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In the summer of 2013, I arranged a pilgrimage to a religious monument: the Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal. At the time I was still primarily a Zen Buddhist by training and belief, and had been so for about the prior thirteen years. The stupa is more closely tied to Tibetan Buddhism, but I also had some connections to Shambhala Buddhism, the sect founded by Chögyam Trungpa which sought to merge Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and Western philosophical thought. But even though the stupa wasn’t directly tied to my lineage as a Buddhist, it had a particular calling for me ever since I first saw a picture of it as a child: the great white dome under a clear blue sky, painted eyes looking out at the world in all four directions, prayer flags extending in every direction, tattered and fluttering in the wind.
During my time at university, where I studied music, philosophy, religion, and education, I encountered the professor Anne Parker, who spoke almost manically about the depth of spiritual experience available to the pilgrim. Although I never ended up attending her classes, the one lecture I heard her give on her pilgrimage to the Black Madonnas of Europe left a worm in my brain that I couldn’t shake. After I graduated, I took the first opportunity that came along to tag along with another professor who was looking to link up her nonprofit organization with NGOs in India, Nepal, and Bhutan. The deal was, if I got a Bhutanese visa, which was exceptionally unlikely, I would continue on with them from Nepal to Bhutan. And if I did, then great, I would get to visit a country that few Westerners would ever get to see. Otherwise, I would assist the team in Nepal and later on in India, but would be left to my own devices in Kathmandu, and would then be able to make my pilgrimage to the holy sites as I had desired. So it was a win for me either way. And, much as expected, my visa for Bhutan was denied and the rest of the party continued on while I remained in Kathmandu.
I’ve spent time in developing and war-torn countries before, but when I first encountered Kathmandu, I found it a more brutal city than any I had ever visited, short of those in which active battles were being fought. The poverty was unlike anything I had ever seen. Every street was glutted with shops selling an abundance of wares, but even as the city was teeming with people, there weren’t enough customers to go around, and so the shopkeepers would work from dawn to dusk every day and make almost nothing. At times it seemed little more than a seething gutter, and yet also there arose from its maze-like alleys artifacts of astonishing antiquity and remarkable magic. Take this corner and that corner and then this one and that one and end up in some alley barely three feet across, and just beyond, in a garbage-strewn stone courtyard adjacent an open sewer is a centuries-old shrine to Ganesh, so worn that His form is only hinted at in the smooth wet stone. And still today it might painted with fresh red paint, a streak of it down its center, with lit candles on either side and incense burning.
Despite the refuse and the teeming masses and the nests of electrical cables and the fresh, raw concrete construction, one would not be able to spend even five minutes in the city without seeing and feeling the degree to which it was ancient.
I hired a Tibetan refugee, Kelsang, to serve as my guide and translator. Many of the people spoke English, but a difficult and unfamiliar dialect colored liberally with words from Nepali. When the Chinese invaded and conquered Tibet, many fled to Nepal for refuge, my guide’s parents among them. He was my age, and had never seen his homeland. He remains among the kindest and most generous people I have ever met.
I asked him of religion. He waved his hand at me as if shooing away a fly, saying, “All the same.” He was smiling, as he always was, but I understood that my questions seemed foolish or obvious to him. Often, as we were walking through the city, we would pass by a monument, a pillar with a polygonal base. Each face was carved with the symbol of and some text from a prominent local religion (I believe it was Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and one more, perhaps Jainism or Sikhism), and they all supported a single pillar. There is a strong sense in that region of the world that all religions are indeed the same. I don’t myself believe this, not quite. Religions aren’t saying the same thing; they’re saying different things about things that are at least within the same domain, that being the subjective experience of the sacred world. But I appreciated that there was a pluralism in Asian religion that simply did not exist in my homeland.
I ate every day at a small cafe run by other Tibetan refugees, where I could get three giant momos for a dollar. They were delicious plain, even more so when I smeared them with chili paste, which was intensely spicy. The family who managed the place laughed every time I did this; the woman who seemed the family matriarch would give her daughters a knowing look and make an expulsive sign with her hand which I think meant to signify how the lower end of my digestive tract would react to that much spicy food. She wasn’t wrong, but I’m a sucker for hot food and ate it anyway. The tea — made with yak butter, rich and bizarrely salty but nevertheless delicious — made a perfect complement to the meal and curbed some of the intensity of the spices.
I wouldn’t circumambulate the stupa as other pilgrims were doing, nor did I spin the prayer wheels. Instead, I climbed the levels of the stupa and wandered around the surrounding streets, visiting shops and temples, day after day for the three weeks I had planned to stay in the city. Nothing in my Zen training was concerned with what would happen to me after my death; it was concerned entirely with what great effort could bring me in this life. I had thought that most Buddhism was like that, at least to varying degrees, and was disillusioned when I discovered that not to be the case. As I discovered in conversations with local monks, for those circumambulating the stupa, the aim was to accumulate merit that would lead to a favorable rebirth.
One day I saw a man circumambulating the stupa. I don’t know whether disability forced him to this or whether he did this of choice, but he had put wooden platform shoes on his hands and moved forward always in a cramped, crouched position, lifting himself on his hands and swinging his body forward in front of them and then repeating. He was there when I left one morning to go into the city; he was there when I returned late in the evening, and with him the entire time was a young girl of perhaps six years, who I think was most likely his granddaughter. By the look on his face, he seemed so very, very happy.
Remarkable though his efforts were, I was disillusioned by this vision of Buddhism. I had always seen Buddhism as unique among religions in focusing on effort in this life. But the Buddhists of Nepal seemed to have forsaken this life entirely; their goal was a favorable reincarnation. I had been taught that Buddhism explicitly rejected reincarnation: there is rebirth, but it is not the eternal, inner self that is reborn, as no such thing exists. This was not the view of the Nepalese Buddhists, who believed explicitly that they, as distinct individuals, would be reincarnated in a new body after death, perhaps in a realm where enlightenment would be easier to attain.
