Temple Tours
Trip Start
Feb 03, 2008
1
17
33
Trip End
Aug 16, 2009
Tongren, Qinghai,
China
Thursday, September 25, 2008
He calls to the ruby-robed monk in the Wutun Temple's ticket booth by the driveway. "Hey brother!" It sounds like he calls out, and then a stream of Tibetan dialect I have no hope of following.
I stand in the mud on the driveway and look around while the monk and the cabbie talk.
I'm in a big parking lot area. Against the hill to my right is a bright stupa (called a chorten here, I'm told). Its many cones reach up to the overcast sky. Its faces are a riot of gold, silver, blue, white and red. On the left there are smaller, more sedate cream-colored chorten. These all look fairly new or at least rehabilitated, but directly in front of me is a yellow-walled enclosure I know is not from the current era.
The monk comes to me and talks in a mixture of English and Mandarin. The cabbie wants me to call him when I want to go the six kilometers back to Tongren. I smile and show my cell phone to the driver. I've already got his number. He waves and takes off and I thank the monk profusely.
He's not much taller than I am, and has a worried expression on his face
The main courtyard at Wutun Upper
. I take it he's trying to remember how to speak English. For the 26 RMB entrance fee, I hadn't expected a personal guide, but I'm the only visitor today and the monk needs to unlock the chapels. He walks through the gate and into the front courtyard of the monastery and I follow several paces behind him.We pass through the yellow walls into an open-ceilinged corridor with several smaller open hallways leading off to the left and right. The monk slows down and looks back over his robed shoulder, his shaved forehead wrinkles in the concentration of remembering the words.
"Monk's houses," he says, waving at the hallways.
At the end of the corridor the monastery opens up into a grand courtyard with impressive buildings on three sides and the roofs of more behind. I see red cloth disappearing behind the buildings. Other monks, perhaps.
We pick our way across the puddled brick-paved courtyard. The monk is wearing yellow cloth slippers and takes care not to wet them.
We go to the green and black exterior of one of the main chapels. Huge, careful paintings adorn the anteroom to the chapel. The monk unlocks the intricate red and gold doors and lets me look in at a giant statue of the Buddha. It's sculpted in a more mainstream Chinese style than I had expected. Carved dragons curl around each of the two pillars in front of the idol. The monk lets me take pictures and ask questions. This statue is new, he says. The temple has obviously had good luck in recent years to have this new chapel and the new stupas outside
Buddha statue at Wutun Upper
. I wish Dan were here taking pictures instead of sick in our hotel room. Then, he takes me to a big hall, with many low cushions and benches. This is where all of the 130 monks will congregate, he said. It's dark in this hall. Wheels dripping satin fabric shaped like neckties hang from the high ceiling to a level where I have to duck. Light comes in from high above and it takes quite a while before I can see correctly.
The monk points at some religious paintings on the walls. These are called thangkas and this monastery is famous for them.
"This one, 700 years old." He says. "Zhe ge. Also. 700."
So old, I say. I stare at them. Their colors are faded a bit, their edges are ragged. Swathes of red silk frame them.
"Cultural Revolution," the monk says. "Now, only two."
What happened to the monastery during the Cultural Revolution, I ask. During the1960s, China launched the "Cultural Revolution." In this time there was a lot of anti-religious, anti-traditional sentiment and many or most monasteries, temples and museums were sacked or damaged.
"The village people, they have waiss here." He tells me.
"Waiss?" I ask.
"Raiss?" he tries. Shrugs his shoulders and walks off into the gloom of the chapel. I follow him, trying to figure out what Waiss is. He stops behind the statue of the Buddha, and dips his hand into a big chalice. He takes his fist and holds it up to the light.
"Oh, rice!" I say
700 year old thangka
. He smiles for the first time. "Rice" he repeats, mimicking my pronunciation. Apparently the villagers stripped the ancient buildings and used them to store their grain. Better than burning it, I think to myself but don't say to the monk.
We go outside again and he unlocks a third door for me. This time there's a new, plate glass door protecting the inside chapel. We take off our shoes to go into the carpeted interior. This is a chapel devoted to Yellow Hat Buddhism, he tells me. He points out framed photos of lamas and tells me their names.
The tour is over, the other buildings are out of bounds for visitors, he says. Now he can take me to a local house where the residents paint thangkas. I really wanted to see the inside of one of the houses, so I say yes and walk in expecting a sales pitch.
The house is built on the courtyard scheme, with eight- or nine-foot mud brick walls around the exterior. The interior wooden house follows the contour of the wall, leaving a grassy area in the middle for flowers and fruit trees. The monk lets us in the front door and knocks on an interior window. A man wearing big glasses opens it and we look in at him and a teenage apprentice using tiny brushes to painstakingly paint curliques on a canvas of the Buddha.
I watch them for a few seconds but the monk beckons me to a door in the back of the courtyard. There's a small gallery here, with huge thangkas showing all manners of Buddhist figures and designs
Village house door
. I can't really grasp them all. My reading about Buddhism hasn't prepared me for all the different personages and designs. Because they're hand-painted with really fine brushes, each thangka takes a really long time to make. I ask about a small one, smaller than a sheet of letter paper. The monk says it should take about a week to do. The bigger ones can take more than a month. I am impressed, and bring us into the phase that we both knew would follow: the sell.
Eventually, after some minor bargaining-It didn't really feel right to bargain with a monk-I buy a small thangka with Sanskrit words written on it.
A few pictures later, the monk and I leave the house and he points me toward the Lower Wutun monastery, down the road a little ways. He also smiles a little and tells me not to call the taxi driver; instead I can just wait on the road for a cheaper taxi. They come pretty often. I thank him and start walking.
I planned to walk to the Lower Wutun and also to another one across the valley that the monk had said was about 20 minutes away. But what happened next curtailed my plans but expanded my enjoyment of the day.
The Lower Wutun monastery was also building new stupas outside, and had an impressive row of golden revolving prayer wheels along the roadside wall. I walked down the driveway and smiled at the woman shoveling cement for the new stupa. She looked very surprised to see me but gave me a big smile and a wave anyway
Golden roofs Longwu temple
. This monastery had no ticket booth so I just walked in the whitewashed entrance and down to the main chapel buildings. Again, on both sides there were corridors I knew must lead to the monks' residences, but this monastery was built on a hillside, so the layout was more open. I saw a teenage monk coming out of a door eating something from a plastic package. Potato chips, maybe.
He hurried down the dirt driveway and joined a group of boys in monks' robes kicking a bottle around the courtyard like a football. They seemed to range in age from about eight years old to about fifteen, though the smaller boys could have been older than I gave them credit for.
The courtyard was edged by a trio of tall, white walled buildings. Their green doors were all shut, however, and I stood looking at them unsure of whether they were open and trying to get an angle to take a picture of the boys without them noticing. I heard someone walking behind me and turned to see a monk in his 30s carrying an umbrella. He greeted me and stopped beside me to look at the building too.
We started to chat about where I was from and what monasteries I'd seen already that day. I mentioned that I bought a thangka and he told me he was the art instructor for the boy monks. He taught them how to make the thangkas. I showed him mine, and he seemed unimpressed. Oh well, can't impress an art teacher with the cheapest painting, I suppose.
He smiles a bit and invites me to see some of the thangkas that he has made
Thangka house
. The temple chapels won't be opening till later, he says. Everyone is at lunch now.
We walk back to the monk's residences and I consider the wisdom of going to a strange man's house all alone, but I figure that he's a monk, not much taller than me and pretty skinny. And, I have a good feeling about it.
This monk doesn't speak any English but has infinite patience to listen to my bad Chinese. We chat about life and science in America as we enter his home. In his garden he has a big mirror-mosaic dish that he says you can put a kettle on and on a sunny day boil water with. He seems really surprised that we don't have these in the US. I tell him about solar panels and he laughs in delight. He's never heard of them before.
The thangkas he has made are different from the paintings I saw at the Upper Wutun monastery. Those ones were only painted, but this monk, since he's a teacher, I guess, has some embroidered ones, some appliqué ones. He also has some clay sculptures he has made.
We sit crosslegged on his floor after I look at the art and chat about life and a little bit about Buddhism and different religions. I lack a lot of the vocabulary for this, but he is patient and we have a pretty fluid conversation for about an hour.
He has a small English-Tibetan phrasebook some traveler left him a while ago (he calls the traveler a "foreign friend," a nice way to describe a foreigner). Unfortunately, since he doesn't know English, he can't find the sections he needs
Teenage apprentice
. I find the religion section for him and help him pronounce the words within. He takes notes and suddenly I've got the most unlikely English student of my career. After awhile I glance at my watch and realize that the afternoon is almost gone. I need to get back to check on Dan, so I say goodbye to the monk. I had a really unexpectedly wonderful time chatting with him. I leave feeling like the bad events of the morning have had their perfect counterbalance.
I get back to the hotel and Dan is feeling well enough to leave the room for a walk. We go through a market street and watch people in traditional Tibetan garb buying fruit and selling socks.
In the morning, as long as Dan feels well enough to travel, we're going to set off and try to make the afternoon train from Xining to Yinchuan, in Ningxia province. Goodbye, Tibet.
* * *
What it cost:
Taxi from Tongren to the Wutun Si: 15 RMB
Taxi from Wutun Si to Tongren: 2 RMB (guess I didn't bargain very well the first time)
Entrance to Wutun upper: 26 RMB
Thangka: From 200 RMB up
