Tantrika Page 14

  Esther and Lucy appreciated one simple fact: Princess Mandarava got a raw deal.

  Buddhist Tantra is a branch of the Mahayana school. It teaches that with intense compassion, we can all reach Buddhahood quickly. It’s critical not to be defined by the everyday ego with its infinite problems. We’re supposed to visualize ourselves in the images of enlightened beings. It’s not a crash course, though. First, you’re supposed to be experienced in the principles of Buddhist thinking, such as the nature of suffering, the impermanence of existence, compassion for all beings, and the realization of selflessness. Then you’re ready to practice Tantra. I, of course, hadn’t yet unpacked my boxes in my parents’ garage.

  The official Dalai Lama Web site on the Kalachakra told me the word kalachakra meant “wheels of time.” It was an entire cosmology and Buddhist system of exercises for developing awareness. The goal: enlightenment. They called it a spiritual state beyond all worries. It sounded like sukoon to me, the peace of mind I’d been seeking since my earliest childhood days.

  The Kalachakra initiation is the largest of the Buddhist rituals, and the Dalai Lama presides over it every year. It’s supposed to be about spreading peace and tolerance. It’s a big deal to get initiated. It means you’ve been blessed to move forward on the Tantric Tibetan Buddhist path. Plus, you learn some of the practices of meditation that are supposed to make you a better person. Not everyone has to get initiated. But for those who do, the ritual gives them a special blessing to promote peace and harmony internally and in the world.

  Buddha is said to have taught many ways to transform your consciousness and attain enlightenment. Tantra’s techniques of meditation and exercise are supposed to be one of the most effective. Or, at least, that’s what Tantrics say. Buddhism rests on the principles of Four Noble Truths: suffering; the arising of suffering; the end of suffering; and the path toward the end of suffering. Buddhism teaches that liberation of the spirit, nirvana and the end of suffering, comes from freeing the spirit from negative elements such as greed, envy, and anger.

  I was starting to understand that the teachings in Canada and Santa Cruz took students to the X, Y, and Z of Tantra in one weekend with blissful sexual union with another as the reward, but I now saw there was a lot of A, B, and C that had to come first. That’s why the true Tantric discipline had to be practiced alone first to overcome greed, envy, and anger, the attaching emotions that make relationships miserable.

  To get admitted into Tantra, you’re supposed to get initiated. This happens in a ritual blessing of body, speech, and spirit by a teacher who is connected to the meditation Buddha. At the Kalachakra, that would be none other than the Dalai Lama. The teacher initiates students into special forms of meditation that are supposed to become a part of daily practice.

  One thing I liked about the Dalai Lama’s thoughts on this concept was that he said we should study our possible gurus for twelve years before deciding whether to go under their wings. My friendship with my bodhisattva friend began in the summer of 1986, and I figured it took that many years for me to watch her and recognize the wisdom in her guidance. Before I had departed for India a second time, my friend gave me a nugget of wisdom that stuck with me whenever I doubted a decision I’d made. “Don’t question reality,” she told me. To accept reality meant living in the present moment without flashbacks wondering why the past had turned out the way it had.

  Lucy and Esther and I drove on, hitting the Grand Trunk Road built hundreds of years ago linking the Indian subcontinent over sixteen hundred miles, from Calcutta in India’s east through Delhi to Amritsar in northern India and into Pakistan and Afghanistan. I didn’t know yet that I would embark on this same route three times, each time with a different teacher, each time with different lessons.

  Seventeenth-century European travelers used to call it the Long Walk. Sher Shah Suri, a sixteenth-century ruler of the Indian subcontinent, engineered the construction of this bold highway project to link trade and communication across his empire. In 1947, it was the path of escape for millions on both sides of the subcontinent’s new dividing line. For us, it was a crowded highway with blaring lorries, the trucks of the subcontinent, painted bright colors. We passed the Parakeet Tourist Complex, a funny name that lodged in my mind. Lucy looked out the window and remarked, “Oh, there’s an elephant.” It was no surprise in India. We were following the trail of Rudyard Kipling, who set much of his novel Kim on the road, calling it “such a river of life as exists nowhere else in the world.” Without fear, we told our driver to pull into a dhaba, as roadside restaurants were called, places where lorry drivers, not three Western women on a road trip with a Sikh driver, could rest. But we were modern Tantrikas, aspiring to be dakinis, with more than Swiss Army knives. Lucy pulled out a traveling Clinique soap dish whenever we stopped at a dhaba for our staple chawal and dal, rice and lentils. Esther carried a Scooby Doo soap holder.