One day I visited a campus of Hindu temples. Sitting among the ancient shrines were sadhus, men who had renounced their families and all connection to the world and who lived lives of quiet contemplation. I took a picture of one, who then gestured to me, and Kelsang instructed me that I was to give him money in exchange for having taken the picture. I did so, not quite sure how I was supposed to act. Was this a simple business transaction, or was I contracting from him something more personal? Was he revealing something to me? Was he putting on a show to make money to feed his family?
The Bagmati River passed through the heart of the temple complex, and when I arrived there, I saw on the other side a family bringing the corpse of an old man on a stretcher down the ghat to the water’s edge. They brought water up from the river in their hands and poured it over him. Further upstream were platforms at the edge of the ghats, just above the water’s surface, where great fires burned and cremated other corpses.
After a week, the destitution of the city became too much and I sought some anesthetic against it. Drugs, though readily available, were too risky: the last thing I wanted to do was end up in a Nepalese prison. But alcohol was also plentiful and cheap, so I began to drink and wander around the city on my own. There were street children: orphaned or disowned children as young as 2 living in packs on the street. I would pay them to guide me places (even if I had already known how to get there myself) and they would run around me and play and laugh as I walked. Nepalese adults seemed universally miserable, while the Tibetans seemed sad but with some measure of restrained joy. The street children, probably worse off than any of them, seemed oddly happy.
On a day towards the end of my journey, I went to an internet cafe to take care of some paperwork that was required for the planned excursion into India on my way back home. I had been there before, but I nevertheless went and found the street children in their usual haunt, across one of the entrance to the plaza, and paid them what amounted to a couple dollars to guide me there.
We set on our way immediately. When I arrived, the children ran off hurriedly. I went inside to find the place empty except for the manager and a few of his friends or family. Their internet connection was down; not an uncommon occurrence, and there was nothing to be done about it. It would likely be back up within the day, so I left, planning to return later.
When I turned the first corner on my walk back to my hotel, I found the street children again. The first one I saw was the youngest. He was lowering a small yellow plastic bag away from his face. A trail of snot dripped from a nostril down to his mouth. He was looking at me, but did not see me. His eyes rolled back in his head, his head fell back, and he spread his arms as if receiving a divine visitation or ecstatic vision. I looked around at the other children; they were all dazed, distant, unresponsive.
I felt a tug at my shirt. It was the oldest of the children, no more than 10 years old but I think probably closer to 8. He looked up at me with a sober expression, looking me directly in the eye, and then made a sideward glance toward the street and said to me, “You go now.” There was urgency in his voice but not such that would indicate to me that I was in any danger; rather, I believe that he simply wished that I left before I understood what was happening.
And I did as he directed. What else could I have done? Naively, I had thought that the money I gave them was going towards food or clothing. In fact, I was subsidizing child solvent abuse.
For the days remaining, I stayed by myself and drank in my hotel room.
On the night before I was to leave for India, I heard the sound of trumpets and drums coming from the plaza. This was a daily occurrence; the stupa is surrounded by temples which regularly hold ceremonies. It was by this familiarity that I was able to recognize that the character of the music was somewhat different, and the sound seemed clearer and more direct.
The monks of one of the temples had set themselves up in a small square structure — I remember it as a length of iron bar fencing about 10 feet wide with roughly triangular wings perpendicular to it on either side, but it was too dark to take pictures so I’m not sure how accurate this is — just outside the gate to the stupa. There were about a dozen of them, some sitting on the ground, others standing, some playing small Tibetan trumpets, others playing drums, and all of them chanting (with trumpet blasts coming between lines of chanting). People walked up to the square and tossed food items on a large pile.
I watched this over the course of an hour, wishing I could understand the language that they were chanting, likely Sanskrit or Pali or Tibetan. At the end, they gathered much of the food and brought it into the temple. The ceremony, it seems, had been for the purposes of gathering food. Much of it was rice, which would keep well. What was left, they handed out. One of the monks handed me a pack of crackers. I refused; I was not in need of food, and I knew that others were. The monk stepped toward me and held out the package and smiled. I think that he understood, and meant for me to have it anyway.
Disillusionment is painful but is something for which we should be grateful. The etymology of the word itself speaks of something beneficial: the removal of illusions. But rarely does such an experience come without pain. We identify with our illusions, and it pains us to know that our core beliefs, which may even be tied into our identities as persons, have been mistaken. This isn’t even the worst of what I saw in Nepal and India, but after so many years of meditation I felt for the first time as if I was waking up to what the world really was. My time in Iraq had, until that point, seemed more the exception than the rule, but now I had come to understand that I had it backwards and that my own life was the exception. But I don’t think I would have ever gotten there without all the time I had spent meditating on my zafu, trying to figure out what was what. I wonder if the world is in the state it’s in because so many people have given up on life and sacrificed it to their next life. The disillusionment that was granted to me was to live for this life alone, because it’s all of which I can be truly certain, and that became the foundation of my new Satanic religion. After I returned to the States, I drifted away from Buddhism, no longer confident that spending a quarter of my waking life meditating was the best way to live, and gradually, as has been elsewhere documented, I became a Satanist. I still meditate and still find it beneficial and spiritually meaningful, but it is no longer the focus and center of my life. What is most important to me now is the time I spend living, loving, and writing. Alan Watts said, with regards to the use of psychedelic drugs for spiritual purposes: “When you get the message, hang up the phone.” I think that this can be applied to meditation as well. I doubt I fully understand the message, but it’s been received loud and clear and I think that the best way for me to proceed is to live with the message in mind rather than putting it on a playback loop.
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