, my Dylan tapes, my I Ching. I offered up my silver ring, a family heirloom that had survived the Battle of the Somme and a pawnbroker in the Old Kent Road. I crooked my arm and flung the ring into the Hooghly. Then after standing for a moment in silent meditation I stepped backwards into a fresh cowpat and fell on my arse.’

David Tomory
December 2011.

The companion piece for the Giant Mahakala appliqué (ceremonial piece). This drabje is used in conjunction with all wraithful deity ceremonies in Tsurphu’s main assembly hall.

Terris Temple is the first Westerner to learn the art of Thangka painting. He studied in Nepal 1966-75 with various traditional Masters. He has been involved with the Karma Kagyu order of Tibetan Buddhism since his initial meeting with the 16th Karmapa in 1969. Terris also does “flower and bird painting”. Along with his wife Leslie Nguyen Temple they are the artists to HH the 17th Karmapa, and working on the making of Tsechur Drabje again for Tsurphu, replacing lost heritage. With its completion Tsurphu’s treasures lost during the Cultural Revolution will be replaced and actively used once again for the benefit of all sentient beings. Besides this project they are presently making a feature documentary film about Tibetan Art with His Holiness the Karmapa.

Terris is the executive director of Liberation Arts, a non profit organization using art to create, preserve, and educate about culture, the arts and environment.

HH Karmapa is the spiritual adviser of the organization.

Produced & Directed by David Hargreaves, who wrote: “In 1980 David Hargreaves hitch-hiked the Hippy Trail from Britain to India. At the Austria/Yugoslav border he came across three British Pakistanis from east London driving Transit vans to Pakistan. Glad to have a white face on board through the communist badlands of eastern Europe, they gave him a ride all the way to Istanbul. About six weeks later at the Iran/Pakistan border he ran into three more British Pakistanis, this time from Blackburn, also piloting Transit vans. He drove with them through the Baluch desert up to Quetta. By now he had become well acquainted with the practice of “Transit-to-Pakistan”, and had learnt that it was quite widespread amongst the British Pakistani community.

Twelve years later, by this time a film producer and director, David decided that the phenomenon could easily form the subject of an intriguing documentary. He spent an afternoon wandering the streets of east London, and finally managed to track down Selim, one of the original drivers he had travelled with, who confirmed that British Pakistanis were still making this trip. After speaking to local papers in towns with substantial Pakistani populations and encouraging them to write about his film plans, he was contacted by various characters who were thinking of doing the journey. He liked Fazal from Bradford the best and they agreed to co-operate. David hired a cameraman. The two film-makers then travelled with the group of drivers in the three Transit vans, not in a separate vehicle. The journey was in every respect a shared experience. “

Samsara is time devouring. Everyone is busy and has obligations. It was difficult to find the time and a conducive place to interview Tabla Paul and Kailash Ray for the Flower Raj and for posterity.

Samsara is time devouring. Everyone is busy and has obligations. It was difficult to find the time and a conducive place to interview Tabla Paul and Kailash Ray for The Flower Raj and for posterity.  The perfect circumstances for them to tell the stories of how they became musicians in the North Indian Classical tradition manifested in July 2011 in Phuket, Thailand.

I interviewed them with the small hand held Flip HD Camcorder. The voice behind the camera is mine, a long time friend of all involved.

The video has three sections.  Part I was Tabla Paul’s account of how he became a student of North Indian Classical music, who his teachers were and where he studied.

Part II (this video) is be Kailash Ray’s story of how he came to the sarod  (a lifetime love affair), who his teachers were and where he studied.

Part III will consist of repartee between Tabla Paul and Kailash Ray evoked by the ‘audience’  member Sitar Andy, who was there at the beginning [the 1960s] as well.

Paul was still recovering form a serious thumb injury and Kailash Ray’s sarod was in need of repair at the time of the interview. Hopefully, a video of them playing together as well as more stories will be forthcoming. (by Arthur Mandelbaum 2011).

INTERVIEW LINKS:

Pandit Ravi Shankar A clip from “The Mahabharata” (1989). Directed by Peter Brook, adapted from his groundbreaking stage plays.” Raag Malkauns played by Pandit Ravi Shankar is the music in this clip, wonderful.

Pandit Ravi Shankar web site, still going strong.

Pandit Ravi Shankar Wikipedia entry.

Bhatkhande Music Institute University where Kailash Ray studied for Rupees 7 per month fees!

Ustad Ilyas Khan musical lineage described.

Kanailal and Brother, Calcutta “The History of an Indian Musical Instrument Maker”. Article by Steven Landsberg in Asian Art.

Alan Meller & Rosario Concha are the first ever Chileans to study at Indian Universities at post-graduate level; Rosario recently completed her Masters in Sociology at Jawarhalal Nehru University, Delhi, while Alan is still working on a Ph D at Delhi University, comparing  modern Indian & Spanish Literature.

They are not your ordinary University students! It took them years, applying from Santiago, to be accepted at these prestigious Indian Universities.

I was fortunate to meet Alan & Rosario in Vashisht Village, a place they visit regularly, taking the long winding road up into the Himalayas from Delhi.

Alan Meller wrote: “Maybe I would include two references about this video.  One is that we worked  (production, camera, sound and editing)  with the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication (New Delhi) and the other, that the two poems written in Hindi (the one in the temple and the one given in paper in Jama Masjid) were translated by two teachers from Delhi University”.

(poems/video copyright Alan Meller & Rosario Concha 2011).

(music from the film Delhi-6 copyright Tseries Music ).

LINKS:

Jama Masjid (Wikipedia) “The Masjid-i Jahān-Numā (the ‘World-reflecting Mosque’), commonly known as the Jama Masjid of Delhi, is the principal mosque of Old Delhi in India. Commissioned by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, and completed in the year 1628 AD, it is the largest and best-known mosque in India. It lies at the origin of a very busy central street of Old Delhi, the Chawri Bazar Road.

Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communication New Delhi “Started in 2003, the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communication (SACAC) is an autonomous non-profit institution for creative learning in arts and communication. We are a unit of Sri Aurobindo Society, Puducherry”.

Delhi University (Wikipedia) “is a central university situated in Delhi, India and is funded by Government of India. Established in 1922, it offers courses at the undergraduate and post-graduate level”.

Jawarhalal Nehru University (Wikipedia) “also known as JNU, is located in New Delhi, the capital of India. It is mainly a research oriented postgraduate University”.

Samsara is time devouring. Everyone is busy and has obligations. It was difficult to find the time and a conducive place to interview Tabla Paul and Kailash Ray for The Flower Raj and for posterity.  The perfect circumstances for them to tell the stories of how they became musicians in the North Indian Classical tradition manifested in July 2011 in Phuket, Thailand.

I interviewed them with the small hand held Flip HD Camcorder. The voice behind the camera is mine, a long time friend of all involved.

The video has three sections. Part I (this video)  is Tabla Paul’s account of how he became a student of North Indian Classical music, who his teachers were and where he studied.

Part II will be Kailash Ray’s story of how he came to the sarod  (a lifetime love affair), who his teachers were and where he studied.

Part III consists of repartee between Tabla Paul and Kailash Ray evoked by the ‘audience’  member Sitar Andy, who was there at the beginning [the 1960s] as well.

Paul was still recovering form a serious thumb injury and Kailash Ray’s sarod was in need of repair at the time of the interview. Hopefully, a video of them playing together as well as more stories will be forthcoming. ( by Arthur Mandelbaum 2011).

INTERVIEW  LINKS:

Tabla Paul Leake playing with Michael Bocian (audio with images).

The Flower Raj Original Music Sampler listen to Tabla Paul & other original music tracks (audio playlist).

Tara Bir Singh – “Nepal Sitar” (Amazon USA).

The Mind’s Ear, Larry Porter Tabla Trio (Paul Leake on tabla).

Uday Shankar Wikipedia.

Pandit Kamalesh Maitra (Culturebase).

Pandit Kamalesh Maitra (Amazon CD).

Mahapurush Mishra (Questz – Artist)

Mahapurush Mishra (Magic of Juju)

Pandit Jnan Prakash Ghosh (Wikipedia).

Ustad Keramat Khan (sadly no links found).

Ballygunge (Wikipedia).

Dans le creux de cette vallée, il n’est pas bien difficile de quitter les grands centres de tourisme comme Manali, , un petit chef-lieu au climat tempéré. Il attire de nos jours des millions de touristes indiens pendant les vacances scolaires du pays, en mai et juin, ainsi que pas mal d’étrangers. Mais le dépaysement n’est jamais très loin : il suffit de faire de courtes randonnées sur les chemins pédestres traversant des forêts magnifiques pour se retrouver au cœur d’une tradition millénaire caractérisée par une population au langage particulier. Nous sommes, en effet, au milieu d’un croisement d’ethnies : indo-aryennes, aryennes et mongoloïdes. Ces derniers sont descendus au cours des siècles des hauts plateaux himalayens, limitrophes de la vallée par le nord, l’ancienne partie ouest du Tibet.

Donc, après une courte marche (mais disons, tout de même, plus ou moins longue !), nous arrivons dans un de ces petits villages de montagne. Nous y trouvons des gens qui partagent leur temps entre le soin de leurs cultures, la garde du bétail et leurs activités sociales et religieuses au caractère unique.

D’abord, c’est l’originalité de leurs habitations qui saute aux yeux dès le premier coup d’oeil : des constructions de bois et de pierres. Deux ou trois rangées de granit mal taillé sont recouvertes d’une poutre de bois et le mur s’élève de cette manière jusqu’au toit qui sera recouvert de lauzes ou de planchettes superposées. La construction est à trois étages. Le rez de chaussée est réservé aux vaches, vénérées dans ce pays (seul le lait peut être consommé, et non la viande). Le deuxième niveau constitue l’habitation proprement dite. Il est entouré d’une véranda sur laquelle la famille prend plaisir à profiter du soleil, surtout pendant les mois d’hiver. Enfin le troisième niveau est un grenier. Naguère, cette pièce servait à cuisiner, en été, quand il n’y avait dans les maisons que des foyers ouverts. La fumée pouvait s’échapper par le toit à une époque de l’année où il n’était plus nécessaire de se chauffer. De nos jours, les habitants ont compris l’intérêt du « tandoor », ce petit réchaud en fer que l’on remplit de bois, et dont la fumée s’échappe vers le toit par un tuyau. Par contre cet étage abrite toujours les divinités personnelles de la famille dans des représentations fondues dans le fer en autant d’emblèmes de chaînes ou de sabres transmis de générations en générations et ainsi conservées à l’abri de toute souillure dans un pan de mur de la partie haute de la maison.  Il n’y a pas que l ‘esprit des dieux de famille qui occupent le pan des murs du grenier. Certains propriétaires ont trouvé le moyen de joindre l’utile à l’agréable. Des niches pratiquées dans le mur abritent des ruches. Elles sont closes, à l’intérieur, par des planches recouvertes de bouse de vache et ouvertes en octobre pour en récolter le miel.

Quand ils ne travaillent pas dans les champs ou s’ils ne prennent pas le soleil dans leur véranda, les habitants de la vallée se retrouvent surtout sur la place du village. C’est l’endroit public préféré des villageois. Cet endroit est entouré de temples hindous. C’est là que l’on vénère le saint protecteur de la communauté. Quand on dit « LE SAINT PROTECTEUR », il faut entendre une multitude de divinités mi-autochtones et mi-hindoues mélangées dans un harmonieux syncrétisme1 et implorées selon la nécessité du moment. La tradition rapporte que 350 divinités habitent la vallée : ce sont, soit des « Rishis » ou grands sages dont l’esprit règne sur le lieu depuis des temps immémoriaux, soit des divinités féminines qui assurent à leurs disciples protection, fécondité et en général, bien-être, soit des dieux issus du panthéon propre a l’Hinduisme .

Ces dieux sont représentés en idoles dans des temples en bois magnifiquement sculptés ou en effigies que les villageois promènent sur un palanquin lorsque l’esprit a besoin de sortir. C’est un temps fort pour la communauté : quatre porteurs dans leurs plus beaux habits sont coiffés du chapeau traditionnel de la vallée. Précédé par le chamane, portent l,habit du berger, et l’orchestre du temple, constitué de différents tambours et trompes , le dieu est suivi par une grande partie du village.

