| PAGE ONE Fall, 2001 Issue: Spirit & Crisis EDITOR'S NOTE BUDDHASCOPE DHARMATALK FOUNDOBJECTS GUESTCOLUMN QUOTES POETRY READING ROOM REVIEWS CONTACT US SITE INDEX SUBSCRIBE |
East meets West as the Dalai Lama and Father Freeman give a joint teaching in the shade of the Bodhi Tree. Photo by Siddiqi Ray, copyright 2000 ©
The Tibetan Influence
AN ADDITIONAL ELEMENT at Bodhgaya was the presence and concerns of the Tibetan refugee community. I have been told by people with much more extensive experience of India that the Tibetan influence is felt most deeply here.
The streets leading up to the temple are lined with vendors, almost all Tibetan refugees. When I slipped out of the hotel to visit the temple at 4 a.m. the day we were scheduled to leave, I met many vendors coming out, having already completed their prayers before a long day of selling prayer beads, woolen goods, or artifacts from their occupied land.
As if to underline the chasms between our worlds, our final attempt to return home became surreal. A pervasive fog (and also, I believe, the resumed bombing of Iraq by the U.S. government at that time) delayed our exit from India by nearly a week's worth of aborted trips to the airport and substitute train and bus routes across the country.
On one train ride, slowed from 12 hours to 24 by the mists, our weary pilgrim troop collapsed into planning the "Whole Dung Catalogue" as an East-West fund-raiser.
Grace and laughter
ONE YEAR LATER it is the simplest gestures and words that stay with me. The ring of His Holiness's laughter. The graceful bow of a street vendor as we passed each other at the temple entrance. A spontaneous shoulder rub from a fellow pilgrim.
And the reminder that we are "all part of God's
creation" and that that "is good."
Michael Tierney lives in the Catholic Worker tradition with his family on Big Ugly Creek, West Virginia. He edits a journal on family, justice and the spirit called The Family Worker which you can receive by e-mailing him at this address.
HAVE AN Eyewitness encounter to submit for possible publication in Hundred Mountain? See details in our Submissions page.
PREVIOUSLY in Eyewitness:
The Retreat as Treat, 9/99:
Tuning into Thich Nhat Hahn. By Jean K. Hughes
Dying for a Retreat, 6/99:
A doctor on retreating to an awareness of death. By Daniel Smith
Eyewitness, 11/98:
Talking monk underwear down in the doe shack. By Bonni McKeown.
RELATED Articles:
Bleacher Buddhism, 11/98:
Taking in a teaching by H.H. the Dalai Lama along with 5,000 other folks. By Douglas Imbrogno