Another Day in Derhadun

Yesterday we had a great day visiting two shedras in the Derhadun area. Khenpo has been giving away sets of his on Khenpo Zhenga at each of the monestaries or to lamas that he meets. We started the bus trip in Delhi with about 40 sets of the 13 volume book. We are down to just a few sets now.

The highlight yesterday was meeting the tulku of Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, a young boy born in January 2002 in Oakland, California to Tibetan parents. His name is Dorje Tashi. He's very sweet and gave blessings to each of us as we offered him kataks. He was very composed and sat with us while we had adult conversations around the table. His parents fed us all and were very kind to Khenpo, treating him as a revered guest. Khenpo had assisted Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche on the preparation of his book on Nyingma masters, and developed a close relationship with him during those months. At the end of the evening, Khenpo led a practice in the family shrine room.

Last night when we got back after dark, we found that the Princess had erected a 40'x40' sun shade tent. I believe this is a local Indian wedding style tent. It has no sides, and they laid out green exterior carpet inside and set up a PA system and throne inside. Late last night, most of us met in the shrine room at about 11:30 PM and Khenpo lead an hour long recap discussion of everything good and bad that had happened to us so far, to help us not forget. I'd love to recount more about what has happened, but frankly there has not been time to sit at a computer and especially it has been hard to get online.

Today after breakfast on the roof with the pilgrims, Khenpo gave a teaching in the tent to Tibetans while Hollee and I walked to the Internet cafe to try to submit our bag claims to British Airways and check email.

This morning I had a scare with the PowerBook. The internal drive started making a clicking sound right after I first got it hooked up to an external drive I had brought along to use for backups. Now it's not booting, and the internal drive has the only copies of all my photos (and some other people's photos as well). Keeping my fingers crossed I can get it to spin up again and make a copy of all the amazing images I've captured.

I need to stop now to go meet everyone at the bus so that we can go meet His Holiness the 41st Sakya Trizin, supreme head of the Sakya School.

Great Stupa

Today we slept in until 8 AM and then "team A" prepared breakfast. We ate organic oatmeal, eggs, and nan flat bread in a Tibetan tent that was set up next to the gonpa. Afterwards we did preliminary practice and then got ready to go on a tour of some local monestaries. The drive across Dehradun took about an hour, and the road was very bumpy. We arrived at the Tibetan colony and immediately could see the great stupa in Og Min Ogyen Mindrolling Monastery which is 185 feet tall and 100 square feet in width. It was the world's largest when built, and probably still is. I think it was started in 2000 and completed in 2002. It is called the World Peace Stupa and also The Great Stupa of Descent from Devaloka. At one point during the day a few of us were able to go inside and see the preparations for the drupchen, including a huge sand mandala that will be inside a special mandala shrine.

Thanks to Khenpo's ability to open doors for us we were able to meet several lamas while in the monestary complex including HH Karmapa, Tokup Rinpoche (a main disciple and attendant of Dilgo Kyentse, and Khenpo's first friend after he crossed the mountains from Tibet to Nepal); Kochen Rinpoche (abbot of the monestary); HE Minling Kenchen Rinpoche (current head of Nyingma Lineage); and Khandro Rinpoche (a very good English speaker and daugher of Mindroling Rinpoche, who just passed).

Getting kicked out of Cyber Cafe now!

At Khenpo's Retreat Center in Dehradun

We have arrived safely in Dehradun and are staying at the Dzogchen Shri Singha Thakchen DoNgag Choling Buddhist Retreat Center. This is a new retreat center that was built at Khenpo's direction by a Tibetan princess who lives in Deradun and who managed the entire development a few years ago. The land was given to Khenpo by Dodrupchen Rinpoche, who received it from HH Dalai Lama. I traveled with Khenpo to Los Angeles the first week that I met him in May 2002 and he took me to HH Dodrupchen's residence there. We met His Holiness and the princess and she showed us photos of the retreat center in progress. It was almost completed then. For the past six years a Russian student of Khenpo named Sveta has been the primary retreatant at the center. The land is about 2 acres total, in a long rectangular plot and is surrounded by a 5-foot high brick wall, plastered white. It's a 2-story building with a wide open roof patio. There are 16 bedrooms, about 6 bathrooms, and a separate building for the kitchen. On the second floor at one end is the temple, with enough room to hold about 30 practitioners and a very nice custom shrine cabinet. The floors in the temple and hallways are a beautiful terrazo utilizing multicolor stones. In the typical modern Indian style of construction it is built upon a reinforced concrete frame, with brick in-fill, reinforced concrete floors/ceilings, and cement plaster over the brick walls. Plumbing and electrical are all in the local style. The finishing has a Tibetan flavor. Lumber for framing is rarely used in India, probably because it is scarce and expensive compared to concrete, rebar and bricks. I'm writing from an Internet cafe that is only a few blocks walk from the Retreat Center, so I'll be able to write more while we are staying here about everything that has transpired over the past four days when I couldn't blog. We'll probably be here for at least three days which will be the longest we've stayed in one place since the pilgrimage started. So much has happened and we are trying to take a breather to recuperate and relax. I'm feeling much better now, but am still recuperating. Others have gotten cold symptoms, but everyone seems to be holding up pretty well. I'll write more soon!

