The mixture that stirs up that ‘little freak town’ of Dharamsala

Press, 11 May 1984, Page 13

The mixture that stirs up that ‘little freak town’ of Dharamsala

By

ROBIN ROBILLIARD,

a freelance

writer and broadcaster, who also took the pictures.

“A real little freak town,” the guide book said, describing Dharamsala, a hill station in northern India.

I had arrived at the upper part of the town, separated from the lower by 1500 metres. Both settlements cling to a spur of the Dhauladhar range, at the foot of the vast Himalayas. The buildings are very humble.

The cobbled main street was crowded with young, uncombed Europeans, weirdly dressed and with drug-glazed eyes. Here, they drop out cheaply, as they once did in Kathmandu.

But there were also high-cheek-boned Tibetans; the women in fulllength dark tunics, a striped apron in front; thick black hair in a single pig-tail, or worn in a coil; lovely open faces. And the men, tough and wiry, but unable to farm in this settlement where refugees cannot own land. They are dependent on tourists, with family-run hotels and restaurants, and traditional rugmaking crafts. “A society not of today, or yesterday, but of somewhere in between,” someone described the generation that remembers Tibet. It was to Dharamsala that the Dalai Lama and his followers fled,

after the Chinese invasion of their country in 1959. I found a hotel room costing 20 rupees ($3) a day, on the edge of the small town square, with a shower (cold water only) and a 100 (Asian style) one floor below. From the balcony I could watch the activity.

In the centre of town was a prayer wheel, along which Buddhists ran their hand as they passed. Here and there a monk, in a bright saffron habit. From the private rooms of my Tibetan hosts I could hear the murmur of prayers. What a contrast. In Dharamsala were people deeply committed to religion — and others who knew not what they sought.

That first afternoon I walked through the town towards the sound of chanting. Small boys at the Monastery school swayed to and fro, from a cross-legged position, to the rythm of their lesson. As the teacher said something they repeated it, memorising enormous texts.

In the temple, behind the school, adult monks, fingering beads,

chanted their way through ancient ritual. However, not everyone in Dharamsala, in a monk’s robe, is attached to the monastery. Among the pine plantations, renting stark hostel rooms and cottages are people from all over the world, learning to be Buddhists. Most of them come from the West, leading quite separate lives from the sad, dazed hippies. Four I met were women. There was Molly, a wealthy American in her 50s; an extrovert, bubbling with enthusiasm. The Dalai Lama keeps giving her difficult projects, sending her to refugee camps in other parts of India, “to learn to be humble.”

Michelle, from Paris, elderly and shy, pinches and scrapes all year on office wages, for her annual return to Dharamsala. I would see her in a restaurant asking for boiled water to mix her meal of Tsampa flour, pathetically grateful if offered a cup of tea. A pretty New Zealand girl in her 20s (I will call her Susan) had been in Dharamsala for seven years. I had seen ‘her mouthing prayers on a bench in the forest, or hurrying along with a worried frown, too often in tears. “It’s all so moving,” she said.

I found Berenice, a 32-year-old from Belgium, sitting on a rock on the hillside, guiltily smoking a cigarette — and frustrated at her inability to give up smoking. Tobacco, drugs, alcohol, and sexual misconduct are forbidden to Buddhists. I asked Berenice what she was looking for? “Happiness,” she replied. Daily lessons are held for foreign

students in the library, two miles down the road. A senior monk sat before a junior class;. “We must try to prefer the ten v M rtuous actions. At the market, in the home, we must control our minds with alertness. If we cause suffering for others we will not be happy in rebirth.” “There is an average of 50 foreign students every season,” a library official told me. “The numbers are increasing, particularly from the United States. We try to make each student a better person, to correct their character.” Only a few, I learnt, have the dedication and self discipline to make serious progression. It is the Dalai Lama who decides who is ready for Initiation, ready to take the committment to be a “noble and loving person.” I walked back up the hill with a science graduate from Los Angeles, clear-headedly certain he had done the right thing in rejecting com-