Le dieu, « l’âme du village » ou encore « l’Esprit », peut se rendre soit vers un lac de grande altitude afin de se purifier, soit vers un autre village afin d’y rencontrer d’autres divinités ou encore dans la maison d’un particulier qui célébrera sa venue par une grande fête dans la cour de sa demeure. Cependant, la promenade n’est pas de tout repos ! Parfois, pendant une de ces sorties, la divinité emballe son palanquin ; ses porteurs penchent à droite, à gauche, jurent qu’ils n’y sont pour rien et que c’est seulement l’esprit qui parle. Tout ce remue-ménage se déroule au son d’une musique assourdissante de tambours dont le rythme monte et descend alternativement pour exprimer l’humeur du divin, une humeur tantôt joyeuse, tantôt mécontente de l’attitude de ses croyants mais qui peut aussi avertir d’un danger comme l’inondation, la sécheresse ou l’incendie. Soudain, toujours précédant le cortège, le chamane entre en transe : la tête tourne, les yeux se perdent derrière les paupières, ses mouvements deviennent incontrôlables. Il se met à sauter sur place. Puis, dans une voix sortie d’ailleurs, il transmet aux villageois la volonté de l’esprit. C’est au cours de ces « processions » que l’on peut admirer toute la tradition des vallées. Si, de nos jours, les tenues vestimentaires ont beaucoup changé, on rencontre encore des villageois habillés de leurs habits de laine, tissés « maison », pantalon, veste et coiffés du chapeau traditionnel. Cette tenue est portée été comme hiver, à l’instar de celle des bergers qu’ils furent autrefois avant de se mettre à travailler la terre plus sérieusement. Les villageoises, quant à elles, sont plus traditionnelles et nombreuses à porter le « patou » : une simple couverture adaptée aux travaux de la ferme. Mais ce vêtement peut être aussi une parure de gala : certains patous sont merveilleusement tissés de motifs et les femmes les revêtent lors des cérémonies et des jours de fête ; elles s’en entourent le corps. La taille est ceinturée d’une bande de tissu. Le vêtement est maintenu aux épaules par deux aiguilles d’argent fixées à une chaîne. Ce dispositif leur permet non seulement d’ajuster le patou selon le confort voulu mais aussi de libérer un espace dans le dos afin d’y « accrocher » le dernier-né pour la promenade

Enfin, c’est le retour : on redescend comme on est monté, mais quand on retrouve la ville, quelle déception ! Tout est différent. On a vraiment l’impression que la machine à remonter le temps n’est qu’à quelques kilomètres, là où nous avons trouvé une communion entre la nature, la dévotion et une organisation sociale parfaitement rodée. Les scènes festives de ces villages sont tellement vivantes et colorées qu’on se croirait plongé dans un film sans réalisateur. Ce qui reste en mémoire, c’est surtout la musique de cet « orchestre divin » qui animait la ferveur de la foule et dont les percussions provoquaient inévitablement des frissons chez tous les participants. Etait-ce la mise en scène ou le souffle divin qui nous a mis dans un tel état …

On a en tout cas le sentiment d’avoir touché l’intemporel ; c’est d’ailleurs une sensation fréquente pour qui se promène dans la vaste mosaïque de l’Inde ! Mais Manali nous ramène vite à la réalité ! La route pour y redescendre fait froid dans le dos, mais ce n’est plus le même frisson…

(écrit par Maharaj).

The three of us had been trekking for 6 days from the Chinese road where we had been hauled in a elaborately painted truck featuring mostly strangely endowed women in what might pass for 1930′s bathing suits surrounded by lotuses and dhorjis. On the trail we were not roughing it, in addition to seven Sherpa porters, a cook and a guide, Nema Chorta, who spoke a sort of English and who assured us daily that, “we are not afraid”.

What that said for his past experience we never found out and never will because he died in all too common bus accident some 20 years later in 1988. Meanwhile back on the trail my two companions were of the opinion that I should leave the Mane stone where it was. Now a little background, I was at that time, among other things a collector-dealer in various kinds of antiquities that struck my artistic fancy. I had been doing this whenever my roamings had brought me into contact with the unique beauties of the world since the late forties and this did not always mean antiquities. We had passed these particular Mane stones by the thousands at every dangerous pass or bridge or wind-swept summit. They were etched with Sanskrit calligraphy with the Buddhist prayer, Om Mane Padme Hum. Of all sizes, shapes, composition and character. Struck by their strange and rustic beauty,I wanted one quite early in the expedition and would often lag behind examining them for the one I would have. I must have seen thousands of them by the time we reached Jumbesi, an ancient stone village perched on many terraces going steeply down to the Dud Khosi river and it was there I saw it. Perched on a shelf in back of the Ghomba, the temple, it was exposed to the elements as were the piles of carvings in schist and granite for who knows how many years. It was granite and pear shaped and had the Highly prized Lenza Calligraphy coiled like a snake around it. The figures were as beautifully and carefully carved as if it was done by ancient Egyptians. It was about 4 feet high and weighed around 160 pounds. I calculated how many porters, at 75cents a day, it would take to get it back to Katmandu. Easy-peasy!

When we had assembled our camp on the wind-swept terrace close to the Ghomba, I approached Nema for his advice on how to get the Mane stone back to Katmandu on our way home.

-There are too many Mane stones on the way we are going Sahib, forget this one it is much trouble to get this one. I will get you another one.-
-Nema, I want this one, I have seen many along the way and this one I will have-
-Okay, I will ask the lama what we can do-
-The roof tiles on the Ghomba are very worn and I could pay to have them covered with gold again so they would be beautiful once more.-
-Yes, sahib, I will talk to the lama.-

In the morning, Nema Chorta took me aside and told me that the  lama had said if I would pay a Thangka painter to repaint the big dragon-filled painting at the entrance to the Ghomba as well as putting new gold leaf on the roof, that I could take it. At this point in our conversation, Nema hesitated. He continued.

-All the people have to agree to let it go. We will only know when we return. Not to worry, we will find another at my home.-
-Why would they care, there are dozens in the pile behind the Ghomba.-
-Sahib, these people are country people, they are superstitious.-

So we packed up all our gear, the porters helped one another to load the big wicker baskets full of food and supplies, that served as packs with the final adjustment of the strap that went across the forehead. I often looked at these wonderful cheerful Sherpa people and thought that I would actually prefer to be in a jail cell than to be a free man and get up in the dark freezing morning, eat a few handfuls of last night’s cold rice and step out barefoot onto the steep trail lugging about 80 pounds, day after day. It seemed to me that something had prepared them for whatever might come and they never developed the propensity to complain or even to judge what is better or worse. As for the three sahibs, we were all in quite good condition and all we carried were small field packs with a good number of tangerines, some chocolate bars and maybe a camera. Still it took us about 5 hours to catch up to our train since Nema prepared our breakfast after the porters left, of rice with some greens, cups of tea with 2 or 3 tablespoons of sugar and a few potatoes spiced with fiery chili. Off we went, every day a wonderful crisp November morning with clear skies and the most breathtaking mountains all around us. When we reached one of the many passes I would scout out the Mane stones and though there were many, none were anywhere near as special as “my mane stone”. Standing on a vantage point, Nema would point out the far away ridge that was the grayest of the layers of ridges  that changed from green to blue to violet to gray like cardboard cutouts one behind the other. Then he made his morning pronouncement. -We are not afraid!-

One of the things Nema meant was the weather was something to be afraid of here in the Himalayan winter and we had been lucky. Sunny days every day all of November and December. Our luck held even though I had thrown some bones into the fire. Very bad! It surely makes rain or snow. We are not afraid.

By the time we reached the Khumbu valley in the shade of Chomolungma I had had it with looking for Mane stones. I got Nema aside and said to him;

-Send one of the porters back to Jumbesi and tell the lama that when we come back thru there in a couple of weeks that I will do what he wants and to tell the people of the valley that I am a good Buddhist and want the stone to mark my ashes in San Francisco.-

Two weeks later we arrived back to Jumbesi and before we climbed that last long grade to the ghomba, There was the lama and two other monks coming towards us. He soon told me that all was in order and I could leave with the stone tomorrow morning when there would be a pujha ceremony to send the stone off.

We went around to the back of the temple and there stood “my mane stone” standing on its shelf amongst the many others. Nema came around with Big Stoop, as we called him, the biggest and strongest of the porters, a Tibetan and not the smartest, and one other  strong Sherpa. They had with them, three woven mats which they positioned under the shelf and behind the stone. Some clouds had come up and a stiff little breeze had come upon us. Nema looked worriedly at the sky and urged the men to hurry. They clasped their arms around the stone to inch it forward onto the mats but no amount of huffing could even budge it. Nema conferred with the lama and in a little while four more men arrived with ropes, mats, poles and big baskets and of course every child in the village with there green snotty noses. They looped ropes about the object and prepared to tumble it into the baskets while Big Stoop helped by bodily pulling it. I couldn’t believe my  eyes when I saw all this manpower unable to budge this just average sized stone. They pulled and they grunted and at last started to tip forward, but unfortunately one lasso slipped off the top and the stone banged back into place where the Tibetan’s arm was. He let out a howl and pulled it away with a significant amount of skin abraded away and dripping blood. When I had digested this drawback to my affairs, I realized that not only had it started to snow but that all of Jumbesi was in attendance. Nema suggested that perhaps we could leave the Mane stone for another day. Or year. I felt that I was the captain of this particular ship and this was approaching mutiny. I controlled my frustration and said we will try once more. And so we did but not without mishap for this time it did not fall directly into the basket without glancing off the ankle of one of the helpers from the village. He hopped and grunted bravely and was helped away, but there was a rising murmur from the onlookers. I said;

-Let’s get this out of here before they change their minds-
-Perhaps we should leave this for now.-
- Get five of our porters here and tie the stone to the poles and bring them to our tents.-

As I looked to our tents and porters coming down the short trail it became quite apparent that a snow storm was in progress, that I hadn’t noticed in the excitement.

The porters and Nema arranged the ropes and poles to sling the weight amongst four porters and commenced to heave. And heave they did, but nothing moved and I was sure they were doing this to me on purpose for there Wily Oriental reasons. And there was only ten yards to our camp. Then they mutinied. Nema said they were only ignorant farm people and refused to move it because it didn’t want to go. Then I blew it.

-OK Nema you grab those two poles and I’ll take these and we will move it in stages to the tents.-

Reluctantly, Nema took his burden and I took mine, walking backwards. It was heavy but not that heavy. At the second stage I tripped and fell backwards while Nema with his forward momentum flung the Mane stone at my head. I went unconscious only to come to with blood in my eyes and loud shots coming one after another. I cleared my eyes to see and what I saw was quite unexpected. A furious wind had come up and yanked the pegs out of the tent’s rain shield and was snapping them in the wind with explosive violence while horizontally driving snow almost obliterated the scene of the men of Jumbesi reclaiming their ropes and baskets. Nema said;

-Maybe Sahib we should not take the stone right now.-
-Maybe not.-

My head hurt and I felt more than a little foolish, but next morning I felt alright and the sun was shining and the wind had died and Nema was at the tent flap with a big cup of sweet tea. Nema said we must go to Pujha and I wanted to.
As we walked yesterdays bloody pathway there was no Mane stone nor any sign. Did I imagine it. I certainly didn’t have an imaginary bandage above my eye. I walked around the back of the Ghomba but no Mane stone there.

We entered the Ghomba and when our eyes got used to the dark we could see that my Mane stone had been moved to a position of honor in the lap of the big golden Buddha and was surrounded by dozens of burning butter lamps while clouds of incense came from many bundles of smoking sticks. Ranged along one side were high ranking lamas from neighboring monasteries and along the other wall seen in semi darkness and smoke were the Tibetan  musicians producing enormous sounds from instruments from hell. Trumpets from the thigh bones of monks, Large marine conchs with gold trimming and copper and brass horns 12 feet long. At times they sounded like the New York subway with all the locals and expresses coming at once This music would sound exotic and spiritual for ten minutes but for several hours it certainly did something to your head not to mention the pain in the legs and back from my constantly shifting half lotus position. It suddenly without warning stopped and I felt myself expanding in every direction. I don’t know how to describe this expansion as it included some kind of expansion of my mind. Was it only my mind? All I know is my eyes could only open to slits and the bones of my face seemed to open out. To expand! The Jumbesi lama came to me and helped me arise as my legs were sleeping. When I stood, he stood in front of me and we touched foreheads. Then he took me to the high lama and we touched heads, and down the line to the lowest lama. This was not a serious and pompous ceremony, it was accomplished with some giggling and shy responses. Believe me, when I went outside I was really stoned, elated and more than a little dizzy, but ready to go. Nema said with that special Eastern wobble of the head;
-We are not afraid-

It’s amazing how quickly the weather can change in the Himalayas; at 2:00pm it was a beautifully sunny summer’s day.

