The Search For The Karmapa and The Mystical Tibetan Snow Frog (Part II)

We walked in a humbled, hunched-over position of humility and sat on maroon velvet pillows on the floor. The Karmapa was seated on a small yellow chair placed higher than his visitors.   As per Buddhist tradition the teacher always sits higher than the students.  My heart was pounding in my throat not just from the excitement of the moment, but it was still less than two minutes since squeezing by the vicious Tibetan Mastiff guarding the steps below.  I figured it best to stay in the moment and not yet consider what we'd have to do to get by him on the way out.  I slowly caught my breath. The altitude and dry air at fifteen thousand feet had destroyed my voice three weeks ago.  I'd been speaking in a throaty whisper ever since.

Nobody spoke English so it didn't matter what I sounded like.

Utu

Not Utu

There is a strict protocol to follow when in thepresence of a living Buddha.  We'd met many monks and lamas in the past four weeks and we knew the drill.  Mostly they involved reverence, respect and ritual.  These are the basics:  Always bow first and take a  humbled position.  For someone as elevated as The Karmapa we performed three prostrations on the ground before him.  Never turn your back to the Master, even if it means backing out of a room down treacherously dangerous steps with a vicious dog below.  (We did eventually get a photo with The Karmapa and logistically had to have our backs to him, but I think as foreigners get a pass.) Never reach out to touch a Master, but if he offers his forehead to you, it is okay to touch foreheads with him--this method of receiving his blessings is known as utu.  It is essentially a sacred Buddhist transfer of blessing in the form of a high-five of the forehead. 

The venerable Bhakha Tulku Rinpoche.
Utu with caution.

Years later I would find myself invited to a Buddhist ceremony at the home of Steven Seagal in his Los 

Angeles home.  Steven was a great supporter of the Dalai Lama and a man as learned in Tibetan Buddhist theology as any other Westerner I'd ever met.  We'd become friends through our mutual interests in Tibet. When the great Buddhist masters would come to visit him, he'd generously invite me to meet them at his house.  He was receiving a visit from the venerable Bhakha Rinpoche, an eccentric Tibetan lama who was in his tenth Earthly reincarnation and who lived at a Buddhist monastery in nearby Santa Barbara.  I was introduced to Bhaka Rinpoche.  He stared at me for a moment and then leaned his forehead forward.  I felt honored.  I leaned forward waiting for the gentle touch of Utu inspiration from the Lama. Out of the top of my eyes I saw the old, grey haired master pull his neck back and then slam his head into mine as hard as he could.  He had executed the perfect head butt.  Moments later when the double vision went away, I focused on him and bowed in a "thank you sir may I have another" manner.  I was goofy for the following three hours. I'm not sure why I got the head-butt Utu. Maybe one of my previous incarnations had upset one of his previous incarnations.  If so, this debt was paid in full.   Accounting for the transgressions of your self and your possibly ne'er-do-well preceding incarnations is tricky business.  Later that day I mentioned it to Steven and he just said, "Good.  Very good." Being a devout Buddhist is complicated.  But when I thought about it, it made sense.  If you are going to Steven Seagal's house you should expect to leave with either a blessing or a head-butt.  

Karmapa, The Boy

Back in the chambers of The Karmapa a young monk in three layers of maroon robes stepped forward.  He was The Karmapa's attendant and translator.  He had closely shorn black hair and sun-burnt, Tibetan-weathered skin on his face and hands.  He had a perpetually serious face that looked incapable of frivolousness.  No one was smiling in the room. Not Dr. Ken, myself nor The Karmapa.  Smiling was inconsistent with the moment. Also in the room was The Karmpa's director of security.  He was a tall, quiet, wall of a man with a Tibetan face, but a long Roman nose.  He never blinked.  Meeting a living Buddha was not a slap-on-the-back, how-ya-doing occasion.  It required the deepest concentration.  We were seated, cross-legged, ten feet in front of a real-life Golden Child upon whose shoulders the future of Tibetan Buddhism rested. I was caught up in the focus on the moment and the humbling greatness of the experience. I had no idea what to say.  This was a speak-when-spoken-to moment  Sometimes you dream of a special moment.  You dream and you plan and you plot to do whatever it takes to get there to make the moment happen.  Then you realize you spent so much energy and attention getting there that you don't know what to do when you get there.  We stared at The Karmapa.  He stared back at us.  The room was so silent that I could hear my pulse in my ears.