Live from Himachal Pradesh

Wow, there are so many things happening, it will be hard to recount much of what transpired since the last posting. Also, I have some really amazing photos, but finding an Internet Cafe that will allow me to connect my laptop to their network is challenging.

I forgot to mention in my earlier posts that Julian Leuthold from LA was very kind to loan me an old 12" PowerBook G4 he had sitting around, so that I could leave my more precious MacBook back in the States. Thank you Julian! So far it is working amazingly well for downloading my photos and preping them for the blog. I was also able to connect to Wi-Fi networks in London and Delhi. Hopefully in our next city I'll be able to connect it to the Internet so that I can upload some photos.

We got on the bus at the Tibetan Refugee District in Delhi just after midnight two nights ago. Our bus is a fairly modern model with reclining seats but no air conditioning. The air quality in Delhi and much of Himachal Pradesh especially on all the highways makes LA smog look like a clear day. My lungs really took a beating, and that in combination with sleep-deprivation pushed my immune system down to the point where I got some pretty nasty symptoms, fever, coughing, headaches, runny nose and sore throat. I slept 18 hours last night, took Cipro for my bronchitis in the morning and later in the day visited a Tibetan Doctor. I'm feeling a bit better now. I guess the lesson is that one needs to do whatever possible to get as much rest as possible when traveling this way. Yesterday we arrived at around 6 PM and I showered, set all my equipment batteries on recharge, and went straight to bed.

Everyone else did a little shopping and exploring the town. This morning I felt really awful with a high fever and nasty cough, deep in my lungs. Kunchok and Justin shared the room with me,. Hopefully I'm not contagious, but I have not been coughing much because it hurts too much.

Justin bought a lot of medicine for people if they got sick, and he was very kind to offer me cough syrup and lozenges and pain killers. Between all the rest and medicine I took, I think it is helping. I intend to get some rest tonight during 4 hour bus ride and then at the next stop. Today we all had breakfast together. We all ate the same thing, cheese omelet, white toast, and some kind of Indian-style potato dish. After that we split up. Some of us walked down the hill to the actual city area, which turned to be quite a trek down rugged rocky foot path that was lined by mani stones and cows and had beautiful views of the mountains and town below. The mountain peaks rise precipitously over the town, and appear to be only about 10 miles away as the crow flies, looking very close. They are still covered in quite a bit of snow, but the weather in the area has been unseasonably warm in February, after a very cold winter, so we lucked out. It felt like it was approaching 80 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, and it stayed in the 50s at night. It is hazy and by mid-afternoon the smoke from all the cooking fires just fills the air with particulate. The walk down the hill was arduous for me in my weakened condition. I lagged behind and probably complained a little... sorry to everyone who was with me (we took a cab back up the hill later on).

We visited a temple office that is in charge of Dharmapala offerings and made an offering. Then we went to the beautiful Dharmapala temple next door and made numerous Dharmapala offerings in a secret room and wrapped up the session with the Dharmapala offering in English from The Buddha Path. That was totally amazing. Then they served us tea out on a patio with majestic views of the temple with the mountains as the backdrop.

My photos from today would thousands of words, and the bus is going to leave in a few minutes, so I should head back up the hill to the hotel. Hopefully I'll be able to update earlier posts with photos as I find the time.

