In 1959, His Holiness, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama also “escaped” from the “reds,” in his case, the Chinese. Once both the political and spiritual leader of Tibet, his Holiness now lives in Dharamasala, India. He can still see the Himalayas from this refuge. His Tibetans continue to revere him. And I fell in love with him, at a fundraiser for Tibet in San Francisco in 1991, when, as I always say, “He rearranged the molecules of my heart.”

 

Both my husband and I dreamed of visiting his homeland, and so there we were, one midmorning in October 1993, in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital city. As part of a group led by Jock Montgomery, we found ourselves in front of Ramoche, both a temple and a monastery. The road we had taken to get there was dark and narrow. Ramoche is second only in importance to the Jokhang, also in Lhasa, Tibet’s most sacred, magnificently enormous temple.

 

“Ramoche was originally built in the 7th Century when Buddhism was beginning to take root in Tibet,” Jock told us. “The Chinese destroyed 6,000 temples and shrines during their 1959 take-over, and this one has only recently been restored. Its Abbot, Lobsang Sherpa, is a Rinpoche, one among a handful of the highly revered teachers capable of keeping Tibetan Buddhism alive.”

 

Ramoche might have been restored but when we were visiting its exterior was unadorned and unprepossessing. Current photos show significant embellishment.

 

Inside the modest-sized temple, shafts of sunlight—from one, high-up east-facing window—illuminated soaring, red-painted columns. Decorative red and gold hangings fluttered from the ceiling, perhaps 50 feet above us. Thankas—religious paintings on fabric—adorned the white plaster walls. Statues of Buddha were all around. We were in a crucible of light, shimmering with red, blue, green, white and gold. Lit yak butter lamps glowed.

 

The memory of the pungent, slightly sour smell of yak butter takes me back there. Monks, perhaps 80 strong, in deep red robes, are chanting and I think of how the Dalai Lama always says he sees himself in his dreams as “just a simple monk.” Ramoche’s simple monks are sitting in two rows, facing each other, on cushioned wooden platforms in the middle of the hall. After immersing myself in their deep, two-toned vibration, I can hear that one monk is responsible for setting and altering the pitch. He could perpetuate the chant forever, it seems, despite the younger monks’ greater interest in us, representatives from the far away among them here and now.

 

The monks break—to fortify themselves with yak butter tea—and then resume chanting. They now count among them my husband, whom I often think was a monk in some former life. Seated at the end of a row closest to the wooden entrance doors, head bowed, eyes closed, he is repeating, sotto voce, Om Mani Padme Hum, the mantra in every Tibetan’s heart. It means, in my understanding: may the Universal open my heart into all-embracing consciousness.

 

I station myself near the back of the hall. The Abbot is sitting beneath the monastery’s main altar, about 30 feet away. Aged and small, hunched deep into his robes and solemn concentration, his shaven head is glistening in a sunbeam. Clasping my hands against my red-vest over a light tan jump-suit, I close my eyes.

 

There is peace here.

 

When I open my eyes, it is to see the Abbott smiling at me. Could it be? I close my eyes again. This time, when I open them, the Abbot is still smiling: at me. My heart floods. Tears of happiness spill down my cheeks. I smile back. No, I grin. Were this not a monastery, I would laugh out loud.

 

I am embraced by the same radiant consciousness as when the Dalai Lama, standing right in front of us, smiled at both my husband and me in San Francisco. We both cried tears of joy then. And, on many following occasions, we have learned how irrepressible is his laughter.

 

Surely both ‘monks,’ the Abbot of Ramoche and His Holiness, are bodhisattvas, enlightened beings who have chosen to reincarnate in order to bring us—stragglers all—along.

 

After continuing to stand alone, yet knowing myself to be encompassed, I look for my husband. I think the group has left, but will learn later that Jock took them into Ramoche’s inner sanctum. The second most famous statue of Buddha in Tibet resides here. Buddha is called Sakyamuni to his followers, meaning the Sage of the Sakya clan. Covered with gold, this Sakyamuni statue is of immense material and historical value. Broken in two by the Chinese, the bottom half of the statue was discovered in a factory in China, the top half in a garbage heap in Lhasa. It is now reassembled into a whole.

 

Alone, I walk out of the doors at the back of the monastery and stand looking out. The sun, because of our 12,000-foot altitude, is shining with a heightened intensity. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. The monastery’s courtyard, surrounded by high stone walls, is filled with rubble and dust, the earth hard packed. Directly ahead, 100 yards away, is an archway cut out of the wall.

 

Beyond the arch is an unpaved road. Two medium-height, young Tibetan men are walking along, going right. I see them in silhouette. They are both wearing faded black pants and jackets, their thick hair short and dark. A thin black dog has his nose to the ground, tail up.

 

“So, this is Life,” says the still, small voice within. It resonates with unfamiliar certainty but then I had never experienced a moment in life as if for the first time—Life Itself.

 

Leaving the monastery’s courtyard through its archway, I turn right into the road. I find my group at a crowded outdoor market selling simple household goods, barley, and root vegetables.   

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Life in Lhasa is very different now. When the Han Chinese, an ethnic group, were sent to Tibet their mandate was to transform the culture. Mandarin became required in schools. The Tibetan language was no longer taught. And Lhasa was rebuilt. Its traditional wooden houses on narrow streets have been replaced by modern, concrete apartments lining paved avenues. Burdened yaks no longer trudge here, and Tibet has become an increasingly geophysically and politically important land. The lives of 750 million people in Asia and China are now at risk from Tibet’s declining glacial flows and water polluted by erosion.

 

Historically, living in and around the Himalayan range of mountains has never been easy: it is not a naturally hospitable place—neither for its people nor animals. It is this challenge, however, which I believe has created a spirituality in the Tibetan people which, despite ongoing oppression, expresses itself in a profound joy for Life Itself.  

 

Why travel? You never know when you might have an experience which becomes lodged in your soul.