At 2:30pm storm clouds gathered, the wind lifted & suddenly, without warning, it began to hail. At first the hailstones were small, but within a few minutes they had become, some of them, as large as golf balls.

The Vashisht apple  crop, the villager’s main cash crop, already damaged by frost earlier in the year, was almost obliterated.

This is the first post to show full HD video from our new video hosting provider Videopress.

This is a big poem full of tourists  & cameras set on tripods,
this is a poem seen from bamboo scaffolding of the Golden Temple’
a poem with one hand reaching up out of the earth counting on a rosary—
This is a poem of lost children looking for money.
a poem trying to hold a split bag of rice in a moving crowd,
this is a poem burning like charas in the pipe of a friend,
a poem of Shivaratri carried on staggering legs to see the king,
this is a poem striving towards the light sparked from the heart of Basudeb,
this is a poem which wants to tie itself around your neck like the skinny legs of The Man of the Sea—
this is a poem interrupted by elephantiasis,
this is a poem leaning against a temple wall drawing energy from the sun,
this is a poem smiling with no nose,
a poem reluctant to sing,
a trident of a poem aimed at your pineal,
this is a poem of pilgrimage,
an offering of struck bells to a dead dog in the river—
This is a poem looking down on pagodas,
this is a poem waiting for opium.
this is a poem of suicided sadhus
surrounded by trees in a foreign land,
anonymous as the voice on the loudspeaker,
this is an anonymous poem covered with birds….

(george farrow scanned the poem & wrote: “108 copies of this poem were published by Ira on hand made Nepali rice paper. I still have two copies given to me by Ira at that time”).

BMT & Company - Anjuna '73

Extract from a work in progress “ORIGINALLY…” .

GOA

“I know it sounds a bit bizarre,
But for one brief Shining moment
That’s how conditions were”.
(apologies to Camelot)

Swarming is a natural state in organisms, be they bees or people.  We all recognise the motivation of a Memorial Day march, the football crowd, the Mardi Gras Parade or the gatherers at a Khumba Mela.
By the time the nineteen-seventies were under way, we baby boomers thought we had invented swarming.  We kept getting away with the most outrageous stunts, like swarming through the streets to oppose a war that our elders had initiated.
I was working in New York City, but the East was still calling… there had to be more to life than this. All winter I went down the elevator, into the subway, up the elevator and into the office in the morning, and reversed the procedure in the afternoon.  Sure, I had seen the Stones at Madison Square Gardens, watched transfixed like the proverbial spot-lit rabbit at television broadcasts of the Watergate conspiracy (on every channel, all day!).  A journey down to Maryland had resulted in a memorable 4th of July Beach Boy’s concert at the Washington Monument. I had hung out at McSorley’s Pub on the Lower East Side after seeing Jacques Brel’s show, drinking mugs of dark beer and munching on raw onions and crackers while the potbellied stove pumped more dust into the massive cobwebs overhead. The input seemed intense, even for a young Aussie. My plan was to go back to India.  I kept hearing stories on the grapevine about some bloke who was called “Eight-Finger Eddie”, living in a place called Anjuna Beach in Goa.
One of the best things about travelling is that you can stop. I knew a mad German called Theodore in Portuguese East Timor, who had arrived from Kupang in 1970 in a leaky Zodiac accompanied by a one-eyed sea eagle with a brass neck-ring.  He stopped.  The concerned local cops took away his spark plug.  I didn’t tell him about brave Captain Bligh’s whaleboat journey through the Pacific to Timor.  The German lived for a couple of years in an old gun emplacement bunker on the beach at Dili harbour, using the sea-eagle to catch his dinner.  He used to rent out floor space in the bunker to backpackers; I know, because I stayed there.  The cost was thirty cents on entry; it didn’t matter how long anyone stayed.
I planned on stopping in India.  The West had become overwhelming and many of us knew enough of the East to remain unintimidated.  One vital requisite was a robust constitution.  An interesting collection of like-minded people from all over the world ended up in the same place at the same time while trying to get away from all the other people.  Swarming amongst human beings is a funny thing.  I imagine the scene on the goldfields during the rush was similar.
After a circuitous route through Egypt and East Africa, picking up unwritten introductions, information and some sense of traveller’s credibility after all that time working in N.Y. Fat City, we hit Bombay.

Dipti's House of Pure Juice.

At this time the cost of living was much as it would have been in Paris in the ‘thirties’.  It was the sunset of the Raj and some people lived semi-permanently in second-class colonial hotels with afternoon silver tea service delivered by what seemed to be a butler.  Here I saw the last of the old colonial remittance men (all straight out of Kipling) rubbing shoulders with the first of the hippie Raj (all scripted from Mitchener’s Caravans).

Boat from Bombay to Goa.

There was a small, curiously familiar colonial coastal steamer down to the enclave of Goa.  We entered Port Panjim and encountered a coastal strip of riverlands where the food was good and the old ramshackle Portuguese 17th century housing was cheap, especially in a land where it would not rain for another six months.

Mapusa Market '70s

Around the campfire - Anjuna 1973

Eight-Finger Eddy did exist.  I was told the missing two fingers provided his pension.  He had gathered a group around him who met at night to eat from the enormous pots of rice and vegetable subji in the surrealistic ruins of the porch that was all that remained of a mansion.  There was always food.  Those who could afford it rented the whitewashed houses along the palm-scattered beachfront.  Those who could not, built huts from woven palm leaves.
A community developed that was not based on any sect, but rather on a mutual unspoken decision to encourage harmony.  We all knew that it could not last.  Surprisingly, the core of that community did exist for some years.  It was inspiring to return after what seemed a lifetime away on some other adventure and find the spirit still living amongst those most transient of peoples.

Anjuna Beach Bums 1973

One of the major factors in the Goan experience was the democracy.  It was a subtle socialism, so many people lived in a scattered village of a few square kilometres.  No one owned property; they were tenants under a benign system where $35 a month paid the rent and some help from the Goan family, who continued to live in the rear rooms of the house.  The floors were sealed with dried cowshit mud, the pigs ate the refuse, no-one had electricity, but everyone was cool.

Mama de Mello's pig.

As I said, these were a curious bunch of travellers.  A number of the  Americans were like Sadhu J., still probably officially a draft-dodger in America.   Sadhu J. had been in India so long he lived on a few rupees a day and ritually never slept twice in the same place.  I doubt if he ever went home.  In the group were Algerians and Argentinians, people from California and both Carnarvon’s and all three Aberdeen’s.  Many of the couples were cross-cultural marriages; misfits in both societies.
Rapidly an almost medieval image developed.  Exhibiting perfect post-harvest behaviour, people seemed to reach back to comfortable memories of a common past where to spend a morning flirting with a pretty girl at the local well while drawing the day’s water was a fine and honest thing to do.

Franny and Freddie.

“It is a dance we do in silence, far beyond this morning’s sun
You in your life, me in mine, we have begun.

Here we stand and without speaking draw the water from the well
And stare beyond the fields to where the mountains stand so still.

And it’s a long way that I have come, across the sand,
To find this peace amongst your people in the sun,
Where the families work the land, as they have always done,
Well, it’s so far the other way my country’s gone.”

“Lady of the Well”, by Jackson Browne,  sung often on Anjuna Beach in the early 1970s by Franny & Freddie.  (I still have their cassette tape, recorded in Bombay).

At evening the fires spotted through the glades illuminating the small white houses, made a view evocative of timeless rural Europe.  At Christmas the candlelit Catholic, Portuguese, Christian altars at every crossroads seemed to compound the view.

Portugese House - Anjuna c1974

The communal meal at Eddys’ Porch was a focus, even for those who cooked in their own homes.  Afterwards there was music with guitars, drums and an open fire, with stories told late into the night, and more music.
That is not to say that everything was peachy.  There were intrigues and infidelities, disappointments and mundanities; hygiene was questionable, and yet healthy children were born.  So long as most were fed and housed there was a dogged obsession with continuing the experiment.  Of course everyone knew that it couldn’t last, but so long as it did no-one wanted to upset the balance.  Surprising changes occurred in people.  A quiet dormouse became quietly confident as her role developed within the community.  Strangers began to trust, opening up to talk about what really mattered to them.

At the time I copied Aldous Huxley’s words from ‘Island’ into my journal….

“No Alcatrazes here.”  She said.  “No Billy Grahams or Mao Tse-tungs, or Madonnas of Fatima.  No hells on Earth and no Christian Pie In the Sky,  no Communist pie in the twenty-second century.  Just men and women and their children trying to make the best of the here and now,  instead of living somewhere else as you people mostly do,  in some other  time,  in some other home-made imaginary universe.  And it really isn’t your fault.  You’re compelled to live that way because the present is so frustrating.  And it’s frustrating because you’ve never been taught to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year’s resolutions and your actual behaviour”.

“For the good that I would” he quoted, “I do not, And the evil that I would not, that I do.” ”

Freak Family - Goa 1974

It didn’t last.  Time has a way of moving on.  The moneyed drifters started to arrive, and then the electricity was connected to the beach.  In came new swarms; the gays, then the jet-set, the dealers and the drug money.
At breakfast one morning I saw Allejandro, our two-metre Spanish version of Hanuman the Indian Monkey God, wearing half a kilo of silver wire wrapped around each bicep.  He was arguing with a fierce gang of new arrivals, tough Geordies from Newcastle in the U.K.  One of them suddenly pulled a gun.  I was close enough to see the pearl handle.  Allejandro simply stood there with his hands on his hips and mocking eyes.  The gun misfired. Allejandro laughed, spat at the English boy’s feet and walked away chuckling.  He knew how lucky he had been.
I knew something too.  It was time to move on.  Materialism was replacing the magic.

The self-elected  “Mayor” of the community published his declaration…

Bombay Brian - 1977

November, 1977
Goa
Theme:
Goodbye paradise,
Hello Coney Island,
Enter the Dragon.

AN OPEN LETTER TO EVERYONE

Due to the general, steady trend of degeneration in the quality of personalities as well as the overall environment over the last 3 years, I Bombay Brian do declare the Hippy Raj is  DEAD !
Anybody, who should happen to think or say that the “Goa Scene” is anything but a “Amateur Nightmare Hot Bed Lunatic Asylum” are themselves Bogus and really don’t know any better, don’t count and deserve what they get or ask for…….!
Any scene, that is run by untalented, unenlightened “3rd rate goons” is not worth its while and should be avoided by the wise….!
Anybody, that thinks or even hopes that “New Faces” will produce a Renaissance of new or different tricks and attractions are mistaken… The “good old days” are gone and will not return. Everyone is “chasing” or trying to duplicate 1974, which is impossible, especially under the present conditions.
Anyone, who tolerates this “jive nonsense” that prevails in Goa is a Loser….!
Many of these “goons” believe that the only problems in Goa are:
1) More and new electronic equipment and gadgets are required.
2) A “New Location” for the Garbage Bazar (Flea Market) is needed.

I personally can assure you that when Goa was the “ Highest and Hippiest” scene in the world, that neither of these two nefarious activities were present or active.
Some morons call this “Progress” but in actuality, it is Destruction…..! That is, destruction of the “Status Quo”…! And that status quo was what made up the Raj…!
Some people are so uninspired, they don’t like the night, and they can’t see the light of day.

Thank you and Good-Bye,
Bombay Brian Esq.
P.S:-
Who will clean the beach now? Maybe someone will import from Hong Kong an automatic beach cleaner, that will sift through the sand and suck up all that toilet paper, food wrappers, tin cans and old newspapers, etc. that constitute the make-up of Anjuna Beach.
B.B.

I tell the story to illustrate that there ARE shining moments in life and the world and that evil is only part of the equation.  For a while these people had found a refuge when it was needed.  For a place where nothing material had been created, so many people still talk of what they have learnt from the Goa experience.

Blond Peter – still reading at the Well!

Peter Thomas lives in Nambucca Heads, a most beautiful rural part of Australia & works selling rare books & photos when he is not watching whales or dolphins or living a family life.

Photos by Blond Peter

this story is copyright peter thomas 2011.

Dave Tomory wrote:
I asked my friend Constance if I could call her short video Night Music – as in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik – because apart from me, all the people playing in it are German.

