Where I live!

I live in a small town of 15,000 people, 8 or 9 thousand of them monks and nuns. There is a Thai monastery next to my flat. We have one Tibetan monk who is doing a completely isolated 3 plus year retreat in a house just down the hill, a house I rented for two years early on during my trips. The community knows he’s there and in subtle ways support his meditation. I’ve worked with a few lama friends on Buddhist projects. One is actually very interesting. Kunga Dakpa, a Nyingmapa khenpo and I are working on bi-lingual version of a very important Zen text, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. It has not been in Tibetan for almost a thousand years. I hope we are near the end. It’s been three years since we began. I live 200 meters from the residence of HH the Dalai Lama, but, as he no longer walks his dogs, I’ve only met him twice in 12 years. I do go to teachings and classes from time to time. I have very few western friends here, the closest is a young Mexican gay guy who just had to return home after 6 years of intense Tibetan language training as a certified translator for teachers working in Latin America and Spain.

Part, or even most of Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism will always remain remote and in many ways incomprehensible to me. I will always be a foreigner. I will not pay a baba to break coconuts over the bonnet of my car no matter how insane the driving in India. I do not really participate in the ritual life of my Hindu neighbors, although I do make a donation for puja when asked by the local taxi drivers union. It’s just a good idea to be friends with the people I depend on to live in a foreign country at my advanced age. I attend the rituals of death when I have to. They are my neighbors and friends.

I have made some wonderful younger Indian friends. With no family here, I love this group of young design students from the NIFT (National Institute of Fashion Technology) campus in Kangra. They call themselves “Les Garcons,” or maybe it was me who gave them that moniker. There are four guys and one woman, although she’s not been as present recently as she’s the only one going on for her masters. The way classmates bond with their “batch” is something that I haven’t noticed in the US. This group will be friends for life. Bright, creative, open-minded and hard working, if India is going to live up to its promise, it will be because of young people like my new friends.

I am very happy to be part of their lives.

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