petitive pressures in the career field, to become a Buddhist monk. One of the most learned western Buddhists I met, soon to be a Geshe (more senior than a doctor of divinity), is known as Jampa Tenzye, his adopted Tibetan name. Jewish, the son of a medical doctor in Switzerland, he bad set off, on leaving school, to wander through Asia. “I had been an athiest from the age of 12. My intellectual parents were unbelievers. The one idea I had was that life was very valuable that one must not waste it. I

turned away from Hinduism — too much devotion. Buddhism appealed because its reason and logic are based on experience. Here I found a teacher. Everything fell into place.” The eventual plan of the Swiss monk (as with most western monks I met) is to return to his own country to teach. “The young are searching for new answers. Bud-

dhism appears to fill a gap left by Marxist ideology.” It was Jampa who told me that 99 per cent of western Buddhists

had been through the hippie stage — the drugs. This made me realise that the gap between the freaks of the town and the westerners among the pine trees was not too wide to bridge. There was, for example, Joe, a thin, gaunt 26-year-old from San Francisco, torn between his dependence on tobacco and marijuana and his desire to be accepted for a Retreat. There, Buddhist students live without human contact for a month, two months, or for increasing periods. Food is left outside their door.

There is a young American woman who built her own small house, before disappearing inside for two years of meditation. Among the mountain caves are four men in two-year Retreats, living on rice and what they can glean from the land. As well as lessons in class, each Buddhist student has an individual tutor who decides when a student

is mentally ready for such extreme isolation.

The administrator of the Retreat Centre, hidden away up a rough, stoney track, is an Australian monk called Dave. “I saw my father work hard to make money — and die a cruel, painful death. I was a successful meat exporter, but it seemed that money wasn’t the answer. Life is very short.”

It was Joe who took me to the weekly session for Western students at the home of His Holiness Kybte Ling Rinpoche, senior tutor to the Dalai Lama. He lives in a hilltop bungalow left behind by the British.

Visitors enter one at a time, to ask one question. The 79-year-old Lama, crosslegged on a platform, looked like a large cherubic baby, with his shining bald head, but with such an interested gaze in his allseeing eyes. I asked my question. The interpreter, a Canadian monk, strained more sensitively than any interpreter I had known, to get the answer right. In a twominute meeting the wise old Tibetan revealed more perception

of me than I had managed to learn in a life time. 1 Another friend I made was Tshetan Choekyappa, a Tibetan of the new generation; very smart in collar, tie, and V-necked jersey, home for the holidays from university in Madras. His secondary and tertiary education are being sponsored by someone in Ireland.

“There are other Tibetans at the university. We meet regularly, to discuss who will take what position in government, when we return to our country,” he said.

Tshetan took me to the Children’s Village, an hour’s walk from the town, where one thousand Tibetan children, orphans and children of those too poor to cope, are cared for up to the age of 12. Tibetan music soared from a classroom. Every child learns to play a musical instrument. Older children make and wash their own clothes, and are each responsible for someone younger. With shovels and pick axes, children carved a sports field out of a hill. I have never seen such concentration in five year olds, as with a

group of small Tibetans squatting in the sun pencilling homework. It’s as if every Tibetan child and adult knows who he is and where he is going. “If a Tibetan says he will be somewhere by 6 p.m. he will be there,” said’ a woman teacher at the village. “If a clerk in our office is sick, someone else will do her work. What holds Tibetans together is the love they have for the Dalai Lama.”

The teacher was 6 years old during the escape from Tibet. “It took a year. We hid during the day, travelling only at night. Of the 50 families in our group, four families survived. “Given the chance,” she added, “most Tibetans will go back.”

It is an ironic situation. In 1959, the free world stood by as the Tibetans lost their country; yet, during the 25 years of Tibetan exile, people from that same free world have flocked to Dharamsala, from far more pampered lives, to seek solutions.

Buddha is reputed to have said: “Everything that happens has a reason.”