I meant it as a sort of tribute. For instance, the house you see us rehearsing in, the house Harry, the harp and acoustic guitar player, and Christine, had been living and playing in for many years, with many different musicians, was music and hospitality central in the part of north Goa that most of us lived in.

Any good things we played emerged from that little world of hospitality. As habitual visitors – serial tourists, if you like – or residents, we’d all been playing in India on and off for years. For decades. Klaus the fiddle player and Skip the drummer had done big gigs together in Mumbai in, I think, the eighties; Harry had been running sessions and playing in Goa forever; likewise Rainer the bassist, enviable owner of The Outhouse, another great place to play.

Myself, I’d been a band player in Dharamsala between 1979 and 1981 (an account of this period, titled The Hills Are Alive, appears in the Penguin India anthology Mountain Stories), and I was familiar, as we all were, with the curious & certainly unique world of rock n’ roll in India in The Old Days.

Now, of course, Indian rock n’ roll burgeons and is highly professional. For me and my colleagues, it was otherwise. To be brief, it was easier in the seventies and eighties to act like a rock n’ roller than to play like one. Rusty secondhand strings, boiled and knotted together, cardboard speakers and combustible amplifiers, megaphones for microphones, guitars by Gibtone… Enough.

Backstage, however, was more like it. You could have as much fun as the Stones, and cheaper, too.

But to return to the video you see before you, filmed in Goa, this century (2008).  Sometimes we ventured out from the music house, when it was dark, and did proper gigs. This one was at Laguna Anjuna, a notable resort at the famous or infamous Anjuna Beach. Constance filmed and recorded the gig that night: and if the work isn’t perfect, well, conditions were difficult, it was tumultuous in there, and her mic was playing up. It sounded much better on the night – as witness the jiving barmen.

Still, the video gives you the general idea. It’s a document. And a word on the song chosen to illustrate that gig: it was chosen for a reason. Not only did the Velvet Underground’s I’m Waiting For The Man have the least bad sound recorded that night, but it may be the only fiddle version of a much-covered song.

And if Anjuna Beach had an anthem, that should be it.

D M Tomory 2009.

Notes & Links:

Laguna Anjuna Hotel.

I’m Waiting for the Man – Wikipedia.

Laguna Anjuna -  ILoveIndia.Com  listing.

I did have the opportunity in 1974 to hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama, when he spoke to a small audience at the TROEPEN MUSEUM in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.  His talk was ecumenical and to me much like a visit with a friend, needless to say, I was very impressed.  A year later after returning to New York City thanks to my friend Loren, I followed his suggestion to take refuge as a Buddhist from a Tibetan lama named Kalu Rinpoche.

This happened in an apartment on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village a neighborhood of Manhattan.  I found myself seated on the floor to receive this meditation practice from Lama Kalu and in front of me sat together Alan Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.  These luminaries were among those bohemians, whom I had wished to emulate to realize my dream of becoming a ‘beatnik’ in New York.  Thus after many years, I find myself reflecting on the realization of that dream, which for me did come true.

After some years of studying at various Tibetan Buddhist centers I had become accepted into the circle of practitioners.  One summer on a trip to the Berkshire Mountains of New England, I was driving in the company of my wonderful friend Helena Hughes, who had invited me to attend the religious teachings at the meditation center of The Dodrup Chen Rinpoche, which is located near Hawley, Massachusetts.   One could admire the expansive lawn with a tent that had been erected for the teachings and the great Stupa shrine that had been constructed by devotees of the Rinpoche (teacher).

Alas that Stupa was later destroyed by fire, when deluded ex-Vietnam commandos, assumed that any foreign Asian types were suspect enough that their beautiful place of worship could be attacked at will by these mercenaries.  In any case, during my visit the Stupa was standing.  Helena had arranged for a personal interview with His Holiness, The Dodrup Chen.  The well-known scholar Tulku Thondrup was also there for the interview.

As I entered the room to sit at the feet of this guru, on my right a voice spoke, she said “I’m not surprised to see you” and there sat Marilyn Silverstone, who had befriended many seekers on the road, while she was living in India with her husband.  I remember well visiting her with Arthur Mandelbaum in New Delhi.  Marilyn was to be my translator for this interview.  As we sat together I realized that after some 15 years both of us had recognized each other without a second look.

Already a bit unnerved, I bowed to His Holiness and then found myself quite at ease in his presence.  Helena spoke and explained that I was scheduled to visit China the following week.   During his subsequent discourse and questions, he revealed several details about embroidered brocade fabric that had traditionally originated in China, where specific designs had been created for the Tibetan Buddhist trade.  Then the weaving of these speciality brocades moved to Varanasi, India, after the Chinese take-over and suppression of Buddhism in Tibet.  Rinpoche asked me, if I had ever seen the like, while on my trade visits to China.  He meant of course the type of brocades we see on valuable Thanka paintings.  I said, no Rinpoche, I have looked at many fabrics there, but never had seen antique or new brocades in the specific symbols of Buddhist iconography.   As the interview came to an end, I hoped to revisit the meditation center again later in the summer, after I returned from my business trip.

The trip to China was quite marvellous, because I was going not only for my own company to import merchandise, but I was acting as trade liaison on behalf of my  American client Steve Aronoff and his wife Anita, who would both accompany me on the trip.  Steve would be purchasing wonderful garments made from the finest Chinese silk with exquisite embroidery and cut work lace designs. Anita Aronoff was a professional singer with the Grand Opera Company of New York City.  She had mentioned to me about her interest in the Chinese musicians and operatic singers, who were practising Western classical music.  The Chinese Ministry of Culture responded to my inquiry in regard to the pending visit of this wonderful artist and they really rolled out the red carpet for her.   She went on to perform two concerts in Shanghai and Beijing by singing beautiful selections from popular operas.   She also gave master classes to students studying classical music.

We were staying at the PEACE HOTEL in Shanghai, which was still open to tourists or foreign business travellers.  The original details of the hotel were intact to some extent revealing the wonders of the JUEGEN STILE of design decoration, which was I believe the predecessor of ART NOUVEAU with accent of the Orient.  In addition to this, one could dine in the rooftop restaurant with fantastic mouldings and shapes done in crimson and gold paint.  Shopping was our diversion, as it always is but don’t let me forget the living members of a traditional jazz band still alive in 1980 who had been playing Dixie land style music in the same hotel probably since the 1920’s, when jazz was hot even in Shanghai.

This being my fourth year of travelling to China, I was acting a bit over the top, playing ‘the old China hand’ to the fullest extent.  While shopping one afternoon with Steve, who certainly knew about fabric, I asked the attendant at the tourist souvenir shop in the hotel lobby, if I could see a piece of material, perhaps one meter that had been rolled up and placed on a shelf behind some other goods.  Something about it had caught my eye, but looking at it I was dumbstruck.  I realized what it was, but when told that it would cost about $100 dollars, I passed on buying it.   This scene repeated at least two more times on subsequent days, there I would be with Steve at my side and asking to look at this fabric.  Finally the last day of our trip, I asked to see it again.  I was aware of a lady hovering by my shoulder, who looked longingly at the brocade as I finally produced the cash to purchase it.  Later, she told me … if I had refused it, she would have bought it immediately.  Her tour had visited several factories where they produced brocade, the commercial type you always see on Chinese stuff, but she assured me there had never been anything remotely like this material.  I knew it was an antique piece of brocade in Tibetan motif, but I just could not wrap my mind around it.  And yet, I knew that I would return with it to America and present it to His Holiness The Dodrup Chen.

So it was that at the end of the summer, as autumn colors had already begun to touch the foliage, I found myself standing on the beautiful grounds of the meditation center.  A ceremony was about to begin.  There across the lawn approached both His Holiness the Dodrup Chen and the scholar Tulku Thondrup.  They paused to speak with me as they made their way to the ceremony.

I unrolled the textile and presented it to the Rinpoche.  He smiled and said through the translation by the scholar, Oh yes, a very nice brocade fabric and see there all the Buddhist iconographic symbols depicted in the design.  He pointed out, the traditional chrysanthemum floral design that had the auspicious number of petals, etc., and accepted the offering, which he then placed on the altar prepared for the ceremony under the tent on the great lawn with the Stupa in the near distance.

You may well ask, what happened?  I submit the obvious it was a fabric no doubt antique and probably looted from a Tibetan temple then sold as a souvenir to a tourist.  But coincidence begs the question; did the Rinpoche have a little fun and see into the future that I might encounter such a fabric?  By describing it during his discourse that had happened a few weeks before did the Rinpoche prepare me to bring the fabric to him as a demonstration of his prescience?  I know what I believe, because it happened to me and you are welcome to your interpretation, too!

Funny how karma seems to ripen, all this time I was travelling for business and visiting whenever possible sites of interest like the Temple of the Jade Buddha in Shanghai and circumambulating the great Stupa in Peihei Park in Beijing.  The Tibetan monks I spoke with about these holy places smiled when I told them it was possible for a tourist to visit.  They explained the buildings might be there but the important scrolls and written sutra teachings most likely would have been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.

Then, in the 1988 I received a call from the office of an American businessman, who with his wife had been among the first to travel to China for business, after the détente initiated by Nixon and Kissinger with Zhou EnLai.  Mr. Julian Sobin of SOBIN CHEMICALS, Boston, MA had asked me to visit his Hong Kong office.

I was pleased to have received the call, because I could thank him in person for the favor years earlier, when his wife had arranged an invitation for my first wife Arleen and me to begin doing business in China directly in 1976.  I could not have been more surprised during the meeting, when he and his son in law explained that they had plans to visit Tibet.  Mr. Sobin knew more about me than I had realized.  He seemed to know that I was a student of Tibetan Buddhism.  In fact, he asked me to initiate a contact between himself and the office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Although, I protested that I was not connected in any way with this office, I did have in the back of my mind a possibility, which I assured him that I would pursue on his behalf.  My friend Arthur Mandelbaum, whom I have previously mentioned knew Robert A.F.Thurman, a tenured Amherst university professor, who is a contact person for the office of His Holiness, whenever he would be in America.  The result of this series of coincidences:  Julian Sobin did have a personal appointment with the Dalai Lama.  I later heard from Mr. Sobin that the visit had gone quite well.  The topics included the possibility that Mr. Sobin would be able to discuss the conditions that he would encounter during his trip to Tibet, not only with his connections in the Chinese government, but with his contemporaries in the American government, too!  So approximately ten years after sitting in a small audience, where the Dalai Lama had spoken informally to a group of interested people, I found myself in the position of furthering his ecumenical message for humanity by opening opportunities of discourse between senior representatives of respective governments.  Well, Tibetan Buddhists do speak about the relationship between the Buddha, the Dharma (Teachings) and the Sangha (those who practice the teachings of the Buddha), as well as Samayas, which are the vows that bind everything together.  May I offer the merit from these life experiences to benefit and further the enlightenment of all sentient beings.

Copyright:  Brice Bowman 2008

LINKS

Dodrup Chen (Rigpawiki)

Kalu Rinpoche (Wikipedia)

Kalu Rinpoche photos (Flower Raj)

Dudjom Rinpoche (Wikipedia)

Dudjom Rinpoche photos (Flower Raj)

Marilyn Silverstone (Wikipedia)

Brice Bowman photos (Flower Raj)

Peace Hotel Shanghai (Wikipedia)

Sam Cutler Vault (similar stories, worth a visit)

Geshe Jamspal at the Sanskrit University 2009 photos  of his return visit.

Geshe Jamspal CV/Bio (PDF view or download).

LINKS FOR GESHE JAMSPAL

Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center

Columbia University Faculty

The Tibet Center

LINKS FOR SANSKRIT UNIVERSITY

University Web Site

Times of India – New SSU-VC Vows to End Corruption (13 Feb 2011)

MSN India News – SSU to probe status of affiliated colleges (14 Feb 2011)

Kei Kataoka – アジア研究情報ゲートウェイ (info on SSU library).

WIKIPEDIA LINKS

Sampurnanand Sanskrit University

Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies (Sarnath, Varanasi, India).

Sarasvati Bhavana Granthamala (Texts from Sārasvati Bhavan library, SSU).

Sarasvati Susama (Sanskrit Research Journal, SSU).

Pandit Baldev Upadhyaya (Director/Professor Emeritus, Research Institute, SSU).

Herbert Güenther (German Buddhist Scholar – Headed SSU Buddhist Dept 58/63).