The Karmapa, even at age fourteen, cut a powerful figure in the room.  He was tall for his age--nearly two meters tall. He had a brown, weathered face and deep dark eyes.  He seemed to have the concentration and composure of a seasoned adult, but then again he really was nine hundred years old.  We weren't  sure what to expect from a young living Buddha.  Our only personal reference was Yoda from Star Wars.

Karmapa's attendant broke the silence.

"Tashi delek, doctors.  The Karmapa would like to welcome you to Tibet and Tsurphu Monastery.  He would like to hear about your work in Tibet."

Karmapa, The Man

We spoke to The Karmapa.  We told him about our project for the charity called SEVA foundation.  Our 

team of Westerners and Tibetans were moving from town to town throughout Eastern Tibet (coincidentally the birth place of The Karmapa)  performing hundreds of free surgeries for correctable blindness. We didn't have to tell The Karmapa that this was saving not only the sight, but the lives of these people. He knew it better than we did.  Life in Tibet is harsh in all aspects.  For those without vision, it is a life of hoping someone will feed and shelter you from the cold, hard elements.  If not, you die. There are no social services, handicapped assistance programs or even roads in the places our patients were coming from.   Also it didn't help that the favorite toys of Tibetan children seemed to be pointy sticks.  Life is hard here.  Beautiful, but hard.   The Karmapa knew this.  He also knew that the Chinese were making it harder.  We didn't talk about this.  You assumed the walls had ears in Tsurphu.

The attendant translated this to The Karmapa and he nodded his head once. He had a look as grateful and relieved as Tibetan parents had after their children were treated.  Then he leaned forward and stared at us silently and intently for about thirty seconds.  He sat back and spoke again to the attendant.

Karmapa, The First

"The Karmapa says thank you for helping Tibetan peoples and the people from his home.  He hopes you will 

come back again soon to Tibet.  He would like to give you some gift from Tsurphu." His attendant placed a few items in front of us:  a number of thin, folded, beige envelopes full of assorted powders, incenses and herbs.  Also a thick green and yellow woven cord that The Karmapa had personally blessed (the woven cord that still travels with me everywhere).  It was time to leave, but I could have sat in that room for five more hours.  It was deafeningly quiet and abnormally calm.  It was the kind of room that just made you feel better when you were sitting inside.  We prostrated three more times to The Karmapa, stood up and backed out of the room into the stairway.  It wasn't until I saw the steps that I remembered the snarling, angry beast that lay in wait one floor below.  Getting past him from a spacious room was tricky enough.  Doing it from a narrow staircase was going to be harder.  The only light in the stairwell was from a dull, yellow light bulb.  Everything looked like a shadow.  I waited at the top of the steps to follow the monk downstairs, but the old man just stood there and pointed to the floor below.  His trip to The Karmapa was just one way.  Fantastic.  Well, if there was one thing worth getting bit in the ass, it was this.  I slowly headed down the stairs using the toe of my shoe to feel through the shadows for the next step.  In the darkness I could not make out the shape of the dog until I was half-way down.  The beast, however, had heard us coming before we ever left The Karmapa's chambers.  He had nothing else to do.  I was within three steps of reaching him.  It was Go-time. Then an amazing thing happened.  The dog looked me straight in my eyeballs, snarled and lifting his foaming lips to expose thick, yellow, pointy fangs.  Then he groaned, turned in a circle and lay down next to the wall.  I was shocked, but not too shocked to see a moment of opportunity.  Still it made no sense.  This was definitely the same dog--there's no shift work for vicious, rabid, Tibetan Mastiffs at Tsurphu.  Then I worried that he was just trying to suck me in to a sense of false security and get a proper piece of me.  I inched carefully closer, but he didn't move.  He couldn't be bothered. I guessWhen I was two feet from him I hit the last step and bolted through the doorway to safety.  Dr. Ken did the same.  The dog didn't even look at us.