  It was a blur of new driving etiquette on the road, marked by signs that commanded, “Blow Horn.” That was how drivers signaled they were about to pass, even though there were turn indicators in vehicles. “Use Dipper at Night.” High beams were “dippers,” and drivers were supposed to flash them before passing. Forget the turn indicators. As we passed through the city of Chandigarh, our driver pulled over so we could appreciate the Rose Garden. “The Rose Garden. Very nice.” Our Lonely Planet told us it was Asia’s largest rose garden, stretching over twenty-seven acres with more than seventeen thousand plants and sixteen hundred types of roses. We walked about a half acre, soaking in a long landscape of terrace, before it started to rain. We ducked under an awning next to a juice walla. Three portly middle-aged Indian women sat in the back, sipping their juice, also avoiding the rain. They could have been us, just born into different incarnations. One of the women studied my face as I talked to them about my inquiries into Tantra. She told her friends, “You can see the Kundalini in her eyes.” The Kundalini was the serpent introduced to me in Canada that lay coiled in our sexual chakra, ready to unwind and unleash its energy throughout our systems. Of course, my eyes were probably just bloodshot from wearing my contact lenses too long. Our juice sister said she practiced breathing techniques to uncoil her Kundalini.

  “What kind of shakti does it give you?”

  “It gives me the power to run my family,” she said.

  Not so convinced about the Kundalini uncoiled within me, the driver let me drive barely ten minutes before taking the wheel again. I didn’t like him much. We wound around curves as we climbed into the Himalayas. With the sunset a couple of hours behind us, the driver pulled into the parking lot of a place called the Hotel Hilltop outside the town of Bilaspur in District Swarghat. It was a government lodge run by the Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation Ltd., the type of two-star hotels my childhood friend Sumita had advised me to trust. My love affair with Indian government tourism lodges and their role in the liberation of the lone female traveler started here at the Hotel Hilltop.

  In the parking lot, our driver told us he could keep driving if we wanted. “Whatever you wish,” he said.

  We conferred. “Yes, we’d like to drive through the night,” I told him.

  He started listing all the reasons he shouldn’t drive through the night. There wouldn’t be another hotel for many miles. It was too dark and dangerous. So, in fact, we really didn’t have a choice. Classic. I liked him even less. We then performed our huge act of liberation. We checked into a hotel. We were on the road in India without a male chaperone. In the mind-set of many a family on the subcontinent, the driver could have been a rapist. If not him, surely someone would turn out to be a rapist, because that was what happened to women who stayed alone in hotels.

  Our Bible on this journey was a book, Passionate Enlightenment, by a University of Virginia academic, Miranda Shaw, who chronicled the philosophies of dakinis, the magical goddesses of Tantric Tibetan Buddhism, also known as sky dancers because they are free of the conventions and restrictions of worldly ex
istence. Lucy and I looked at each other as I read. We hated to be conceited, but we acknowledged what we were both thinking. “That’s us,” I scribbled in the margins.

  The next morning, not raped, we continued on, escaping an avalanche of rocks on the road in Mandi, at the junction of the Kullu and Kangra Valleys. I saw a beautiful India I’d hardly seen except for a glimpse on our rides to our family hill station house in Panchgani outside Bombay. We climbed into mountains whose lush green was occasionally broken by gushes of waterfalls spilling down as if from the heavens. A rope bridge crossed a river beside the road. I wanted to walk on this rope bridge, but we were three dakinis on a mission. It was a virtual entertainment show on the road. A truck, marked “Highly Inflammable,” blew dark diesel smoke onto our Tata Sumo, something like a sport utility vehicle. A woman walked on the side of the road with her dupatta tied around her forehead.

  “Rambo style,” Lucy quipped, just before we passed a road safety sign that proclaimed: “Darling I want you but not so Fast.”

  We started passing the first of many storefronts marked English Wine Shop, a commodity we couldn’t figure out, no matter how hard we tried. As we climbed into the mountains, it felt as if we were headed to a place where the clouds met the earth. It was fitting that, on this road trip, I learned the Urdu word for clouds, badal. A Holiday Inn in the tourist town of Manali fell along this journey to the heavens.