Destroyed Bamian Buddha

Old Bamian Buddha

The road out of Kabul is the same road leading over the Salang Pass and on to the town of Tashkarghan where it forks left to Mazar i Sharif and Uzbekistan, right to the towns of Faizabad, Kunduz, and up into Tajikistan and China. Traveling north from Kabul and some kilometres before the Salang Pass there is a dirt track leading off west from the village of Pul-i-Matak, it leads to Bamian Valley, up to the Band-i-Mir lakes and Maimana in the region of the Hazarat. This dirt track is strictly for animal caravans and four-wheel drive vehicles; it is the only route stretching across the centre of Afghanistan and only open from April to October. The drive from Pul-i-Matak to Bamian is some 150 kilometres through gorges and valleys and takes several hours to negotiate.

A hotel sits on a hill outside Bamian Village, a simple and welcoming government managed hotel and mainly used by archaeological teams, historians or the rare tourists like ourselves who visited the area. It gave a wonderful direct frontal view of the village on a poplar lined river and on to the 55 metre and 38 metre statues of Buddha, which stood in niches carved from the sheer rock face of the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains that rise behind them. From this position the statues appeared to be holding up the mountain range. These wonderful statues were later destroyed by the religious intolerance of The Taliban. In 2006 a team of archaeologists began examination to view the possibility of re-creation. Rebuilding would be necessary as there is nothing left to restore.

Arriving at Bamian in the evening we checked into the hotel, ate and went to bed.

The following morning, awaking early and after breakfast I decided to walk to the Buddhas and make some exploration of the caves (monks cells) that are carved into the rock walls surrounding the statues. Arriving in front of the largest statue I was met by a Hazara Tribesman who offered to guide me around the cave complex, I accepted and we set off through a series of caves and ancient cells of former monks, until having climbed a steep rock staircase cut deep inside a cliff we emerged onto the top of the head of the Buddha. From here, standing on the head of the Buddha we were facing south into the wild jagged Kohr-i-Baba Range, beyond which to the south lay Kabul. The mountains seemed impenetrable and I commented on this to my guide, he replied that this was true except for the Hajigak Pass, open three summer months. leading from Bamian to Ghazni, and another pass through the Kohr-I-Baba mountains toward Kabul and that this latter pass was a track usable only by walking men and animals. He mentioned a third carved stone statue of a Buddha, known to archaeologists as the Sunburst Buddha, residing in a cave near the entrance to the nearby Kakrak Valley.

Also, from the top of the Buddha where we stood I could also see a hill in the centre of Bamian Valley on which is the ruined town of Shahr-I-Golgola (The City Of Screams,) so named because the grandson of Genghis Khan was killed here in battle and Genghis beheaded the entire population. Other names of some places in Afghanistan reflect a harsh land with a lurid past. Besides Shahr-I-Golgola, (The City Of Screams) there is Dasht-I-Marga ( The Desert Of Death) and the Hindu Kush Mountains ( The Indian Killers) in which I now stood, so named for the countless soldiers, traders and adventurers who have died in them on this part of the Silk Road track to the trading centres at Samarkand and Bokhara.

The Hazarat part of the Hindu Kush Mountains is regarded as not being accessible from the south by motorized vehicles except by the two summer passes. The mountains rise over 23000 feet.

To the east, in the adjoining Pamir Range are mountains over 24000 feet high and known to the nomad transients as The Roof Of The World. North of the Hindu Kush, through Alexander’s Pass and some hundred or so miles north west of Balk, the town of Shibergan is nearby, and where not discovered and unearthed until 1979 were over 20,000 artifacts of gold buried in the graves of Kushan kings. And it was here on this wild frontier one night in 1972 that a Greek American friend known to some of our wandering family – won a gun fight with bandits who were trying to steal his horse.

An example of the obscured history and remoteness of some regions of The Hindu Kush is the 200 foot high Minaret Of Jam. Built in 1194 in the Hazara district of Ghor, it was first only first discovered by the western world in 1866.

Twenty severe passes, each of about ten thousand feet height above sea level on the road from Bamian must be negotiated to reach the minaret.
Nobody knows why at its hundred feet high mark it bears a verse in Arabic celebrating Mary and the Virgin Birth of Jesus, or who were the people buried in a twelfth century Jewish cemetery nearby, or why there are ruins of forts for more than twenty miles around.

After my guide and I descended from the head of the great Buddha and down through the rock staircase to the ground level we came out of the caves and onto the track in front. I told my guide that I would like to visit the smaller of the two standing Buddha’s, so we walked east along the track until arriving in front of the 38 metre statue which rose above us in its’ niche on a steeply angled shale slope.

When I told my guide that I wished to walk up the slope to the statue he replied that this Buddha really did not like being disturbed and had been known on many occasions to throw stones at inquisitive visitors. I told my guide that all I wanted to do was walk up and touch the statue. He told me that I was welcome to try but that he was not going any closer than where we stood. I thought then that he did not want to climb the shale hill.

I started up the slope and got about 50 metres from the statue when I heard a whirring noise. I stopped to listen and was suddenly aware also of a crackling noise like small arms fire and that stones were flying out horizontal from the cliff face surrounding the body of the statue. The sounds I heard were of stone separating from the rock face and whizzing past my head and body. I turned and ran back down the slope with stones of a size from peas to pigeons’ eggs shooting past me like slingshot. The hail of stones stopped as I neared the guide on the track. I interpreted the event as being that my approach to the statue had set up a reverberating vibration, which had bounced off the face of the cliff and loosened stones around the statue. I was surprised when my guide, (a Muslim,) replied that the statue was benign but very powerful and that the people in the valley never disturbed this Buddha. I was forced to recognize his sincerity and also to realize that the stones around me had not been falling down from high above the statue, they were shooting out horizontally. My guide told me that this statue could only be closely approached safely from the side.

Later that day I set out alone to find the cave of the Sunburst Buddha and after some searching in the entrance to the Kakrak Valley I found the cave hidden behind boulders and bushes in a narrow gully leading off a goat track.

This Buddha is in perpetual shaded silent retreat in his shallow cave, The figure and the surrounding sunburst are carved directly out of the caves’ rear wall. The rays of the sunburst stretch floor to ceiling to floor around the statue and it is as if a message of peace is radiated from here to the rest of the world. I made my sincere respects to the people who carved this figure and to their intent that all who would find it can appreciate its’ aura of harmony and calm.

The malignant intolerance and stultifying ignorance of The Taliban is so rabid in character that to have destroyed the Standing Buddhas of Bamian is beyond all intelligent acceptance. The entire history of Buddhism is encapsulated in the atmosphere here, as it was here that Mahayana Buddhist teaching was developed from the tenets of King Ashoka, and from this point that Mahayana Buddhism spread to India and onward to China and the South East Asian world.

The day following my visits to the Buddhas, over curds and kebabs in the village bazaar chai house a local man told me the story of Alis’ Dragon.

Hajrat Ali, the son in law of Mohammed, The Prophet, may peace be on his soul, was said to have fought and bested a dragon, which had been terrorizing the people of the Hazarat. The dragon lay in the hills close to Bamian Valley and still cried with shame for it having been beaten in battle by Ali. The village man explained to me where to find it.

Ali's Dragon - olden days.

Ali's Dragon - 2009

Some kilometers beyond Bamian in the direction of Ghor and Maimana, two red hills that I had been told to look for came into view. Driving off road along a desert defile I came to a valley between the two red hills and found a track running near them. Leaving my Landrover I walked on the track and rounded the hills. Facing me was an ancient frozen narrow strip of volcanic rock flow some 250 metres long that had formed along the spine of a ridge running to the ground from the crest of a hill.. The shape of the lava flow is that of a dragon crawling tail to head down the hill. It is of white and yellow rock along its entire length. I climbed the hill and walked back down slowly along the back of the dragon. This rock formation is truly the most amazing rock formation that I have ever seen.

When the volcanic explosion had taken place, the ground had cracked and an underground stream of water had been released to the earths’ surface. The water had broken through from underground at the same time as the lava flow and resulted in the water cooling the lava, shaping the dragon and splitting open the beast along the length of its’ body. Jets of molten lava were thrown up from the split, caught and cooled by the exploding water, so that water-cooled rock formed huge spines, rising some 1 to 2 metres in the air along the length of the dragons back. Deep inside the split shape were tall vertical rock striations blasted into forms looking like giant organ pipes in the dragons bowels and as ribs in its chest cavity. As the lava and water had flowed down the mountain the lava slowed, expanded and set into the shape of a bulbous head some 10 metres long and 8 metres across. A 2 metre tall single Rhinosceros like horn of volcanic rock rises straight up into the air from the tip of the dragons nose.

In the side of the head I saw a slow drip of water was running to the ground from a fissure shaped as an eye. The dragon really cried: And I am still truly amazed.

My friends on this trip had also spent their time also exploring and walking round the area.

Meeting at the hotel in the afternoon of the second day of our visit we were warned by the management that snow was forecast for the next day and that we were advised to leave at first light, if we did not we could be snowed in for days or possibly months. If the track back to Pul-I-Matak closed we would be stuck. I asked about the pass from Bamian that leads through the Koh-I-Baba mountains toward Kabul and was again told – as my guide of the day before had said – that it was a track for walking persons and animals only.

Later that afternoon we were again warned of snow and that it might come that night. We decided to leave immediately. Knowing that the longest drive in terms of kilometers to be covered would be to Pul-i-Matak then down to Kabul and that we could not reach Pul-i-Matak before dark, we decided to try the Kohr-i-Baba caravan track going south from Bamian. Our reasoning was that we had a Land Rover good for rough terrain and if the track was wide enough for pack camel caravans or donkeys then it would be wide enough for our vehicle. We were assured by the hotel manager that other Land Rovers had been in Bamian Valley before, but also that he knew of no motor vehicle of any kind that had ever tried to drive out by this route.

The pass started as a dirt track at Bamian Valley floor level and about 3 metres wide. Then the track climbed into the mountains and narrowed to become a ledge about 2 meters 50 centimetres wide and running along a cliff face. Soon we were driving along this ledge at about half a kilometre high from the floor of a gorge on the right hand side of the vehicle. It was clear we could not turn round or reverse back down the mountains and if we met anybody coming the other way, then they or we could not pass each other.

It started to snow and dusk set in. We were at a height of about 12,000 feet above sea level and still climbing. The mountain wall was ice covered, the wet cold air was painful to breathe. The Land Rover engine changed tone as it laboured in the thin air. Night fell and we feared sliding into the chasm. To put snow chains on the vehicle two of us had to get out and fasten ourselves to ropes round the wheels while we hung over the abyss and attached chains to the tires on the right hand side. There was not enough space between the left hand side of the vehicle and the cliff face to attach chains on that side. We drove with chains on one side until we came to a place wide enough to open the driver side door and crouch with back against the mountain wall while fastening chains the on the left side wheels of the vehicle.
The drop from the ledge to the gorge floor was so deep that although we knew from hearing torrents of water tumbling down the mountainside that there was a river below us we could not see it. Our flash-lights couldn’t reach down the chasm and there were no other signs of tracks to possible villages below.

We drove along this ledge for a couple of hours, switch-backing up and down along the mountain face, the Landrover so close to the edge that stones moved by the wheels were tumbling into the abyss. We crawled along, all the time realizing the danger we were in and that we could do nothing but continue. The night turned pitch black with nothing to be seen in our headlights except the mountainside and the blowing snow.

Suddenly the ledge we were on stopped dead at the edge of a deep crack crossing our front. Between us, and the continuation of the ledge at the other side of this crack was a gap about 4 metres wide. Spanning this gap were two thick sawn flat logs laid side by side for animals and men to walk across the terrifying deep gorge. The three of us got out of the vehicle and two of us walked across the logs over the chasm and with the aid of flashlights spread the logs apart on our side while at his side of the chasm our friend at the vehicle guided the logs until we had spread them to the width of our vehicles’ wheels. Using the flashlights to illuminate the scene we got the Land Rover up onto the logs and inched it across the gap.

We had started driving along the ledge on the mountain face again when our lights showed that the ledge we had been on had ended and we were ascending and driving along the sheer face of the mountain on a shelf made of a bed of packed dirt, pebbles and stones resting on tree branches spread between crude hewn wooden stakes driven into the cliff face at a 60 degree angle. Only the stakes held everything in place and over the emptiness below. We were fortunate that the dirt surface was not completely frozen over, so we did not slide, our chains and tires gripped the stones and the spread branches. This track hanging on the mountain edge and held up by stakes was several kilometres long and at no time were our outside wheels more than 50 centimetres from the edge of the chasm.