"What just happened?"

"I don't know.  It's the same dog, right?"

"Definitely the same dog."

"I guess we are in the club now. We better keep moving in case the spell wears off."

  

But he wasn't going to bother us.  There were bigger forces working here.  Bigger than a brutish, crazed, possibly rabid Tibetan Mastiffs.  We'd find out more about these forces the next day.

We found our way down the steps, through the temple and out of Tsurphu Monastery.  I was giddy from the experience and found a renewed stride in my step despite the fifteen thousand foot altitude.  The taxi driver waited at the gates.  He was asleep on a blanket on the hood of his car.   He slept under the shadow of the Gurum mountains, in the sweet, cool, afternoon air.  This seemed like the ultimate place to catch a nap.  When we tapped the car, he woke up, took an impossibly long swig of whatever was in the silver Chinese thermos next to him and motioned us to get in the car.  We stopped two hundred meters down the road at a stream that was running out of a small hill.  Legend has it that nine hundred years previously the first Karmapa was walking on this hill and struck the ground with his walking stick.  The ground opened up and this running stream of water came out and sent blessed water to the farms and villages down the road from Tsurphu.  It has been running ever since.  I leaned down, cupped my hands and splashed the freezing water on my face, over my head and down my neck.  Our taxi driver, well-versed in the legend, drank from the stream and then filled his thermos.  He offered it to me, but I politely turned him down.  While I was certainly caught up in the mystical experience of the day, I was still wary of the blessed parasites in the water that would probably bless my intestines by morning.

Personal Space, Lhasa street-style

We made it back to the old center of Lhasa in time to make last call for Yak Burgers at the Snow Lion Restaurant.  The Burgers were glorious.  That night I slept the sleep of a man who had checked off a living dream the day before.  Sleeping at high altitudes has the side-effect of incredibly vivid dreaming and that night my dreams were no less than epic.  Living at high altitude also has the side-effect of powerful flatulence.  They were also epic that night, but I blame the Yak Burgers. The next morning we had breakfast and decided to take a stroll around the Jokan Temple, the most famous, sacred Buddhist temple in Lhasa.   But something was different.  I felt........different.  I couldn't put my finger on it, but people were regarding us differently since we got back from Tsurphu (and we did not wear an I Met The Karmapa tee-shirt).  The Lhasa sidewalks are not a bastion of personal space.  Most of the walking is done laterally dodging oncoming people, animals and delivery wagons.  Today these sidewalks were suddenly opening up for us in a parting wave of unobscured pavement.  People were unconsciously moving out of our way as soon as we looked at them.  We made the walk to the Jokan Temple in unheard-of, record time.  The thousand year old cobbled walkway that surrounded the Jokan temple was a circular path of shops and stalls and a place of religious pilgrimage.  Buddhist pilgrims from across Tibet made their way here to walk endless, week-long circles of prayer around the acres of cobblestone at the temple.  They came with nothing and lived on the accepted Tibetan tradition of begging the kindness of strangers.  Tibetan Buddhist tradition looks at the occupation of begging as an honored, accepted and reincarnational activit.  It could well be you in your next life.  Foreigners, as expected, are singled out as the deepest pocketed targets for the slew of real and sham beggars at the temple.  The begging can be aggressive and once the wallet is taken from the pants it becomes the closest thing to a feeding frenzy that you will see on dry land.  On most days when we felt  like being charitable we'd do a drop and run strategy. The sea of bodies could be daunting if you stayed in one place and within seconds you'd be surrounded.  There was in impassable horde of hands and bodies every time. Not today.  A group of three beggars in tattered brown robes spotted me walking and made a bee-line towards my profitable path.  I looked up, caught the eye of the man in front and he stopped.  He grabbed is two friends and pulled them aside.  I figured he saw a better opportunity.  Then it happened again. And again. Soon we realized:  it wasn't them, it was us.  Something had happened between yesterday and today that put us in the don't-mess-with-them, let-them-pass zone.  Soon we were testing it out in different directions and clearing unlikely paths in the crowds.  I felt like The Green Lantern on his first day of super powers.   In total this lasted for about one full day.  Whatever The Karmapa gave us in that thirty seconds of intense, silent, uninterrupted stare had gotten securely into our heads. It was just one more mystical and surreal experience in a country where there is no shortage of mystical and surreal events. We enjoyed that day more than any other day in Tibet, although I have to admit I was kind of hoping for telekenetic powers.   The Tibetans seem to take these mystical manifestations in stride.  Easy come, easy go.  Much different than our Western thinking that would build a statue or start as pay-as-you-go church every time a cloud took the shape of the Easter bunny.  It was refreshing to see and experience a place where expectations were so few and so many people could just, naturally, stay in a single moment.

