Sichuan’s Tibetan Corner, Outside of Time
Jeffrey Lau for The New York Times
A monk prepares a simple meal after worship.
By KIT GILLET
Published: December 28, 2012
HIGH on the Tibetan plateau, a few dozen red-robed monks of the Lhagang
Monastery sat facing one another, rocking back and forth as they chanted
with faces turned upward, to the heavens.
Multimedia
Jeffrey Lau for The New York Times
Novice monks at the Lhagang Monastery playing a version of basketball between classes.
Jeffrey Lau for The New York Times
Dhondoup, one of the young monks at the monastery.
In the flickering candlelight of the monastery’s dim main chamber, they
then built small pyramids of incense to place throughout the building,
adorned with golden Buddhas, and at the center of Tagong.
Outside, under the harsh noon sun, the monks mingled with the mainly
Buddhist and ethnically Tibetan residents of the frontierlike town,
population 8,000, which despite its makeup is in Sichuan Province,
China.
“We are all Tibetan,” said Ba Ding, a local shopkeeper. “We do get a few
Han Chinese tourists passing through, and we are friendly enough with
them,” he added unconvincingly.
I had been in Tagong just an hour, after arriving in a small, dusty van
that had bounced along rutted roads for the three-hour journey from the
nearby city of Kangding, its engine whining as we ascended and descended
steep mountain passes.
After checking into one of the colorful guesthouses across the central
square from the monastery, I had simply followed the brightly dressed
monks into the main hall to witness one of their several daily worship
sessions.
Tagong, whose altitude of about 12,000 feet makes it one of the highest
towns in the world, offers an unfettered window onto the Tibetan people
and culture. The region was part of Tibet until 1955, and its remoteness
— to get there, you must take a single winding road several hours from
the bustling provincial capital, Chengdu — has insulated it against
significant change. The place has a closed-off feel, with a slow-placed
existence that revolves around the major Tibetan monastery and its 60 or
so resident monks. And it was easier than traveling to the Tibet
Autonomous Region, which in addition to the visa and passport required
to visit China, also requires a special entry permit that doesn’t
promise unrestricted travel.
That sort of unfettered access was my reason for going, and two hours
into my stay it was clear that Tibetan culture and Buddhism remain at
the heart of life in Tagong, albeit with slight tweaks to accommodate
the few thousand foreign visitors who make the journey each year: a few
guesthouses, yak-cheese pizza and arranged horse-trekking trips into the
plains outside of town.
Tagong itself is just a blip on the map: a stretch of ornate buildings
leading to the gates of the monastery, all surrounded by endless peaks
and plains. A few minivans leave or arrive throughout the day, offering
seats to destinations as far away as Chengdu for about 120 renminbi
($19.50 at 6 renminbi to the dollar), but the rest of the time a horse
being ridden up the main street is as likely a sight as a passing car.
Once in the recesses of Lhagang Monastery you can see monks devoting
themselves to their faith with a calm assurance; across a wide river
that runs alongside the town young apprentice monks study Buddhism at a
monastic school; and up on a nearby hill, a handful of hermit monks live
in silent worship.
“We have over a hundred young novices studying Buddhism who will
eventually join us in becoming monks,” Dhondoup, a fresh-faced
25-year-old monk said to me in English as we stood on a shaded platform
overlooking the courtyard of the monastery after the noon service.
In front of us, part of the monastery was undergoing construction to
house these new recruits; a new two-story dormitory was being added.
Bags of cement lay within the grounds, and amid the debris were dented
10-foot-high prayer wheels, their Tibetan text covered in dust.
There has been a monastery in Tagong since A.D. 652, when the Tibetan
king Songtsen Gampo built the last of a series of 108 monasteries he had
ordered constructed across his kingdom. (It is said to be where his
Chinese bride had stopped on her way to their wedding in 640.) Over the
next millennium and a half the monastery rose and fell in importance,
changing allegiance several times to different Buddhist sects before its
destruction during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). In the 1980s work
began on rebuilding the monastery, and today’s temple is slowly
returning to some of its former glory and size.
As I wandered the halls and chambers, staring up at the many gold Buddha
statues surrounding the wall, the newness of the physical structure
seemed immaterial. This visit was more about the monks than the
monastery.
Though all Tibetan Buddhists, they were a varied group. In one of the
side reliquaries off the main hall, an aged monk smiled as I entered,
and led me around the small, candlelit room where he has lived for the
last three years, sleeping on a small cot. Stopping at one point, he
showed me a picture of himself next to the Dalai Lama. “We are all
Buddhist and he is our leader,” he said to me in Chinese.
Later in the afternoon I spotted a group of young monks playing
basketball using a hoopless telephone pylon as a net on a grassy field
across the town’s river, their robes billowing around them. There was no
bridge in sight, but I removed my shoes to cross the ice-cold,
knee-deep water. On the other bank I was quickly invited to join the
game.
“We try to play basketball every day before our 6 p.m. studies,” said
Laozang Tsere, a gregarious 18-year-old novice born in a nearby village.
A few minutes after I joined the game, a bell sounded. The novices
quickly checked that their robes were on straight before heading back to
their studies.
Class was in session for an even younger group of devotees in the main
hall of the Sakya Monastic School, a smaller version of the main
monastery, where boys sat crossed-legged on long rows of dark-red
cushions, each facing another student. They debated Buddhist texts,
gesturing to make their points. Dhondoup had explained to me that the
novices study the finer points of Buddhist logic, philosophy and
discourse in the hillside school for seven years before being allowed to
join their brethren in Lhagang.
Sometime during the debates, I sneaked out of a side door and headed up
a small path through a forest of multicolored prayer flags to the
simple hillside homes of several hermit monks. From their dwellings the
town below appeared even smaller, dwarfed by vast snowy peaks in the
distance. In the foreground there was little but wide expanses of
pastureland and other small hills adorned with colorful Buddhist prayer
flags, placed there over the years by the monks and townspeople.
As I arrived outside of one door, a hermit beckoned me in, and, without
uttering a word showed me around his small home, filled with Buddhas.
Most of the room was taken up by the statues and Tibetan texts, with a
small curtained-off area for him to sleep in. Back in town, the streets
were emptying as the evening drew near; soon the monks — who must rise
for 6 a.m. prayers — and locals had gone home. Viewed from this town
perched on the roof of the world, with little in the way of light
pollution save from a few guesthouse windows, the stars that glittered
above the monastery were nothing short of majestic.
That evening I dwelled on the seemingly simple lives of the monks: their
faith, their warmth and their absence of 21st-century distractions. It
may be facile to assume that they had found fulfillment, but it was hard
to shake the impression that I’d met a group of people who, having long
ago discovered a few of the secrets to a content life, existed outside
of time.
The following morning, as I rode in a different but equally dusty van
out of town, the driver stopped at the highest pass, removed a stack of
papers from his glove compartment and threw them into the air, letting
them flutter away as he muttered a Buddhist prayer. Some drifted back
down the mountain toward Tagong. And with that we drove on.
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