yuddah magar - october 9, 2006

i suppose this post was always going to be about death.

buddhists tend to spend a great deal of their practice meditating on impermanence and the suffering (or unsatisfactoriness--the Pali word is dukkha) we experience as a result of our grasping at inherent emptiness, like our selves. tibetan buddhists have some elaborate meditations on death, too.

i've been back in Boudha since the afternoon of october 6. the course was enormously challenging on so any levels, including the palpable disconnect between me and the primary teacher--a buddhist nun who's been at Kopan since 1975. or perhaps it was a disconnect between me and the teachings of mahayana buddhism, which is the school practiced by tibetans. or perhaps i was just disconnected from everything....except my little crushes on some (ok, many) of the monks. maybe it's somethng about shaved heads, maroon garments and saffron robes.

in any case, i have confirmed that the mahayana path is not my path. i'll stick with the "lesser vehicle" of hinayana for now, though even that may fall away once i've been to Pondicherry in India, where i hope to be exposed more comprehensively to the thinking of Sri Aurobindo. (my guilty secret: i was reading The Future Evolution of Man during the course and paying less attention to the course materials.) but more of him much later.

living at Kopan for 10 days often seemed like what i imagine it would be like to live in an M.C. Escher painting, especially one of his works with many staircases. and although it is pleasantly aloof from the hubbub of Kathmandu, perched on a lovely hillside, it lies more or less on the approach path to the Kathmandu airport, so that every time a jet flew overhead, i wanted it to take me back to Canada. i've finally found homesickness, or rather, it's found me.

but this post is really about death and though homesickness can feel like a sort of living death, it isn't at all like the death of a small boy named Yuddah Magar in his home district of Dhading, where he travelled with his sister, Rayala, to be with their family during the Dasain festival, which has just ended with the full moon. both Yuddah and Rayala lived at Child Haven. when i walked to the home from Boudha this morning to find Scott or Katherine, hoping to retrieve my extra belongings from the volunteers' quarters, i was met at the gate by one of the older boys, Raju, who told me that someone had "expired" (this seems to be the preferred english word). i met with the clearly shattered staff (Scott and Katherine weren't on site) and assisted them with writing an e-mail to the Canadian office providing them with as much information as we had. what we knew was that Yuddah became very ill (vomiting and diarrhea) and died within 2-3 days of the onset of symptoms.

i don't even remember this boy, even after seeing his photo.

since the only purpose of my 30-minute walk from Boudha to the home was to get my stuff and i couldn't find a key to get into the room to get my stuff and i was in a weird state of shock about this death and how i participated in the communication to the Canadian office and one of the girls had smeared a large red tikka on my forehead that i felt very self-conscious about walking all the way back to Boudha hoping to find one of the other volunteers and just wanted to wash it off my forehead and tried so hard to be grateful for the compassion that was bound up in the gesture and was frustrated and hungry and grasping at everything about which i had just spent 10 days in a monastery learning was an unskilful way of living (not that this was news to me), i was naturally very, very confused.

i tried writing this post yesterday, but failed, as much from my impatience as the incredibly poor service at the (different and new to me) 'net cafe i'd chosen.

all i want to write about are the staircases at Kopan. so many staircases in so many strange places and odd angles and colours, some very old, some very new. i took photos of so many staircases. i also wanted to write about the food, mostly the freshly ground peanut butter with warm roti that accompanied the slightly sweet morning porridge. oh, and the couple of crazy friends that emerged from the group of 34 participants: Mie (pronounced Me-uh) from Denmark and Alfrida from Sweden.

The day after the course, I met Alfrida just north of Boudha so that we could listen to more dharma from a well-known teacher, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche at the White Monastery, very close to Boudha. Alfrida is a neurotic 22 year old only child who is, like me, always afraid, so she just does stuff because she's afraid anyway, so doing the stuff that scares her isn't going to make her feel differently. i like Alfrida.

Mie is an artist. She's been volunteering as a "didi" in a home for young girls in a different part of Kathmandu. She caught lice from the girls and had to ask the "shaving monk" to shave off all but one of the incredibly beautiful, long dreads she's had for years. Mie is completely crazy. She made a spaceman just to travel with her. She takes photos of the spaceman in various places. Sometime after my trek, Mie wants to do a photoshoot with me and her "spaceman". i like Mie.

i will leave on my trek this thursday, so i'll be out of touch until october 26 or 27. i'm meeting my guide, Bahadur, in less than an hour to brave the insanity of the city to procure some things i'll need. on 3 of the mornings at Kopan, enjoying our morning tea at 6am, the very top of Ganesh Himal could be seen beyond the green rim of the Kathmandu Valley. it was any icy white hint of a completely different universe that i'm excited to see. it's just going to be me, Bahadur and a porter from his village. perfect.

i'll be hanging out in Boudha (more or less - there may be some side trips to Patan, Pokhara and Bhaktapur) until November 14 when the next 6 weeks of fun begin as i am blessed with the opportunity to travel with Bonnie Cappuccinno. here is the itinerary:

Nov 14-16: Delhi, India

Nov16-19: Gandhinagar, India

Nov 19-22: Hyderabad, India

Nov 22-25: Kaliyampoondi, India (south of Chennai)

Nov 25-28: Savarsai, India (south of Mumbai)

Nov 28-Dec 5: Chittagong, Bangladesh

Dec 5-9: Kathmandu

Dec 9-16: Tibet (i hope to see more than just Lhasa in a week)

Dec 16-21: Kathmandu

I'll finally leave Nepal for Delhi on December 21. I'm planning to meet Scott, the other male volunteer, somewhere in South India before heading to Pondicherry.

i'm going to be buying a really nice, fleece-lined, hand-knit sweater today, both for the trek and for Tibet.

but i'm still lost in self-cherishing and trying to understand the death of a 13-year-old boy that i wish i could remember.

over and out.