Finally the cliff edge ledge appeared again, after which we started winding downward on a track through the mountains.

About 2AM, after a seven or eight hour drive it had taken to cover some two hundred kilometers we descended into the town of Istalif. Although nobody appeared on the single town street as we drove through, the people who wakened must have been amazed at the sound of a motor vehicle engine coming out of the pass. Lights appeared in houses as we passed.

On exiting the town we could see through a gap in the mountains the glow of the street lights of Kabul below us. We were home within another hour.

It is difficult to imagine now how we were so fortunate as to have crossed this pass safely. I think it probable that at least until that year, 1968, no other men in a motorized vehicle had ever traversed it. If any of the hotel staff we spoke with in Bamian had known what was facing us and told us, then I do not think that we would have tried.

Remembering this adventure even all these years later brings a heady rush of fulfilment. I visited all three Buddhas’ at Bamian, I walked in amazement on Alis’ Dragon, and my friends and I drove an animal caravan track through the Baba Kohr Range of The Hindu Kush Mountains.

It still feels like I just drank a glass or two of heady champagne.

Failing memory caused me recently to investigate Google Earth 5 to determine the name of the pass by which my friends and I left Bamian Valley in November 1968. It has no name, being to the mountain people merely “The way to Istalif”

Those of us who lived in Afghanistan during the 1960s and early ‘70s were fortunate to explore in a land of spectacular beauty and to share in exhilarating adventure.

Thirty years of horrific war and mindless destruction came there after us.

Afghan army soldiers now guard the hill of Shahr-i-Golgola because it is sown with Russian land mines. Bamian Village bazaar was destroyed in the 1990s by fighting for territorial gains between rival warlords. Recently I learned that The Kakrak Buddha was dynamited along with the Standing Buddhas of Bamian.

The spines and rhinoceros like horn have been smashed from Alis’ Dragon

The hidden agenda of the current war since 2002 between the Western Countries and The Taliban is that of the multinational industrial conglomerates continually buying privatized control and exploitation of Afghanistan’s substantial wealth of precious metals, gem stones, minerals and natural gas.

Bamian Valley, a UNESCO Heritage Site, and in spite of the efforts being made to revitalize tourism is targeted as a multi billion dollar industrial development. It is situated on a huge coalfield and the surrounding mountains contain the largest iron deposits in Asia, one of the most valuable in the entire world. The valley is destined for desolation by large-scale coal-mining and iron smelting operations.

Sad,
Neil Rock 2009

Links:

Wikipedia

Buddhas of Bamiyan

Khyber.Org

BENARES McDONALDS

The first corpse of the morning
is a priest
burning on a sandal pyre.

His wristwatch ticks hypnotically
then melts
conjuring the frankincense
three wise men offered Christ.
Forgiving mankind’s sins
mandated crucifixion
so we might opt for freedom
if we dared…
shedding the tax on our flesh
as a serpent leaves skin…
continually becoming what was inconceived
’til then.

At the time
when the veins on the back of the hand
first cast a shadow
the monk goes out
each day to beg.

At the moment
the full-moon
touches the horizon
he shaves his skull
(hair, beard and eyebrows)

At the point
when his thinking
is muddied by his lust
he spends a season
in the charnel field
and lends a hand
at odd cremations.

Ritual consumes belief
that no thing is forbidden.
God’s a corpse.
The abstract only
manifest as fiction.

Sanctified myth
holds the species in thrall
and politics is chosen first
(like poppies)
over freedom.

Vultures spiral heavenward
through clouds of human smoke.
A monk
warms his hands
on the burning cadaver.

Peter Monk 1988

Patnam Beach, Canacona, South Goa

25/05/09 – I mention the phrase The Flower Raj in an email to Dave Tomory who liked it & thereby rescued it from obscurity; Dave allows me to pester him & tells me about Oral History – thanks!

01/06/09 – domain name theflowerraj.org registered with Joker.Com.

13/07/09 – WordPress blog installed, first post, a boring techie Update.

07/08/09 – Arthur Mandelbaum writes: “I think the ‘Flower Raj’ site is a magnificent idea, not only to access the past, but to know what’s happening now and to get a good glimpse of the future.  Since Jasper’s demise is the inspiration for this, I have recalled a partial list of those whose adventures intersected with my travels in India and Nepal and a few I met later.”

And Arthur went on finding names & contacting people & interviewing & rescuing, he has done so much – he is someone without whom this site would be much less than it is. Thanks!

And PeN – who has patiently allowed me to rummage amidst voluminous writings & massive miscellanea  & put up with my short temper & insecurities. Thanks!

Others have written or provided material that I’ve edited & posted on the blog,  Paul Giraud, Smiljan Siska, David Tomory, Marilyn Stablein, Andy Klein & Charlie Martin. Thanks!

Others have written material that is going to be posted on the blog, Neil Rock, David Buschman, Brice Bowman, Richard Tenzin Mueller. Thanks (& ‘real soon now’)!

Some have interacted via Comments (& emails which I then posted as Comments or made into a post like the Post Office Baba discussion post). Ziska & Andrew Somerville & Klaus Schlichtmann & Steve Landsberg, Hetty Maclise & Robert Beer; Torben Huss, Tobias Moss & Steve Abrams,  Paul Guerin & Jay Winogrond, Heidi Spielhagen & Keith Dowman, Brian Bombay & John Moon & Deniz & Geoffrey D; Marianna Rydvald, Deborah Shri Devi & Heather Williams, Gill Farrer-Halls & Kimo Morrison, Constance Rivemale, Eve Neuhaus & Terris Temple. Thanks!

Others provided photos & remembrances, often sweet & touching ones, especially when they have come from the families of the Gone Beyond; Oberne/Fishman/Diels family Rebecca & Isaac bless them; Susu Morrison & Penny Ohana; William (Swayambu Billy) Forbes,  Nik Douglas, Margo Sagov & Caroline Deakin & others in Goa & Europe & Australia, the Caribbean  & the US of A. Thanks!

I’ve been much stimulated by  Rock ‘n Roll Raj – Andrew Rogers, a great resource. Thanks!

And there’s the back-office support, the excellent Bob Hutchinson of MidWales.Com who has put up with my fumbling programming & immediate capacity to totally forget how UNIX permissions work. Thanks!

The Blog Archives now contain 20 posts & 32 comments, in 16 categories. The Photo Albums have 142 photos. The Encyclopaedia has 25 pages.

We’re a small niche site, here’s some stats (these are unique visitor views as of 21/11/09):

Ganesh Baba talks with Terry Clifford	208
Post Office Baba	139
Paul Giraud – Memories of Jasper – Part I	136
Letter from Kathmandu – September 2009	127
Ram Giri & The Chillum Train Affair	96
Jasper on Video – Kumbha Mela 2001	70
Losar at Bodhnath 2008	59
ABOUT	57
Precursors – Alastair Morrison – Part I	56

It will take time to build a larger audience, as the content breadth & depth slowly grows.

So I’m off! To India and you won’t hear from me until I get connected & see the man in Chauri Bazaar for a phone & data SIM, about a week from today.

Molyma Hotel Roof, Canacona.

More later from the Molyma Hotel, Canacona, Near Palolem, South Goa, India & above is the only photograph I could find of it … Google Map Here.

(photo credit hueystar @ flickr with thanks)

In 1966 travellers from Istanbul to Oxford dreamed of journeying to Kathmandu for Christmas.

Today Western Buddhists, Tibetans living abroad, and indigenous Himalayan Buddhists from Ladhak to Assam make the annual pilgrimage to Bodhnath on the outskirts of Kathmandu to celebrate Tibetan Losar, New Year festivities.

In February 2008, in the dead of winter my daughter Sunita and I set out on our own pilgrimage to Nepal.  Thirty-six years had passed since I lived in Nepal.

The last two years of my seven-year sojourn abroad culminated with my marriage and the birth of my son Willie in Nepal.  Shortly thereafter Sunita began life’s journey in Kathmandu where she was conceived.  This was her first actual trip and my first trip back.

In the last few decades the population has tripled.  Before when I was pregnant with Sunita I walked across rice paddies and mustard fields with baby Willie strapped to my back to visit the two existing rural Tibetan monasteries in Bodhnath.  There are now more than thirty monasteries in the once rural locale.

Tibetan New Year, a bustling and festive time of the year, is an auspicious time to travel.  Our hotel faced the famous Bodhnath stupa, the holy shrine where some of Buddha’s relics were entombed.  Like the other famous Swayambhunath stupa to the west of Kathmandu, immense pairs of painted, wide-open, elongated eyes gaze out over the four directions.

Tibetans traditionally circumambulate holy sites.  During New Year festivities the crowds swelled so that hundreds of visitors joined the normally popular korwa, the circling path.  The constant stream of people represented a cross-section of Nepalese, Tibetans, and foreigners.  I could pick out tribal people by their dress and lamas and monks from various Buddhist traditions and countries by the color of their robes.

A small town of single story shops and restaurants in the early 1970’s, the buildings circling the stupa now rise five stories.  After a climb up four flights of stairs we enjoyed a view of the surrounding area from one of the rooftop garden terraces.   The Himalayan snowcapped peaks, visible every day when I lived in Vijayeswari, sparkled in the distance on our flight in.  Every day we scanned the horizon for another glimpse but an obscuring, dense smog masked the mountains Nepal is famous for.

The menu offered a mix of vegetarian and non-vegetarian cuisine as well as Nepali versions of pizza, ice cream, muffins, cakes and pastries.  My favorite food was the Tibetan noodle soup and dumplings, thupa and momos.

The day before the New Year volunteers skilfully tossed buckets of lime whitewash like a new coat of paint over the bulbous exterior of the stupa.   Vendors around the circuit sold strings of colorful prayer flags, auspicious offerings.  The old, faded weather-worn flags came down and new flags were strung in all directions from the top of the main spire.  Motorized traffic was kept out.  A constant stream of pilgrims recited prayers, and burned butter lamps and incense.  The pilgrim frenzy that intensified as Losar approached reminded me of the Hindu Kumbha Mela in Hardwar, the largest gathering on the planet, visible from the moon.

One morning at 4am from bed I could hear the deep resonating drums calling the monks at one or more of the thirty monasteries in the vicinity to prayer.  The vibration rose from the ground and penetrated the floors and walls of our second floor room.  Another morning the sounds of a marching Nepali brass band lured me from bed before sunrise.  I quickly dressed and from the street outside watched the parade: dozens of colorfully dressed Nepalis carried ceremonial brass trays adorned with offerings of special holiday breads, fruits, candles, and incense.

We took a side trip to Thamel, a shopping district in Kathmandu.  Shop after shop offered hand-loomed cotton clothing, embroidered shawls, intricate bronze statues, spices, art, and books.

Amazingly there are three English language newspapers and more English language bookstores in Kathmandu than there are in Albuquerque where I live.

At Pilgrims Book House I met with owner Ram Tiwari, who published my last book, Sleeping in Caves: A Sixties Himalayan Memoir, under his Pilgrims Publishing imprint. His two-story store had the largest collection I’d ever seen of oriental and Buddhist studies, Himalayan travel literature, geographical guidebooks, trekking maps, Nepalese and Tibetan art, photography, Hinduism, Newari crafts, and Nepalese history.   We enjoyed chai and a samosa snack in the spacious cafe in a lush garden courtyard.

As planned I connected with old friends: Shiv Mirabito, publisher of Shivastan Publishing from Woodstock; Keith Dowman who resides south of Bodhnath and Ian Alsop from Santa Fe.

There were unplanned surprise encounters with other friends like bansuri flautist Steve Gorn and artist/calligrapher Barbara Bash from the Hudson Valley. We joined up with them to share a car and driver then toured some historical villages in other parts of the valley.

At Namo Buddha, the site where one of the previous incarnations of the Buddha offered his body to feed a starving tigress and her cubs, we purchased new prayer flags to add to the already full array of flags.

Tibetans wrote their names on the flags for extra luck.  Since I was the only one in our party who knew how to write in Tibetan (neither the driver nor the guide could read or write it), I dutifully wrote out everyone’s name.  I also took the occasion to write out my son Willie’s name on a flag.  Ever since he passed eight years ago I wanted to make the journey to Nepal as a tribute to his life, to complete a cycle that began with his birth in Nepal.  Sunita and I observed an emotional short period of silence in his honor.