  The terrain began to change as we entered a treacherous stretch of road called the Rohtang Pass. By winter, it was virtually impossible to travel through here. Boulders became the flowers. We saw a sign for “Rohtang Chinese fast food and veg chow mein.” Road workers stacked rocks into beautiful square piles. This was a place that inspired reflections upon clouds. We stared out our windows at one formation.

  “It’s an elephant,” I said.

  “I think it might be a pig,” said Esther. I deferred to the artist in Esther.

  Somehow, we hadn’t gotten an accurate sense of how long this trip would take. It was time for another layover when we found ourselves in a virtual ghost town of a village that could have been a scene out of the moonscape of Star Wars, only this one with businessmen who banged on the door guest house door we locked. “Baji, baji,” meaning “sister, sister,” one of them pleaded, asking us to open the door. “No worry. We’re Indian businessmen.”

  We were in Koksar, a tiny village at a height of eleven thousand feet. It was a gateway to Lahaul and Spiti, the largest district in Himachal Pradesh, an expanse of high mountains and slender valleys surrounded by Ladakh and Tibet to the north, the village of Kinnaur to the east, and the Kullu Valley, which we’d just left, to the south. Villagers used the frozen river, covered with snow, during winters for mule traffic. We were in awe of the alpine flowers and herds of sheep and goats grazing nearby. A pretty woman with a pretty baby in pink was beating clothes with a broom.

  Lucy had taught me how to wrap my dupatta so that only my eyes would be visible, a symbol of a devout Muslim girl, but her trick wasn’t for the sake of modesty but because of the dust storms that swirled around us as we continued our climb on razor’s edge through the rocky mountain passes. It was a virtual geography and geology lesson on the road. There was Chandra Tal Lake before us, “the lake of the moon” in Hindi, the Himalayas towering over it from the north, a magical place created by the depression of a glacier probably at the end of the last ice age. We rode through treacherous mountain passes and rivers with names like Pagal Nali, “Crazy River.”

  From a distance we saw colorful Buddhist prayer flags fluttering like bursts of rainbow around a compound. They surrounded a mandir to the goddess Kali, known as Kunzum Devi. The son that Buddha left with his princess wife was named Rahul, and it was said the name Lahaul came from Rahul. Locals considered it bad luck for a journey if you didn’t pull over, so the driver, a Sikh who didn’t bow his head to Kali, also wanted to pay his respects. At a tent colony where the Dalai Lama supposedly stopped to eat, we had picked up a friendly Buddhist couple who said their car had died. The prayer flags flapped with a background of snow-topped peaks and clouds. We ducked under the fluttering flags to enter the mandir. White dupattas waved at us, tied upon a string. Devotees had stuck coins into the main shrine to the mandir in a way I couldn’t even figure out.

  The Buddhist wife told me, “If your heart is clean, then the coin stays.”

  I took a five-rupee coin and tucked it next to the dark Kali statue. It stuck. The wife patted my head approvingly.

  Our Star Wars–like experience continued, appropriately since Princess Leia seemed to me the ultimate Tantrika, as we nosed into a town called Kaza. It seemed right off the set of the 1970s movie with its narrow alleys and edgy locals. It was the major transport hub of Lahaul and Spiti, the administrative center of the subdistrict of Spiti. Lucy wanted to use the toilet in a restaurant where we stopped to eat. The waiter didn’t know we were eating there and talked rudely to her: “The toilet is only for guests.”

  Lucy didn’t take the disrespect well. She would rather have starved than eat at the restaurant. She refused to eat, even though we sat down because it seemed to be the only decent place in town.

  After seeing so little civilization, we found ourselves staring at acres upon acres of tent colonies that lined a valley below the mountain where our destination monastery of Ki sat, eight miles from Kaza. It was home to the Ki Gompa, a looming monastery built into the side of a mountain, towering above us. Ki Gompa was the largest and oldest gompa in the Spiti Valley. It was built by Ringchen Zangpo and belonged to an order of Tibetan Buddhism called Gelukpa. Ladakhis, Dogras, and Sikhs invaded the gompa three times in the nineteenth century. Fire damaged it, and an earthquake partially destroyed it in 1975. But it survived as a home to Buddhist monks who lived and studied there.

