buddha boom town (part 2): sacred space

Buddhas and Buddhists are everywhere in Lhasa. And Buddhism is a booming business, at least judging by the number of prayer wheels and sandalwood prayer beads and colorful Tibetan prayer flags and "parasols" (multi-colored hanging cloth cylinders that seem to be made of the lower ends of dozens of ties, decorated with tassels) haggled over at the innumerable streetside stalls. In our visits to the many shrines in Lhasa, we saw countless Buddhas in all their manifestations and reincarnations: gilt covered statues draped in shining cloth (some enclosed in glass), adorned with white "khatas," sitting in front of offerings of barley, corn, yak butter, or paper money. I knew going to Tibet would be special but I just wasn't prepared for the reality. I had visions of chasing Brad Pitt around steep flights of stairs while jostling the throngs of the Buddhist faithful. But maybe I should have taken a hint from the glimpses I've seen of the Dalai Lama's easy humor.
When we flew into the modern Gongga airport, a slow hour's ride from the city, our guide, Pemi, draped white khatas around our necks. Two members of our group, who had never been to Tibet, had tears in their eyes. The air, the landscape, the language, the people -- everything was different, even though the Chinese presence was everywhere, in the form of the vast amount of new construction, the Chinese signs, the Chinese food, and the green-uniformed police.
And the holiness is there, is everywhere. But the sacred here seems to coexist with the mundane, the mercenary, and the vulgar, and does so happily, not grudgingly. Certainly temples are sacred spaces: one must wear long pants and take off hats and refrain from snapping photos without permission. But the presence of the secular doesn't seem to impinge on the spiritual, as it often does in the West. As I navigated the streets of the old city of Lhasa, every 10 feet or so would come another pilgrim spinning an ornate brass and turquoise prayer wheel, fingering sandalwood beads, and chanting under his or her breath, while just behind monks might be walking happily draping their arms over one another, straining to hear on their cellphones, or giggling and pulling pranks on one another. Yesterday, my fellow traveller Jane and I sat in the shade at the outdoor teahouse at the beautiful Lhasa nunnery, drinking glass after glass of sweet, milky hot tea out of a large metal, cork-stoppered Tibetan "thermos," the same kind I have seen pilgrims carry through the monasteries in order to pour offerings of liquid butter into the butter lamps. Around us, Tibetans quietly chatted and sipped tea or ate momo, plump yak dumplings with spicy sauce, and occasionally people came up and spun the large, ornate brass prayer wheels fixed to the wall of the courtyard while the alto harmonies of chanting nuns issued from somewhere in the nunnery. Behind us in the hot sun, shaven-headed nuns in scarlet robes scrubbed laundry in a large metal tub under a primitive water faucet while others chopped vegetables in the shade. Within minutes there was a scuffling behind me and I heard giggling from the laundry nuns who were now engaged in a water fight, while from out of the open windows of the building behind them drifted the beautifully haunting tones of chanting nuns, still singing as they coiled up paper prayers for prayer wheels.
The levity doesn't diminish the spirituality. Each quality seems to have an equal right to existence; sacred space seems to be somewhat relative, and perhaps self-contained.
This first struck me on my first full day in Tibet as I walked through the majestic Potala Palace (the traditional political and spiritual seat of the Dalai Lamas until 1959 which overlooks all of Lhasa) and the Jokhang Temple (built in the 7th century by King Songsten Gampo, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism) which houses a solid gold Buddha brought to Tibet by the Chinese bride of the king. This Buddha is the nexus of three concentric "koras" or sacred circuits that pilgrims in Lhasa circumnambulate in a clockwise direction; the middle kora is the Barkhor route I've mentioned before. As large groups of tourists file through the chapels straining to hear their guides (some, having paid the fee, snapping photos), monks and other pilgrims sit chanting or spinning their prayer wheels or lighting their incense sticks undisturbed by the feet of the curious shuffling inches away from theirs.
Maybe this has something to do with the very different sense of public and private space in the East. Not only in Tibet, but in other parts of China, people stake claim to little bits of public space in which to conduct their private affairs. The Chinese are famous for doing Tai Chi and other exercises in public parks--I even saw a group of 8-10 doing their moves on a streetcorner near my hotel in Shanghai. Wherever you go, you see people claiming a piece of the earth simply by squatting and looking about them, perhaps holding a cigarette. In Chengdu, my fellow traveler Dave and I watched a group of men smoke and chat happily as they stood around one man sitting on a low plastic stool in the middle of the sidewalk on a busy main thoroughfare. Minutes later he picked up his stool, stowed it on the back of his motorscooter and rode away. Perhaps this sense of privacy in public goes some of the way to explain the unruffled behavior of Lhasa's faithful. But there's also something they seem to do to make their own spiritual space in their own heads, and it has to do moving, spinning, and wheels. More about wheels in part 3.