There were surprise encounters with old friends from the past, drawn to the Losar celebrations, like Arthur Mandelbaum, and Phil Void – founder of the Dharma Bums, a rock band now based in India.  I didn’t recognize surbahar player  Steve Landsberg nor long time Nepal resident Addison Smith after thirty-six years.

Our favorite side trip was to Pharping.  We avoided the Hindu temple where animals were sacrificed to the Goddess Kali and visited the adjacent Tibetan village.  Thirty Seven years ago on a picnic outing with one of my Tibetan teachers, Chatral Rinpoche, he showed me the land where he planned to build a new monastery.  Now amazingly there are half a dozen monasteries on the surrounding forested hills.  When I visited his monastery next to a cave where Padma Sambhava once meditated, nostalgia overwhelmed me: the lush beauty of the lotus ponds, the forested hills, and the serene setting.

While change is inevitable, not all of the changes in Nepal have been for the better.  There is still no central heat in the guest houses.  Temperature dropped to thirty degrees at night and without heat in our hotel it was cold enough to warrant sleeping in long johns.  On a visit to Nagarkot, a village situated at an altitude of 8000 feet, I added a knit hat to my bedtime attire.

Poverty is still pervasive.  Many of the poor still have no running water.  Women wash clothes at ancient public faucets then fill large brass water pots to lug drinking water back home.  Government planning did not foresee the burgeoning population’s electricity needs.  As a result there were power outages, rolling black outs, for eight hours a day.  In addition to the inconvenience there was the added confusion of a schedule that changed daily.  We kept candles and a box of matches by our bedside and hoped when we ordered a meal at a restaurant that the kitchen could function in the dark or when we wanted a hot shower that the water would be hot.

Years ago banana leaves served as naturally organic 100% recyclable plates. Wandering cows gobbled up the leaves.  Now non-biodegradable plastic water bottles and shopping bags litter the landscape.   When people burn garbage at night in the streets for warmth the awful stench of burning plastic further blackens the already sooty air.

Since our visit was two months before the highly politicized elections, a strike and roadblock near the Indian border halted the normal supplies of petrol, heating, and cooking oil from India.  With all the gas stations out of petrol it was difficult getting transportation.  A typical long snaking petrol pump line―separate lines for buses, trucks and motorbikes―was over a kilometer long.  Tire burning demonstrations and protests in the streets stopped traffic and sickened the already polluted air.  The Maoists, whose underground revolutionary campaign during the last decade accounted for thousands of deaths, won a majority of votes in the election.  A new democracy in Nepal replaced an unpopular monarchy.

It’s only been a little over fifty years since Nepal first opened its doors to foreigners.  While many visit the Himalayan peaks or the ancient wooden Newari temples to enjoy the intricate craftsmanship of metalworkers and wood carvers, there are also foreigners who come to offer assistance.  Many international organizations sponsor programs in Nepal to address the problems of health, birth control, women’s rights, literacy, and education.  Student sponsorships enable poor students to get an education.  The literacy rate is climbing.  A new generation of travellers, young teachers, doctors and veterinarians, volunteer their time to help in village schools and clinics.

With a new democratic government and a steady stream of individuals and organizations that make valuable contributions, Nepal’s future looks brighter.

(A version of this article was published in New Perspectives: A Journal of Conscious Living, Winter 2009).

CONTEXT & LINKS: (people & places mentioned) …

Losar – the Tibetan New Year holiday period.

Boudhanath – a massive stupa & village/buddhist suburb of Kathmandu, seven miles from the city centre, with many monasteries. A research centre.

Patan – with Bhadgaon & Kathmandu, one of the three ancient towns of the Kathmandu valley in Nepal.

Namo Buddha – a stupa in Kathmandu, near the National Museum. Associated with the Buddha & a tiger sacrifice.

Pharping – a village near Kathmandu.

Nagarkot – another village, 32 km east of Kathmandu.

Chatral Rinpoche – a renowned Dzogchen master (Tibetan Buddhism).

Shivastan Publishing – Shiv Mirabito, owner/publisher.

Pilgrims Book House – Ram Tiwari, owner/publisher.

Steve Gorn – musician (bansuri) & musical researcher. Bansuri is the transverse bamboo flute of India. Listen to his Colors of the Mind (CD at Amazon USA) and other recordings.

Barbara Bash – artist/calligrapher/author. See True Nature & her other books at Amazon USA.

Keith Dowman – researcher/author/translator, Tibetan Buddhism & language. Enjoy his Masters of Enchantment: The Lives and Legends of the Mahasiddhas with paintings by Robert Beer & find his many other books on Amazon USA as well.

Addison Smith – see his Tales of Uncle Tompa – The Legendary Rascal of Tibet (illustrated by Addison Smith & translated by Rinjing Dorje, pub. Dorje Ling 1975, republished 1997) – reviewed in Kailash – A Journal of Himalayan Studies Vol IV 1976. Scans at http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/kailash/pdf/ via The Digital Himalaya Project,  based at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Steve Landsberg – musician (surbahar) & musical researcher. Surbahar is a classical Indian stringed instrument rather larger than the Sitar which it resembles but has an extraordinary deep tone.  Enjoy his Night and Beyond: Ragas of Indian Music (CD at Amazon USA) & other recordings

Arthur Mandelbaum – researcher/translator, Tibetan Buddhism & language, Sanskrit language. See The Lamp of Liberation (with Terry Clifford Eds – Amazon USA).

Ian Alsop – researcher/scholar runs AsianArt.Com – “The on-line journal for the study and exhibition of the arts of Asia”.

Phil Void – founder of The Dharma Bums – a Buddhist rock band.

Marilyn Stablein is a born storyteller & has written extensively about her years in India and Nepal & on other matters. Start with Sleeping in Caves: A Sixties Himalayan Memoir & find her other books on Amazon as well.

Recorded at the Maha Maha Kumbha Mela 2001, held every 144 years, at Prayag, Allahabad, India.  Sixty million people took part, the largest spiritual gathering in the world. Celebrated at the confluence of three great rivers, only two of which are of this world; the third, the mythical Saraswati, joins the Ganga & the Yamuna at the confluence, Triveni Sangam, a sacred place, at a sacred time.

This video was made by Smiljan Šiška, who wrote, in October 2009:

“I met Jasper first at the Allahabad Kumbha Mela 1977, when I came there on autostop with my wife Milena and one year old daughter Jasna. We stayed in the camp of Ganesh Baba and Paagal Baba.”

“Our next meeting was in the year 1988. He came to Slovenia, from where we continued to journey to India and Nepal. We travelled together with Chaitanya, his wife Ludmilla and their two daughters, & with my wife & my son & daughter & some other friends.”

“Next year 1989, was the Maha Kumbha Mela in Allahabad and there we met again. As I remember we also met in 1998 in the Allahabad Kumbha Mela.”

“The last Mela we were together – it was in the year 2001. During which I also made a documentary video about the rituals, which I am still completing. In my archive I will look for more photo material about Jasper and Kumbha Melas.”

Glossary:

baba – (Hindi: बाबा; Urdu: بابا; father; grandfather; old man; sir) renunciate man, usually Hindu but sometimes used of Muslim spiritual seekers & applied in India to supplicants of any religion; a general term of respect for men who pursue the spiritual life; usually, but not invariably, applied to older men; a respectful term of address to an older man.

naga baba – a type of sadhu, often nude and practising extreme asceticisms; a sadhu who consumes Ganja (marijuana) as part of his daily spiritual rituals; devotees of the God Shiva.

triveni sangam – exact riverine point where the brown waters of the Ganga meet the blue waters of the Yamuna at Prayag (Allahabad), India.  The third river is unseen, the mythical Saraswati & the confluence has been considered a holy place for millenia.

dudhnath – (Sanskrit दूध्नाथ literally ‘Lord of Milk’) is both a generic term for a milkman in Hindi and also a personal term of address, “Are Dudhnath, kya Hai? (Hi Dudhnath, what’s up)?”; also a surname in some parts of India.

Links:

* Jasper Newsome – Flower Raj Wiki

* Jasper Newsome – Flower Raj Photos

* Sadhu – Wikipedia

* Kumbha Mela – Wikipedia

* Nudity in Religion – Wikipedia

* Triveni Sangam – Wikipedia

* The Inimitable Allahabad

A one hour, two part, audio interview (sides A & B – 30 minutes each) digitised from the original audio cassette tape and made into high-quality (320kbps) MP3.

Ganesh Baba, ‘The Psychedelic Guru’ is talking with Terry Clifford, in Kathmandu, Nepal – 20th September 1976.

(Use the built-in players below or download the original files).

A Side – Ganesh Baba talks with Terry Clifford (31:49  – 74,573KB).

B Side – Ganesh Baba talks with Terry Clifford (31:50 – 74,642KB)

Ganesh Baba:

Born around 1890 in Orissa, India, little  is known of his early life; he is said to have married and to have had financial, social, and familial success.  By the 1960s, as an old man,  he had become a renunciate spiritual seeker and he met and interacted with many Westerners over the remainder of his life. Ganesh Baba visited and taught in the USA between 1979 & 1981. He died in Nainital, India, in 1987.

Encyclopaedia Photo Album

Terry Clifford:

Terry was born in New York in 1945, and after gaining a degree in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967, she worked first as a psychiatric nurse in New York & then headed East to India and Nepal. She became a Buddhist, learnt Tibetan and studied Tibetan Medicine, later being awarded a Ph. D and working on a Tibetan Pharmacopoeia under a grant from the Wellcome Trust.  She died tragically of cancer in 1987 at the early age of forty-two.

Encyclopaedia Photo Album

Credits:

Audio tapes from the collection of Terry Clifford, courtesy Arthur Mandelbaum.

High-quality audio digitisation and editing by Charlie Martin.

Notes:

Excerpts from this were published in High Times as Terry Clifford, “Interview with a Dope Guru … Ganesh Baba,” High Times, Number 29, January 1978, pp. 78-79, 112-113.

Arthur Mandelbaum wrote:

Paul would like the name Paul Giraud used. His nicknames are Taxi Paul (old days) and Babes (nowadays) as he’s been calling his friends ‘babes’ for years.

He was born in Bombay (Mumbai), Bridge Candy, in 1937, but grew up in Connecticut, USA.  In the early ’60s he met Geshe Wangyal and his student  John Brzostoski in New Jersey.

Paul was driving a taxi for several years in NYC before leaving for India upon John’s suggestion that he study Vipassana meditation with Manindra at the Burmese Vihara in Bodhgaya. He stayed in India from 1965 to 1981. From Gaya  he traveled to Goa and Sri Lanka.

Manindra suggested he go to Kathmandu to meet another Vipassana teacher, but when Paul discovered the Tibetans he connected with them. He met Karmapa XVI and all the great lamas of the day. He knew Princess Zena, Thubten Yeshe and Zopa Rinpoche and was there when Richard Tenzin sold Zena’s thangkas to raise $30,000 to buy Kopan.

Since ’81 he has returned to India every few  years and was with Jasper Newsome at the 2001 Kumbha Mela at Prayag (Allahabad).

Links:

Geshe Wangyal

John Brzostoski (no links found – an artist, professor, and one of the first Western students of Geshe Wangyal).

Vipassana

Bodhgaya

Karmapa XVI

Zina Rachevsky

Thubten Yeshe

Zopa Rinpoche

Kopan Monastery

Kumbha Mela

Prayag (Allahabad)

Photos:

Jasper Newsome

Richard Tenzing Mueller

Biblio:

Zimmer, Heinrich – Philosophies of India

Credits:

Paul Giraud

Arthur Mandelbaum

Thanks to Paul Giraud, who delved into his memories at a difficult time and brought a lot of pleasure to us by doing so.

Thanks also to Arthur Mandelbaum for facilitating this so well with his FLIP video camera and laid back interview technique.

There will be more from Paul  from time to time, आलक्नथ बोम शन्कर- ओम नमह शिवाय – हर हर महादेव as we wish him all the best. Alakhnath, bom Shankar .

Kathmandu is exactly the same as it was in 1969 except it has 3 times the population. There has been very little infrastructure investment; basically the same airport, highways, power grid (the neighborhoods look like Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon; a patchwork of homemade electrical connections at head height), with 3 times the population. The crowds, the traffic, the pollution; the pollution! It would take your breath away. I have never experienced air quality like that before; not in Benares, not in Sana’a, or Istanbul, not even in Ahmadabad. Nowhere else. An urban mess of staggering proportions.

We loved it. The people were the Nepalis of old; great folk.