  For the moment, we were just impressed by the candles we found in our tents.

  We were tucked into a far corner of the thousands of tents strung beside each other in this expanse of rocky terrain at the foot of the mountain in which the Ki Gompa sat. Our neighbors were mostly Westerners, many of whom, like me, had found the Banjara Camp on the Internet. Our tent was spacious with luscious sleeping bags stretched over cots for our weary bodies. We bathed in a camp bathroom that came with heated water, a luxury. Our tents circled a main dining tent with afternoon chai and regular hot meals. We’d missed the first days of the initiation, but over the next several days we got into the pace of the hikes up a rocky trail to the monastery for the Dalai Lama’s teachings. The trek began for most around 7 A.M. At the top, we saw a reminder of the twenty-first century: metal detectors through which we had to pass.

  Lucy, Esther, and I hunted for places to sit among the thousands assembled in the monastery’s rocky backyard, a part of the mountainside. A boy with “Teddy Bear” written on his shirt pointed a toy gun at his mother and shot into the air. Indian police frisked boy monks. The Dalai Lama sat like royalty upon a terrace festooned with golden banners. The truth was that it was difficult to understand the teachings. They were translated into English from Tibetan and broadcast through the radio into headsets we didn’t have. Even when a young aspiring Western monk gave me his radio and headset, many of the Dalai Lama’s teachings about mandalas and deities went right past me.

  The parts I did catch reminded us of what made common sense. Some of us were just too busy or too self-involved or dense to remember the essentials. He told us that enlightenment was a mind full of confidence and clarity. He called it “the middle path.” I closed my eyes. I saw a light radiating within me. Rays shone down upon me. He was talking about three critical elements of the Tantric path: bliss, emptiness, and compassion. Strong compassion, or bodhichitta, had to stay with us throughout, along with bliss and emptiness. Bliss meant living with the teachings of Buddha and not the temptations and distractions of samsara, attachment. It had to be melded with compassion so that it wasn’t selfish or self-indulgent. There was “conditional bliss” based on the senses and experie
nces, considered contaminated by attachment, greed, and, often, selfishness. Then, there was “nonconditional bliss,” which was based on emptiness or the imagination. I felt a bliss in the solitude of this moment. My muladhara chakra in my bottom pressed firmly against the ground.

  Plenty of folks in the camp seemed plenty freaky. An Indian police officer appeared more interested in selling his coffee table photo book on the Spiti Valley and impressing foreigners—“It’s yog, not yoga”—than in doing police work. A Western woman in our camp scolded Esther one night at dinner for her definition of emptiness. “That’s not how the Buddhists define it,” she said with a huff.

  An Italian from the city of Assisi rescued us from the woman. His name was Ram Alexander—quite impossible, of course, that his mother gave him the name of a Hindu god to go with the reference to the Greek conqueror. In fact, with his tuft of white hair and thick white beard, he was a long-ago disciple of a Hindu woman who became known as a spiritual master in ashrams around India. That’s how he got the name Ram. Now he was turning toward Buddhism. He was a virtual encyclopedia on modern-day Tantra, actually believing in dakinis as realities, not just the wild fantasies of three oxygen-depleted women journeying through the Himalayan foothills. He even knew of a Tantric Tibetan Buddhist woman, Khandro Rinpoche, who had been accredited as an incarnation of a dakini, who had settled not far from Delhi in a place called Clementown and was lecturing in the West. We talked about ritual bathing in a nearby lake he said was frequented by dakini spirits.

  As we parted, twinkling stars filling the sky, he said to me, “You’re either going to be a great sinner or a saint.” It was a bit extreme, but his point didn’t escape me. I could go down the dark path in this journey, or I could move toward light.

  We found ourselves a new friend in the last days of the teachings.

  In my wanderings through the monastery, I met a young monk who seemed to be a cross between the cook and personal valet to another incarnate, a young Rinpoche. First, I met the Rinpoche in his room, quite by accident when I was looking for the wife of the spiritual leader of the monastery. He and his wife seemed the perfect answer to my questions about how to practice spiritual Tantra as a couple. She was sitting with a nephew in the small room where the young Rinpoche was living. The Rinpoche had some chocolate tucked behind him. I tried but failed miserably to communicate my line of inquiry to her. She laughed a lot. Maybe that was my lesson on being a Tantrika. Be happy. Laugh.