I would get to spend one more afternoon with the Karmapa one year later on a return charity trip to Tibet.  

The experience was just as thrilling.  When you get to meet a living Buddha more than once in a lifetime, you have to believe that, so far,

A rare, orderly line of Lhasa beggars

you've thrown a good set of karmic dice.  There was one special moment I remember as I sat directly in front of The Karmapa. As his attendant monk was speaking, I looked over at the Karmapa and he caught my eye.  I unconsciously, nervously smiled at him.  He nervously smiled at me too.  In that moment the living Buddha was, again, a thirteen year old boy for just a few seconds.  When the smile faded away, so did the child.  At that moment I thought about the difference between legend and reality.  As blessed as he was, the weight of a nation's political and cultural hopes are all on him.  This would be hard enough to grasp and bear as an adult.  He may be nine hundred years old, but part of him is still a boy.  And this boy was under the scrutiny of the massive Chinese military with the understanding that he would go along with their plan or he would disappear.  In the year 2000, the year after I'd visited The Karmapa for the second time, he escaped the sacred halls of Tsurphu during the night and showed up in India a week later. He had made a nearly unfathomable trek through the Tibetan Himalayas to escape the censure and control of the Chinese government.  Back at Tsurphu I heard that heads did roll.  His staff was punished.  Punished severely and placed in horrible Chinese prisons.  This was the collateral damage of a political war.

Meeting The Karmapa will always be one of my top five travel experiences.  It was my once (actually twice) in a lifetime chance to meet the man of greatness while he was still a boy.  Imagine meeting Bob Marley or  Nelson Mandela or Mickey Mantle at age thirteen, knowing that they would be at the top of their game twenty years later.  What would you say to them?  What can be said to the child who will one day become The Man?

  

The Search For The Karmapa and The Mystical Tibetan Snow Frog

"This way, this way," said the monk who had led us up three flights of the steepest, narrowest staircase I'd ever negotiated.  Our guide monk was a short man with closely cropped grey hair.  He walked with his back hunched forward like a man carrying the weight of life on his shoulders.  He was probably only about fifty years old, but had a weathered, leathery brown face with two small slits of eyes--the results of a lifetime of hard Tibetan elements.  I was giddy and excited here at the tail end of our quest. I wanted to ask the monk questions about this place, but I was sucking wind badly and the only English words the monk knew were "this way, this way."  The monk walked slowly, but deliberately up the narrow wooden steps.  Two people could not pass on this stairway without turning sideways and squeezing by.  He kept one hand on his maroon colored monk's robes and bunched them up to avoid tripping over them.  As slowly as he walked, I was still far behind and needed to stop every ten steps to catch my breath and avoid fainting. We were at nearly fifteen thousand feet in Gurum Town, nearly three hours rocky drive from Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet.  With each step the altitude made my head pound and my legs burn and shake.  I was hurting, but I pushed on.  This quest was in the homestretch.

Will you be having your yak shit
fried or aldente?

I'd spent four weeks in remote Eastern Tibet  spending only one or two nights in each town where we worked.  We were running a large mobile eye hospital and churning out hundreds of surgeries from sun up to sundown.  When the surgeries were over we moved on.  Most nights were spent in ugly, box-shaped, piss yellow  Chinese government hotels.  The hotel rooms were the size of  jail cells and smelled like a combination of public restroom and old cheese.  Most of the villages were too small to have hotels. In these places I slept on floor mats with twenty other people a large community rooms.  The rooms were  heated by yak dung stoves that burned dried yak shit throughout the night.  The smell of pressed, burnt yak shit combined with the smells of twenty guys with high-altitude flatulence did not contribute to a restful sleep. Towards the end of the trip I couldn't handle the smells anymore and opted to put up a small tent in any nearby open field.  Despite the cold it was nice to sleep  under the cool, sweet Tibetan air.  Around midnight wild dogs and yaks would show up, growl and  run in nervous circles around the tent.  I had to do a quick survey of animal threats every time I left the tent to relieve my bladder.  This was still better than sleepless nights immersed in burnt yak shit and fart.

Buddha in the sky with diamonds

For four long weeks I lived like this surviving on packaged noodles, cans of Chinese beans,  hard Yak cheese and fresh Yak milk yogurt.  The yogurt was tasty, but  pulling  five inch Yak hairs out of the bowl before eating the yogurt ruined the culinary experience.  I ate, I survived, I lost twenty pounds.  I saw and experienced things that only a handful of people get to see in a lifetime.  I met children who, upon seeing the first white man in their lives, went screaming in horror yelling about ghosts.  I saw clouds that magically formed images of  Buddhas and magnificent deities in the sky. They would show up in the sky every day appearing and disappearing in two blinks of the eye. It took me less than a week to know that Tibet was not a normal place where normal things happened.  The Tibet I saw earned it's mystical reputation.  We heard about some things there that were so supernatural and so particular to Tibet, that the reluctance to talk about them to outsiders was inherent in Tibetan DNA and culture. The greatest example of this is the legend of the Tibetan White Snow Frog.

"White Snow Frog?  Nope,
never heard of it (wink, wink)."

Dr. Ken had somehow gotten the information about the Tibetan White Snow Frog from our translator.  Our translator was half Chinese, so we assumed it was either the Chinese part of him that was giving up Tibetan secrets or he was drunk and chatty on Tibetan Chaang.  After hearing about the White Snow Frog it became a mini-quest of ours to find one in the five weeks we would spend in Tibet.  Once our group of Tibetan hosts became aware of this quest we ran into nothing but hurdles, obstacles and misdirection in our search.  The more we found out about the Tibetan White Snow Frog, especially the female of the species, the more we understood why.  According to Tibetan legend  the fleshy back of the female White Snow Frog is the single most powerful "virilification" medicine known to man.  A single millimeter sized piece of White Snow Frog flesh has the ability, in both men and women, to make Viagra seem like a baby aspirin.  This is well documented in thousand year old Tibetan medicine texts.  Even more versatile than Viagra, it can be eaten or applied directly to the genitals.  The sickness from this frog flesh, if used without first  removing the toxins, is also well documented.  For us this made local intel on Tibetan White Snow Frog preparation just as important as finding this mythical amphibian--especially if it was going to be applied to the genitals. Our Western thinking had led us towards a very non-Buddha-like thought process.  Imagine the possibilities.  Why wouldn't you share this secret with the world?  To understand this you have to think like a Tibetan.  Every direction, every action and every intent of Tibetan thought is designed to keep a person on the long winding path towards Buddha-hood.  How does the Tibetan White Snow Frog fit into this path?  Follow this closely:  Tibetan White Snow Frog flesh is so powerful that under it's influence  two people will experience the most supernaturally blissful union and most pleasurable sexual experience possible to a human being.  In fact, the euphoria will be so powerful and so pure that the ultimate empty nature of sexual desire will be finally realized.  The striking clarity of this emptiness will cause a person to drop desirous activity like a bad habit.  Once desire is finally removed, it will no longer be an obstacle towards reaching the altruistic state of Buddha-hood.  Knowing a little bit about Buddhist theology, I'm sure its a little more complicated than this, but it remains a potentially life changing message.  The depopulation effect of too many people rising to Buddha-hood could be staggering.  Still, Dr. Ken and I were willing to verify the myth. We also recognized that in Buddhist theology, you must ask an important question three times in order to get an answer.  If you stop after first request, the question could be interpreted as a passing fancy and unworthy of attention.  If you only ask a question twice it shows lack of commitment.  The third time asking is the charm proving persistence and dedication to your curiosity.  We were completely shut down after asking at least thirty locals about the frogs.  We got the "not a clue" headshake each and every time our translator checked with a villager about the local Snow Frog stash.  This quest had officially failed. This was disappointing, but we weren't disheartened.  As practicing Buddhists we knew that if we didn't find a White Snow Frog now, there was still a good chance we'd find it in the next lifetime.

The endless lengths one will go to 
find a Tibetan White Snow Frog   

Each day in remote Tibet felt like the most memorable day in my middle-aged life.  Each day was more surreal and mystical than the next. But as great as the days were I had a sense that there would be a Tibetan experience of Indiana Jones-like proportion coming my way.  And it would happen before we left the land in the clouds. 


I had come to work in Tibet as much for the Buddhist experience as I had for the charity work (which a good Buddhist might argue is one and the same).  I was a practicing Buddhist for quite a while by the time I made it to Tibet.  When people  ask me how long I've been Buddhist I only answer: since creation.  When they roll their eyes I clarify that officially and technically it was in the 1990's.  I (along with seven hundred other Los Angelenos) participated in a formal Buddhist induction ceremony at UCLA's Pauly Pavillion given by Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness, The Dalai Lama.  There was blessed milk and blessed strings and Talismans given at the massive ceremony, but it was only a technical confirmation of what I'd already believed.  Belief is a very personal and powerful thing, but when it comes to religion, you choose your poison. I had chosen this one.


In Buddhism, much like in major league baseball, being in the presence of the great ones is a glorious and memorable experience.  You feel a transformation afterwards that can last anywhere from a week to a lifetime (depending upon the immenseness of the hero you  meet).  In Tibet, seeking out the great Buddhist masters is like standing on the playing field during the All-Star Game.  It is going to the source.  In the 1990's in Tsurphu Monestary, deep in the hills of Gurum Town, three hours drive from Lhasa, lived The Karmapa.  The Karmapa had been living in the snow-capped peaks of Eastern Tibet for nine hundred years.  You read that correctly:  nine hundred years.  He is currently in his seventeenth reincarnation.  The first Karmapa, around the time of 1190, was the first Buddhist master to leave clues to his followers that would lead them toward finding his reincarnation after he died.  This streamlining of the reincarnation process seemed to make sense to the other masters, including the Dalai Lama, who still practice this method today.  When we sought out the Karmapa he was only fourteen years old and in his training to become the spiritual leader for Tibetan Buddhists accross the world.   In the late 1990's Karmapa was the highest Buddhist master still living in Tibet.  In 1959, the Dalai Lama had escaped in the night as a young man and made his way to India to avoid assassination by Chairman Mao.  The Chinese wanted complete control of Tibet and figured that cutting off the head of the snake was the best way to get control of the body.  They were unsuccessful.  The second highest Tibetan master in Tibet is known as the Panchen Lama.  Once reincarnated and recognized by the Dalai Lama in 1989, the six year old Panchen Lama was taken to Beijing by the Chinese government and kept in custody ever since for "his own protection."  He is still there under lock and key.  This left the fourteen year old Karmapa as the spiritual leader of a nation that was being systematically, piece by piece, usurped by China .  He was free to roam about the beautiful monastery of Tsurphu and the surrounding beautiful peaks and forests of Gurum, but kept under military and secret watch.  It was the Chinese government's plan that he would never leave Tibet in this reincarnation's lifetime.  His captivity was the key towards taking ultimate control of the hearts and minds of Tibet--thus, control of the country.  This convoluted political mess must have been a pretty heavy concept for the fourteen year old reincarnated master.

The Karmapa

We figured there was a very slim chance that two wayward Westerners on a whim would get to sit down with The Karmapa without lots of strings being pulled and lots of advance notice.    The Chinese government was incredibly protective about foreigners interacting with The Karmapa.  Nothing good could come out of it as far as they were concerned.  Westerners would fill his mind with silly Western ideas and plots of escape and freedom.  That's what Westerners do.  Dr. Ken and I decided to make the trek to Tsurphu anyway and try to meet The Karmapa.  Four weeks of charity work in Tibet had to have made a decent sized deposit in our collective Karma banks. We had nothing to lose by trying.  We'd been regularly monitored by a low-level spy since we arrived in Tibet and deemed (as far as we knew) acceptable, well-behaved Westerners.  The spying on foreign charity workers is standard operating procedure.  We had done all that our Chinese government hosts has requested.  Nothing to fear from us.  Nobody tried to stop us as we left our translator and spy behind.  We walked to the city center of Lhasa and hired a local taxi to Tsurphu Monastery.


The road was decent for a change.  It wound around the foothills outside of Lhasa ever upward into the clouds.  Every few miles a twenty foot golden drawing of Buddha could be found on a large flat rock on the roadside.  In lieu of  a GPS this seemed to be the way to find Tsurphu.  Once at the great white gates of the monastery our taxi driver stopped and pointed forward.  Tsurphu was in front of us.  It was a giant village cut into a wide mountain plateau with a great red temple in the center.  As we left the car our driver parked and decided to follow behind us to see what we were up to.  Only a handful of Westerners make this trip.  I'm sure he was just curious, but four weeks of being spied upon made me twitchy and a little more paranoid than usual.  Dr. Ken and I decided to split off and walk different directions.  After successfully ditching the driver we met up at the great steps to the Temple.  We stood and stared at the steep pyramid-shaped steps that led inside.  I know I must have smiled the smile of someone whose dream was about to transition into reality.  This must have been the Buddhist equivalent of what it felt like to enter Yankee Stadium when Babe Ruth was still playing.  I knew that whatever happened next would stay with me forever.


You could feel and smell nine hundred years of existence in the walls of the great temple.  This was not just a tourist icon of a temple, but the center of Buddhist development for one of the most sacred cities in the world.  Hundreds maroon robed monks from ages five to eighty went about their day cleaning floors or sitting in class or chanting mantras that echoed from wall to wall.  We stood in the middle and watched all the activity circle around us.  It smelled of cold stone, sweet burning butter lamps and dusty  cloth.  We sat down to meditate and pray with some of the monks in the back.  When we were finished a   monk approached us.  He was old, but his closely cropped hair was still brown.  He spoke surprisingly good English and asked us why we were here.  We told him the story of our visit to Tibet and about our four weeks of travel and work through Eastern Tibet.  We told him that we'd worked in the prefecture of Kham and in the cities of Markam, Chamdo and others.  We talked for a few minutes, but it was the kind of conversation that only passes the time until you ask what is really on your mind.  I think it was Dr. Ken who finally said,

Tsurphu Monastery.  Where the
magic happens.....

"Sooooooo, Is The Karmapa here today?"
"Oh yes," said the monk.  "He lives here, you know.  He is very busy in study."
"Oh,"  said Dr. Ken, "I'm sure he's always busy. I understand, but please give him our regards."
"I will.  Thank you for coming to Tibet to help Tibetan people.  Too-jee-jay (thank you in Tibetan)."


And with that he placed his hands together, bowed his head and walked away.  We felt a little dejected for a moment, but only as dejected as you can feel in a nine hundred year old sacred temple of your dreams.  This may have not been the quest, but it was still a quest.  We'd made it Tsurphu.  It was unlikely we'd ever be back.  Not in this lifetime anyway. We wandered around the temple for another half hour in the shadow of twenty foot, hundred year old carved deities. This was a once in a lifetime chance to experience a living, breathing, ancient museum.   As we left the temple we saw the English speaking monk waiting on the steps.


"Tashi delek, doctors.  I am glad I found you.  Are you leaving to go back to Lhasa?"
"In a little while," I said.
"Can you spend a little more time at Tsurphu.  The Karmapa would like to meet you."
I don't think we could speak through the smiles on our faces.  It happened just like that.