They were hospitable, friendly and curious, of course plenty of semi-obnoxious hustlers, but not to worry, they were reasonably cool too. The cultural artefacts! We circumambulated Swayambunath from both top and bottom of the mountain, and it was wonderful. But my 1969 cooled out hippie scene in Swayambu was gone; just some new shacks at the bottom, and no hippie restaurants and dopers. No hippie scene in Swayambu; all the hippies are basically day-trippers in Thamel and Durbar Square, although obviously there are some cool scenes tucked away somewhere, but you would have to know how to find it. I searched high and lo for old friends in Swayambu and they were no where to be found.

Boudnath was great, although the same as Swayambu; lots of tourists and native merchants, few hippies.

I kept thinking that I would find a cool place to spend the month of July in; maybe in Boudnath, maybe rent a house in Kath or Swayambu; but by the third day I realized that living in Kath was a labor of love probably beyond my current capacity; very difficulty to get around, unless you’re walking. Heaven help you if you get sick; In India, they have accessible hospitals, but if you find yourself in the Kathmandu hospital, better call for the mortician right away. Don’t get wobbly, weak, or dizzy in Kathmandu! “The cops don’t need you, and man, they expect the same.” I gotta say, for my money, Thailand is so much easier if you want a nice Buddhist country (which I do). I think this summer we’ll do Chiang Mai, check out Laos and hopefully Cambodia, and do a comparison.

Finally, there were still some foxy hippie chicks on the street and that looked nice. You single guys could do well there.

Links:

Wikipedia – Kathmandu

Wikipedia – Boudhanath

Wikipedia – Swayambhunath

Andy Klein travelled to India from the USA in 1967  and visited and lived in Kathmandu between 1969 & 1971.

He is currently on the Faculty of the School of Business & Management of The American University of Sharjah, UAE .

He took the weekend of Eid Mubarak (2009) off to revisit Kathmandu for the first time since 1971.

When we lived in Banaras in the 1960s, there were numerous unusual people & places, with Post Office Baba, above, one of the more visible. When a friend  recently emailed this image, several of us kicked around the meaning that it has for us today, 45 years later.

Klaus Schlichtmann (Japan):
Some of you may know this one (see photo! The pic is from a book I found).

Arthur Mandebam (New York City):
Great photo of the ‘post office baba’, I can’t remember his name. Didn’t he consume all offerings that were placed before him, including packs of cigarettes? He ate everything including the banana peels. That photo should be on the home page!

Nico Morrison (London):
Post Office Baba. Why on the home page?  Anyway ….. I’ll certainly put this up if either or both of you will write some text to accompany the photo.  I also need provenance,  which book and date if possible.  Digambara baba – I’m sure I saw him as the photo has resonance but I have no memory.

Was he at the Main Post Office, Banaras? Where is that?  If any of you can write a short story/article around Post Office Baba I will most happily post it.

Klaus Schlichtmann (Japan):
I scanned the photo from Eric Newby, Slowly Down The Ganges, London: Picador (Pan Books in association with Collins), 1983 (originally published in 1966 by Hodder and Stoughton).

I immediately recognized our Post Office Baba, having seen him many times during the two years of my stay in Benares. I should say something more, but am tied up in preparations for my peace studies course…

Nico Morrison (London):
I feel I can’t do anything with this without a good story to hang it on. If you could enlarge on your recollections of Post Office Baba and possibly tie those recollections into something the Baba represented for you, that would make it a good post.  Otherwise we are using him as a freak show it would appear. Do NOT want to even APPEAR to be doing that.

SO: What do we learn from him? What do we learn about India from him? What was important about him that you went to the trouble of making a scan and sending it to us?

You get the drift …. Your scan is good enough to use if there is a piece of writing around it that illuminates your Indian experience for others through having darshan of him. Did you ever speak to him? Was he mauni? What do we know more?

Klaus Schlichtmann (Japan):
I would surely like to write up something, but just don’t know when. Your questions are good, and I could try and find some answers. I think he was a mauni, at least during the day, and he used to scribble things on little pieces of paper. Also he had an assortage of small bottles around him and could have given people medicines.  Probably. (May be issuing Tabij amulets as well?) Doesn’t Andrew have a recollection and couldn’t he write something?

Arthur Mandebam (New York City):
Snippets are good. Once it’s out there people can add their recollections.

Nico Morrison (London):
Of course you are quite right. I’ll work up a post on post office baba (pun intended). But …. I still want something that takes away the freak show element.

What is the core value of this man lying naked in front of the main Banaras PO? Where not only men but also women stroll past in large numbers? I mean – in my head I know he represents something of value but I’m having trouble verbalising it. Maybe it IS just the shock value. Digambara ……. we should ALL be naked …….. what is digambara? ‘clothed in light’ or something? ‘wrapped in air’? Monier Monier-Williams is up in my attic somewhere.

Take an example, if I was to lie down naked in front of the Banaras PO they’d arrest me; why not him?

If I can get a snippet together that has some kind of serious provenance embedded in it then it makes the post a lot less vulnerable.

Klaus Schlichtmann (Japan):
I believe I (perhaps) never saw Post Office Baba’s private parts, he somehow managed to keep them out of sight, by lying on his belly much of the time (as in the photograph) or somehow rolling about in such manner that they would not achieve any degree of prominence.

Since he was well-fed, he was a good luck symbol of prosperity, in some way like the sumo wrestlers who are only wearing a “langoti” (apparently the Japanese word for it, “fundoshi”, derived from the Indian word).

I am wondering if I ever saw him stand up and walk about… Apart from being a living manifestation of prosperity and renunciation (interesting combination!), his presence may have had the effect of making people conscious of their humanness and morality.

In this way he exercised a certain control, by assuming and in fact exercising a social function that would have contributed to the natural, peaceful order of things, where everything has its place and value. It’s almost like you don’t need a policeman or guard any more to watch the post office with someone like that around, naked, and potentially vulnerable…

Yes, the shock of being human, reminding us of the existentialist experience of having been thrown into the world, naked…

Steve Landsberg (Venezuela):
When I first moved to Assi Ghat in December of 1967, there was one naked baba living under the only tree there.  He smoked chillums all day long and people would visit him and he seemed to be giving advice and teaching them something.  Although I did not know him well, he was always friendly.  Assi Gat in those days was not what it has become today.  There were some boat wallas and a few other people hanging about but it was a quiet scene except on big festival days.  I do recall the time when James Ivory was shooting the Guru, I recruited a so many people living in Varanasi at the time  to sit on a houseboat going down the river in front of the palace of the  Maharaja of Benaras.  I think Arthur may have been in that. They paid us 100 Rs each for the day which at that time was considered a good salary.

Heidi Spielhagen (Berlin):

To me, although I am a woman and no voyeur, a religious order’s, or an individual mystic’s, choice to live without wearing clothes is the most fundamental religious freedom.

The day  this freedom is taken away even in India is the victory day for those religions that are estranged from the  source of  direct experience of being rather than prayer or hair splitting or a good scam for fleecing the sheep.
Nudity , obviously, is not a requirement for a mystic, but it is an unquestionably valid choice;  most of them use it with discretion, which is their choice also.

And, just for the sake of info, my guru, a white man, lived as naked sadhu by Manikarnika Ghat (Banaras), in the 40s and maybe early fifties. He continued as a naked sanyasi until his death;  he wore clothes only when it was cold or when he was out of doors.
I always regretted that, as a woman, this was an option I did not have.
I sort of think that a stretch of nudity, like poverty, is a really good tapasya,  and certainly most enlightening about yourself as well as society at large.

Marilyn Stablein (USA):

In a culture that admires (idolizes, worships) plumpness Post Office Baba exudes a certain naive baby Krishna-like charm and innocence.  In a country where poverty and malnutrition are inescapable realities for many someone who has achieved a rich, full belly, is to be indulged if not adored.

He reminds me of the mustard oil slathered rotund Brahmin bathers at the Varanasi ghats who languish in the sun under parasols.  Ganesh’s plump belly also comes to mind as do the Chinese fat Buddha belly figures.

Terris Temple (Chiang Mai, Thailand):

Cool pic, Post Office Baba I remember well, he did walk around the PO area, I remember several times going by, once on a rickshaw, another time saw two Western elderly women walking to the PO and Baba with his back to them picked up something from the street, they did get an unusual view.

When ever I was going in that direction he always gave me eye contact. He was a favourite Baba of mine. Many times devotees brought him large offerings of sweets which he hoovered remarkably, never knew his name, but have very fond memories of him.

Klaus Schlichtmann (Japan):

I would like, if I had the time, to expand upon what is the natural order of things, and the ‘police (or policing) function’ that monks and ascetics (world renouncers) fulfill, as well as the example set by someone being happy with nothing. In addition such a order allows anyone fed up with worldly affairs or being unsuccessful in his worldly pursuits to turn to God and renounce the world, instead of having to continue to compete or — what would be worse — engage in criminal activities to survive. Monasteries instead of prisons! Etc. etc… There is always a way out!

Glossary:

mauni – ‘silent’ – not speaking; sometimes under gurus’ orders.

darshan -  literally ‘to see’, to have a privileged view of. Used to indicate the beneficial result of being in the presence of a spiritually advanced person.

digambara – literally ‘sky-clothed’ so therefore naked.

Monier Monier-Williams – eponymous  Sanskrit to English dictionary.

tapasya – penance, austerities.

Biblio:

The splendid book of his1963 journey,  Slowly Down the Ganges by Eric Newby.

“On his forty-fourth birthday Eric Newby, a self-confessed river lover, sets out on a 1200-mile journey down the Ganges River from Hardwar to the Bay of Bengal, accompanied by his wife Wanda.

Things do not start smoothly as they run aground 63 times in the first six days, but gradually India’s holiest river, The Pure, The Eternal, The Creator of Happiness, lives up to its many names and captures them in its spell. Traveling in a variety of boats, most of them unsuitable, as well as by bus and bullock cart, the Newbys become intimately acquainted with the river’s shifting moods and colorful history.

“Slowly Down the Ganges” brims over with engaging characters and entertaining anecdotes, recounted in Newby’s inimitable style. Best of all, he brilliantly captures the sights and sounds, the frustrations and rewards, the sheer enchantment of travel in India.” (Google Books Overview).

Links:

Nudity in Religion

Initiation of Naga Babas – Naked Yogis (with Baba Rampuri)

Contributors:

Thanks to all below who let me pester them repeatedly;

Steve Landsberg: Ragascape

Terris Temple: TibetColor

Arthur Mandebam, Heidi Spielhagen, Klaus Schlichtmann,  Marilyn Stablein.

But it didn’t arrive in time for this meeting and I had some vague questions about the different types of people who had gone to India and their reasons for doing so.

After rejecting my proposal “Beats, Buddhists, Freaks & Swamies” (‘I was too late for the Beats ….’ ) Dave patiently answered my incoherent queries; we ended up with five minutes of audio.

I would suggest to anyone interested in contemporary history that they read some Studs, or listen to one of his many audio recordings, a great communicator was he.

Five minute interview with Dave Tomory:

Friday 28th August 2009 – North London, UK – podcast feed HERE

Oral History:

“Hard Times”, by Studs Terkel, is an oral history of the Great (American) Depression, published in 1970.  It is interesting to me that he wrote it 40 years after the Great Depression began in 1929. It seems that a generation space (30 to 40 years) is needed to achieve some distance from an oral history subject.

Forty years ago this month I was in Delhi, desperately looking for a way to move on out of India and kick-start my life. Five years in India and I’d lost all objectivity; felt I had no centre. Time to move on.

I’d never been able to adhere. Not to a doctrine, not to a sect, not even to my beloved and difficult Guru. Yet India permeated me and constrained the way I ate food, how I defecated, it set the models for my friendships and my lovers, impossible to ignore.

Forty years on I can look at those hard times dispassionately, with equanimity. Time to move on but also time to record and not to forget.

Links from the Podcast:

Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive

Kopan Monastery

Additional Links:

Photo: Jennifer Soo

Novel Destinations

(copyright The Sydney Morning Herald).

“One of Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler’s favourite travel books is A Season In Heaven – True Tales From The Road To Kathmandu, by David Tomory. It is a collection of true stories told by the hippies of the late 1960s and early ’70s, who embarked on Asia’s “hippie trail” from Istanbul to Kathmandu. “A terrific [narrative] of the ‘road to the east’, the ‘hippie trail’ and that whole awakening to the possibilities of exotic travel,” Wheeler says. “It made me very nostalgic.”

Books by David Tomory:

Books with Writing by David Tomory: