What I'm doing here

It's now my last week in Dharamsala, which is hard to believe.

So what have I actually been doing, a number of you have asked? Well, my six weeks here are readily divisible into three equal parts: 1. Meditation retreat 2. Purification ritual (getting sick) 3. Ordinary life. Since I already posted about #1, here are a few comments about the others.

The purification ritual consisted of lots of diarrhea, no appetite, low energy, and occasionally throwing up. It would come and go. I was pretty miserable only for 2-3 days at a time, but it kept coming back. I think I picked up some bug within the first few hours I was in India. I ate almost nothing for about 10 days, so I hope I lost some weight! Eventually though I went to the doctor and he put me on an antibiotic diet for a week. That seemed to pretty much wipe out all the living things in my gut.

I still worked during this. For all of April I've been volunteering at the Environment and Development department of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. They are nearing completion of a big (300 pp) report on Tibet's environment and economic development, the first major assessment since 2000. They needed a native speaker to turn sentences like this one:

"In 2000 China, in a government official report, made an estimate that 1,20,300 migrants moved to Lhasa, attracted by central subsidies, based on the growth-pole theory of economic development with massive urbanisation that will have major impacts on the countryside, and result in more inequality and marginalisation of Tibetans."

into better English. (I made that one up - it's a little extreme but parts of it do read something like that.) Really, their English is very good, considering how different a language Tibetan is. Tibetan doesn't have any punctuation, or even spaces between the words. I'm learning a lot about Tibet doing this report - but it does feel an awful lot like going to work! They work here on Saturdays, and I'm trying to get as much done as possible so I've been working six days a week too. Still, I'm only on page 150.

My other main activity is a couple of Buddhist philosophy classes. One of them is on the Four Noble Truths, with an old Tibetan lama. It is a fun class...mainly because he has a great demeanor, smiling at the most inopportune times (like when discussing being reborn in hell), and he has a fun rapport with the translator who is a wizened and down-to-earth English woman. The other class is about the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, a series of ancient Buddhist texts. This one is the second-slowest class I've ever taken. It's interesting but after one month we've finally gotten through "the preliminaries" (the biographies of the authors, why we are studying these texts and not others, various consequential and inconsequential details about the different schools of Buddhist thought) and just in the last session we started tackling the title, syllable-by-Sanskrit-syllable. We're getting something close to what monks and nuns learn in a monastery. The nun who is teaching it keeps talking about how condensed this course is, being spread over six months every year for a period of five years (!) In the monastery they spend a year on what took us a month.

Anyway..
I've done a little other volunteering, like teaching an English class (with no books, just pure improv) for a week and doing a bit of tutoring. Of course the best parts are the informal interactions with Tibetans and locals. Eating dinner (rice and lentils) and watching TV (Animal Planet) at the boss's house, talking with Tibetan guys about the karma needed to meet women, sitting in on a monks' debate session, talking with refugees who walked over the Himalayas to get here, debating sacred cows. (Literally.) I'm still finding that very open-hearted character in the Tibetans that got me interested in their culture and religion in the first place.