A sense of devotion - moments in Lhasa

.

Lhasa is a flat modern Chinese city. Creamy mid-rise apartment buildings; giant malls under construction; long straight highways run into the city streets that are organised by traffic lights and lane markings. All drivers ignore the rules.

The Potala is almost too big to comprehend.

We slip into the remaining Tibetan quarter of rendered row houses and shops, laneways and courts, tiled roofs, white wash walls and hopper windows with painted black window surrounds under fluttering pleated window curtains. And over the next few days in Lhasa and beyond we gain a sense of the city and valleys as home to ancient culture and still living religious fervour and devotion.

The middle kora around the Jokhang Temple

In the still-beating Tibetan heart of Lhasa, there are three koras (ritual circuits around spiritual places): inside the 7th century Jokhang Temple; the middle kora around the walls of the Jokhang in the old Barkor market; and circling the entire city in the outer kora.

On a fine dry Wednesday night, the middle kora crowd strolls, chats, chants mantras, pushes strollers, and prostrates along the wide paved way, always clockwise, pivoting around the Jokhang. 

Energy, exhaustion, devotion

Who is prostrating? Old ladies with plaits and walnut wrinkled faces; men with families who need to purify past actions; youngsters rolling and tickling each other; young dudes pushing their phones, scooter keys, cigarette packs along the pavers in front of them as they measure their length along the ground, step and pull up, bow with joined hands at their brows, throats, hearts, drop and stretch out again. All devout.

Potala Palace

The Potala Palace looks like a giant cardboard cut out against the blue sky, or floodlit against the night sky. It’s too big to take in from the outside but once you get inside the 1000-room labyrinth of temples, offices, and wooden ladder ways, experience it through touch: embossed carved wood, slippery silk offering scarves (khatas), rough weave black yak wool shade cloth, smooth plastered painted walls with silk brocade pinned to the ceilings.

Every turn through the palace, originally started in 16th century, is up a wooden ladder, down a stone step, over a lintel. A young man carries his mother on his back through the stone walk of the security entrance, up every wooden rung, down every narrow step to the top verandah where the Dalai Lamas would stand under a golden roof to preside over the final monastic exams in the courtyard below.

A well to do family dress up in their best to visit the Potala. Why do Tibetans venerate the Palace?

Because the Potala is where every Dalai Lama worked and prayed for the Tibetan people from the Great 5th Lama to the 14th who left in 1959. 

Sera Monastery

Outside Lhasa, the 1000s of monks at Sera Je were known for their aggression and warlike skills. Nowadays, the few hundred allowed to remain maintain their traditional theological debating methods with the same fervour. Under patchy shade trees in the debating courtyard, around 50 monks pair off with one partner arguing energetically in a ritual way - all designed to help him learn the points he needs to promote the Dharma. Devout, and determined!

Vigorous debate is part of monastic training.

Norbulingka Palace

The Norbulingka park complex includes the Takteng Migyur Potang - the summer home built for His Holiness 14th Dalai Lama in 1956. Visitors can see HHDL’s own comfy brocade sofas, his study with desk and wireless, his carved wooden bed and look out his bedroom windows over the park. In 1959, this would have been his own last view from his beloved home as he made the decision to leave Tibet and save the Tibetan people who would have given up their lives to protect him from the invading Chinese Government army.

No offering scarves or prayer flags are allowed in this building. No photographs. But in the empty throne room we witness an elderly Tibetan lady in traditional dress prostrate herself on the carpet, dip and bow, sing mantras and offer long life prayers to His Holiness. A last act of profound devotion.