Buddhism 101

By Tom
Kathmandu, Nepal

Our final days in India were spent in the town of Darjeeling, an old British hill station built on a hilltop 6000 ft above the valley floor.  We wandered the misty streets, visited a Darjeeling tea plantation on the hillside, and enjoyed some fine cups of the local brews.  Darjeeling is the kind of place where the batty old Indian man with the small collection of stray teeth who gave us directions on the street sported a tweed jacket and trousers and carried an umbrella like a cane.  In other words, the British influence is clear. 

Some sleepy street dogs in Darjeeling

After Darjeeling we spent the next few days in Sikkim, a remote mountainous country wedged between Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and the Indian state of Bengal.  Sikkim is much like Tibet in that it was a peaceful Bhuddist nation with an indigenous population.  It was taken over by India in 1975 and India now claims it as a state, despite Julia and I needing a separate visa to enter.  It is so remote and unpopulated that most villages do not have access by vehicle, and those that are accessible can take 5 or 6 hours to reach on steep, bumpy jeep trails despite only being 30 km away as the crow flies.

Our Buddhism teachers, Tshewang and Steve

One of our favorite parts of this trip has been the people we've met along the way, and our time spent in Sikkim was no exception.  Our companions were a gregarious American ex-pat named Steve who spoke Nepali from his days in the Peace Corps and his godson Tshewang who is a Nepali studying to be a doctor of traditional Tibetan medicine.  Tshewang comes from a Tibetan Buddhist family and Steve is a professor at a Buddhist university in Thailand, so they were excellent guides into the local religion. They explained the Buddhist philosophy and traditions, comparing the Tibetan Buddhism with the Southeast Asian variety.

The intricate detail of the Buddhist monastery

Prayer flags surrounding the monastery

While in Sikkim, we visited a hilltop monastery and joined in a soccer game with some of the young monks studying there.  Despite the great company and the beautiful villages, the glaciated Himalayas surrounding us remained frustratingly shrouded in mist so we decided it was time to move on to Nepal. We passed briefly down from the misty mountains back through the hot, dirty, crowded Indian state of West Bengal to reach the Nepal border.  We then boarded an overnight bus that was without a doubt the scariest night of my life, passing trucks on blind curves at breakneck speeds. At last we made it safely to Kathmandu.  Hello Nepal!

A misty soccer game with some young monks