A Tibetan Walkabout That Didn’t Happen and the Pre-destined Encounter in The Land Down Under

A Tibetan Walkabout That Didn’t Happen and the Pre-destined Encounter in The Land Down Under

When I planned my 6-month off, the second destination (the first was Siberia) I wanted to be was Tibet. I concocted a plan how I would spend a month or perhaps two there, roaming the highland, staying with local Tibetans, tended goats or sheep, then trekking to North India. Yeah you can tell this plan has the smell of Brad Pitt’s Seven Years in Tibet all over it. But more than just a pure adventure, I wanted to be in this deeply spiritual and religious land to relearn Buddhism.

During the past few years, all of my religious experience have been Judas, Christian and Islamic faiths. Traveling and living in Europe have exposed me to more churches than I could ever imagine. I walked in and out of churches like I went shopping. Churches had became parts of my daily routine that I stopped seeing them. When it was too cold outside, I hid in the church. When I wanted to hear the carols, I went to the church. Long lived the Saints for my public holidays. When it was time for Christmas, wherever I was in Europe, it was huge celebration. Europeans knew how to celebrate their Christmas with style. I even attended Christmas masses in the Vatican and Bethlehem. Sometime in between, I became interested in the Muslims after to the wonderful year living with a Muslim community in Sarajevo, my interacting with the super-friendly Turks and people from the Middle East and my newfound fondness to anything Middle Eastern and Arabic. You can’t have two without the other. You can’t talk about the Muslims and not mention the Jews. You can’t say you’re interested in the Middle East without knowing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You can’ t visit the holiest place for the Christian without setting foot in Jerusalem, the holy place of the Jews.

On this trip, I wanted to be in touch with another faith far removed from the Abrahamic religions, a faith very similar yet long lost to me.

Chinese

Then came the Chinese and the forever complicated, nonsensical bullshit we labeled politics. They ruined my chance of a future “awakening”. I found out that I could not freely enter and and leave Tibet as I pleased. I could not cross to Northern India, the home of the Tibetan-government in exile and snatch a meeting with the Dalai Lama without the risk of getting caught by the Chinese police and possible time in jail. To enter Tibet, I needed to book a tour with an official Chinese travel agency. I needed tell them my schedule. I had to enter and leave Tibet at certain borders, etc. At the time I couldn’t figure out how to map the schedule-less wandering in Tibet into a day-to-day check-list, and at the same time, I needed to get familiar with another set of procedure to arrange visa. I crossed out Tibet.

Alternative Tibet

The Tibet alternative became Mongolia, after all this was a convenient stop on the Trans-Siberian route, a perfect stop to leave Russia heading further South in Asia. I saw some resemblance between Tibet and Mongolia from photos and movie: the nomadic lifestyle, the highland, the open landscape. Even better, when I arrived I learned Mongolia also followed Tibetan Buddhism. It was due to the influence of Buddhism that the once warlike Mongols gave up fighting and turned into very peaceful people.

The language barrier and terrible infrastructure made it difficult to travel alone, thus almost every tourist booked a tour for find people to do their own tour. Since I traveled with people, I had to stick with what everyone wanted to see and couldn’t ask “Hey do you feel a bit religious?” or “Please give me some days to hitch a buggy ride to a nearby town searching for a lama.” I wasn’t able to get in touch with any organization to inquire about staying in a monastery. Most monasteries in Mongolia accept men only anyway. A female lama whom I contacted finally got back to me, but I had already left Mongolia.

Young Mongolian monks praying in a Tibetan monastery in Mongolia

A female Lama

China and beyond
After Mongolia, I spent a month in China, an open-air and indoor museums for Buddhism. Despite the influence of communism, Buddhism is still the main religion in China with 100 millions followers. It was here in China that the traditional Theravada Buddhism combined with China’s Confucian and Taoism and developed into another brach called Mahayana or the Greater Vehicle.

China’s huge distance and the strict one-month visa limitation left no time to linger as I needed to move from North to South via land only. Since I moved constantly from city to city, I had no time to cultivate any relationship, especially important for this kind of experience. I could not show up at a monastery and said “What’s up monk? Want a disciple?” nor register for a 3-day crash course to reach Nirvana, that’s sort of thing.

Even though I entered more than dozens of temples, saw thousands of Buddha statues from monstrous to tiny sizes, thousands years to only few years old, this wasn’t exactly what I looked for.

Buddha cave at Datong

1000 funny Buddhas in Hong Kong

Australia and The Universal Force That Brought Us Together

By the time I flew to Melbourne, Australia, an isolated Western society far from the root of Buddhism, I gave up the idea altogether.

One of the key concept in Buddhism is “pre-destined affinity” or “predetermined principle”. Buddhists often use the term to explain situations or chances that bring people together, the reason for certain events to happen, when it happen, how something which is meant to be.

I stayed for three weeks in Melbourne with my 2nd grade teacher, my mom’s best friend, whom I had not met nor kept in touch for 20 years. Well, my former was a devout, practicing Buddhist. In Melbourne, I met a small-knit of practicing Vietnamese Buddhists who had deep knowledge of Buddhism, recited Buddhist texts every night, volunteered at local monasteries and regularly performed Buddhist rituals. I had been around Buddhists before, but never with such devoting people. They were so serious in their belief that whenever I spent time with them, at some point the conversation would switch to Buddhist related topics like karma, rituals, teaching from some monks, future Buddhist events, etc. They often inserted “Amitabha” in their sentences similar to how we said “Jesus Christ” or “Oh my god.”

At first I resisted opening myself to receive Buddhism, a topic I was hung up in the past few months because I wanted to do it in a temple with a monk and not with lay men. More over I was fixated on getting in touch with spirituality in a more spiritual environment, in the steppe of Tibet or Mongolia or at least in China, the birthplace of Mahayana Buddhism. Sitting in a car, driving past industrial buildings, shopping malls hanging 50% off sign to a monastery which looked more like an apartment complex didn’t appeal to me.

Soon I realized how ridiculously I was behaving. I’d been whining for months, complaining that I wasn’t able to do a key objective of my traveling, and then when I had not one but practically an army of knowledgable Buddhists at my disposal, I rejected it. More than that, I had a teacher, not only in Buddhist term “teacher”, but literally a teacher in my former teacher available for on-demand interrogation.

And slowly I accepted the Buddhists’ interpretation about how we met and when certain things happened.