Our Passage to India

The flight to London was long but quite comfortable in a 747-400. I had a window seat where I could capture some shots for my aerial photography hobby. Amy, a young woman from New Zealand sat in the aisle seat. The flight was not very full, and the seat between us was empty. Amy had that characteristic unpretentious friendliness of the Kiwis, with a disarming personality. This was her first major international trip. She was landing in London to meet a friend and possibly get a job and spend a few months there. I told her a little about the pilgrimage and Buddhism and my own experiences in England and she shared some things about her life. Whenever I meet someone young who is that bright, I can’t help but think that here is someone who has the ability and time to really learn Dharma in this lifetime. The Dzogchen Lineage needs a lot more people like that to develop a fascination with learning and teaching Dharma.

At Heathrow, I was able to pay to get briefly online using a paid service. Also at Heathrow, behind the scenes apparently British Airways was having a melt down of their baggage system and our bags didn’t make it into the cargo hold of our jet. Once at Delhi, we spent hours trying to sort it out and report the missing bags as did about 100 other passengers on our flight that also had their bags left in England. We finally were able to exit through customs and Kunchok Lama was patiently waiting for us there. He had arranged a large taxi van to give us a ride to the hotel, located in the thriving Tibetan settlement area of the city. This van ride was for many of us our first introduction to the amazing and unique sights, smells and sounds of India.

In Delhi we all met in Khenpo’s room and began to plan out the trip, starting with resolving some of the financial issues. We added up the donations for the offering fund and greatly rejoiced in just how much was raised! After our morning meetings, we ate a quick breakfast at the hotel. Then we took a foot tour of the Tibetan settlement, visiting shops and temples. We ended up in a Tibetan restaurant where we had a meal that consisted of sweet Tibetan tea, momos, sausages and Tibetan Thukpa noodle soup. Later we met our bus drivers and their mid-sized bus, and they drove us to the Capitol where we took a long walk and plopped down in the shade on a nice lawn to have tea and snacks. We also played games with some of the pre-teen boys who attached themselves to us. One was a whirling dart that you shoot up with a rubber band stick, and it slowly spins to earth where you try catch it, and the other was a kind of improvised volleyball with a light ball. The toys, tea and snacks were purchased from a few of the many street vendors who work that tourist area.

We are currently not certain we’ll be able to get our bags from British Airways, but we are hopeful and praying for a good result. Some of us already started to buy replacements for clothing and toiletries that are in those bags, just so that we could get cleaned up for our trip to Dharamsala. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is teaching there tomorrow, so we are hoping to attend part of those teachings.

I've been taking a lot of photos, and I aspire to edit in a few of the great shots I've gotten into these blogs once I can get more time on my computer.

Late Night Los Angeles

My root Buddhist teacher, Dzogchen Khenpo Choga Rinpoche made a request to me when he heard I would attend the Buddhist Pilgrimage he had organized for early 2008 to India and Nepal. He asked me to write online about my experiences during the trip and post photos of what we encounter. I believe he was aspiring that his other students around the globe could follow along on the pilgrimage from afar, and that they would then have the opportunity to make aspiration prayers for the perpetuation of the Dzogchen Lineage at the same times as we are visiting each of Buddha’s four sacred places as well as the many other places that are revered by Buddhists that we’ll visit during the pilgrimage.

I created this blog to help fulfill my teacher’s aspirations, and to hopefully inspire some others who would like to be traveling with us, or who plan to make a similar pilgrimage in the future. I called the blog "Path Buddha” since I would like this blog to focus on Dharma. Khenpo Choga teaches that Dharma for me as a student of the enlightenment process is only these following five types of my own positive thinking: renunciation, compassion, faith, loving-kindness and wisdom. In his remarkably effective English shorthand, Khenpo defines Dharma within one's present moment thinking as, “my five positive thinking, only, only, only.” Dharma for me is also synonymous with my personal Path Buddha. I'll certainly do my best to focus on the Dharmic aspects of my experiences, but I'll also write about the people, places, transportation, accommodations, food, shopping, and other experiences that arise during the tour.

If you’d like some background on the pilgrimage, you can read this page that I published on the Dzogchen Lineage website to announce the pilgrimage.
http://www.dzogchenlineage.org/pilgrimage.html
It mentions some of the stops of the tour as well as other details about the offerings being made during the pilgrimage.

It's after 1AM here in Los Angeles, the day of our flight to India. In 12 hours I'll be at LAX. A Sangha member in LA asked that I write a little about the food during the trip, so I'll mention that I'm staying in Altadena tonight with Alexi's sister Nicole and signifigant other Lorna. They made a wonderful dinner that included lentil curry, quinoa, steamed greens, tomato salad with yummy homemade dressing and a chocolate-covered frozen coconut sorbet dessert.

Back to packing and then sleep.