The monk led us to the back of the temple through a long, dark, winding hallway.  I was thinking that we should be memorizing how many left and right turns we were taking, but then again finding our way out after getting lost in Tsurphu could be  fun.  We stopped at an old red door and waited.  An older monk met us here.  He looked at us for a minute trying to sort us out in the dark hallway.  He said,


"This way, this way."

Yak Burger:  Before

We climbed two flights of the narrow stairs.  At the top the old monk met a younger monk carrying two white ceramic tea cups.  He barked a few commands to the younger monk, pointed at us and grunted.  The younger monk nodded and squeezed past us down the stairs.  We went slowly up another flight of steps and into a room with small Chinese style table, yellow painted walls and old hand printed weathered Tibetan "thangkas" hanging on the walls.  The thangkas must have been over three hundred years old.  I motioned at them  with my eyes to Dr. Ken and he nodded his head.  We were both too excited to speak.  Do we even speak at all?  We'd never really considered the protocol when speaking to a nine hundred year old Buddhist master in the form of a fourteen year old Tibetan boy.  I never imagined we'd get this far.   The monk pointed to the floor and we obediently sat down at the small table.  Then he left through a second door in the back of the room

Yak Burger:  After

We sat silently in that room for about twenty minutes.  The room was losing its light as the mid-afternoon sun headed down through the cloudy sky.   The sun sets early in Tibet and driving back to Lhasa at nighttime was going to be twice as dangerous on the mountain roads. It didn't matter.  It was getting dark and we were hungry, but were staying in Tsurphu for as long as it took.  You don't drop a quest because you might miss dinner (though we had already discussed getting a legendary Yak Burger at the Snow Lion Pizza restaurant in central Lhasa. Highly recommended).


The old monk appeared at the door again and stared at us.  We stared back at him.  After about twenty seconds he motioned for us to follow him.  He walked into a short dark hallway and stopped at a door at the end.  As he walked to the door he stopped and pulled the second door open towards us.  There behind the door was a snarling Tibetan Mastiff on a short rope tied to a hook on the wall.   As soon as he saw us he went crazy.  He was vicious and he was angry.  The dog was about three feet tall with matted, dusty brown fur and he was pulling on the rope so hard that his front legs were off the ground.  He was growling and snapping a pair of foaming jaws into the air.  The rope that tethered him to the wall was exactly long enough to let an average sized person slip between the dogs crushing teeth and the doorway, but only if that person turned perfectly sideways.  Beyond the door was a narrow dark stairway.  The monk was a tiny old man.  He slipped by without regard to the dog, like he'd done this hundreds of times. He dissapeared up the steps beyond the dog.  I had a long string of white, bone prayer beads around my wrist.  I pulled them in close not only to pray, but to keep anything from dangling down low for the dog to bite.  I looked at Dr. Ken and said:




"Damn.  He looks angry."
"We better hurry up.  The longer we stand here the angrier he's getting.  I don't like the look of that rope either.  You go first."

"May I please know your intentions with The Karmapa before I chew your leg off?"

I quickly, instinctively decided to pass through with my back to the dog.  That way I could cling to the wall and avoid being castrated.  As I got close to him he went even crazier.  I turned sideways, slowly stuck my leg past the dogs nose and planted it on the first step past the door. I could feel the heat of his breath through my pants.  Then I pushed off hard with the leg still in the room and slid by quickly. I jammed myself up against the staircase as far away as possible.


"I"m in!"


I walked up the steps far enough to make room for Dr. Ken to follow.  He came flying through and slammed against the wall.  We whooped and high-fived.  The old monk was at the top of the next stairs looking both bored and impatient.  He walked through a door and we followed.  And just like that, there at the front of the large room was The Karmapa.  He was wearing a golden jacket over his robes and sitting in front of a simple red table.  Though he was only fourteen years old, the light, the shadows and the moment made him seem eight feet tall.  We walked slowly into the room, bowed and prostrated to The Karmapa and took a seat on the floor in front of him.  


stay tuned for part II.......................................

In the sacred hallows of the Master