Good morning. So this morning, Doug and I are going to give a review of our trip to our two weeks in India and Bhutan. I was invited to go on this trip, and I invited Doug and my son Daniel to go. So, the three of us joined a tour, Stanford tour, led by a Stanford professor named Mark Moncal, who does this sort of thing a lot. And this tour started in Calcutta.

[01:07]

We all flew 20 hours in here to Calcutta. And then from Calcutta, we went to Darjeeling, which is the great tea colonial tea city in the mountains. And then from Darjeeling, we went by bus through much of Bengal and to Sikkim, Gangtok, which is the capital of Sikkim. And then we drove to Bhutan. So, the tour was a little over-scheduled. Spent a lot of time on the bus, and a couple of days in each place.

[02:12]

And in Bhutan, we stayed at three different places. But all together, it was a very, very good trip. And so Doug and I will bring you some of the highlights. This thangka is one that Doug bought in Bhutan. Very beautiful thangka. So that's representative of our trip. So, I seem to have the microphone, but... Why don't you say something about your highlights? Whatever you want to say. I'm very grateful.

[03:33]

I don't have the disposable income to do this sort of thing. Once in a lifetime chance. In my preparation for the PEPRA, I read a lot about these just the painting, which is predetermined, the shape, the proportions of the colors that are all laid out. We went to the museum and saw the various stages of the painting. That's all predetermined. There's a little bit of freedom in the area of the decoration. And, of course, the freight.

[04:37]

And when we hit Bhutan, we took a day off from the trip. And the sergeant and Daniel and I just went through the capital of Bhutan. And it was bigger than anything I had, bigger than my suitcase. And with the new restrictions on travel, I was really worried that I couldn't use it so hard. And it pretty much stuck back. I'm kind of acting like a tennis racket poking out of my carry-on. And I lost, just lost this knob on this end, digging into the cart and bringing it here.

[05:40]

Anyway, they're very beautiful and it's very indicative of the brilliance. They use a lot of sensory overload techniques in pushing the self out of people. Yeah, well in Bhutan the monasteries are called Tsongs, and many of them are partly administrative government and partly monks, so you have a kind of combination, but some are just strictly for monks. And we visited quite a few Tsongs. and we had access to them.

[06:44]

Bhutan is a country where it's trying to preserve its Buddhist culture, whereas most of the countries around it are losing their Buddhist culture, or being infiltrated by Western and Chinese influence. So, they only let a limited number of people into the country every year. So we're fortunate to have been able to actually go there. And in the monasteries I realized that they have so much sensory, they create an atmosphere, a sensory atmosphere. So that if you're a monk in the monastery, everywhere you turn there's painting, and so you're totally immersed in this atmosphere and there's no escape, no blank walls, so to speak.

[07:50]

So I can see how There's a varying count of how many monks there are. Some people say 4,000, some people say 8,000, some people say 14,000. We had a visit with the second highest lama in Bhutan, and the way that happened was that our leader, although he was very much interested in preserving Bhutan's culture, he knows the king and he knows all the administrators and so forth, and kind of a high-powered guy. Max was on this trip who sponsored me, sponsored us.

[08:56]

You probably know, some of you may know Max and his girlfriend, Kana. He's very good at persuading people to do things. So we had a, when we were in Bhutan, we had a dinner with some of the administrators of Bhutan. and among them was the Queen. And so, to make a long story short, Max talked to the Queen about our desire to go visit some Lamas in the monastery. So, over the kind of resistance of the leader of the tour, She called the next morning and said that she had arranged for Doug and I and Daniel and Max and Kana to visit this monastery and talk to the lama, have an interview with the lama.

[10:07]

So they sent a car, a vehicle, and brought us to this monastery. So we had a very nice interview, but there was a translator, and they served us tea and some little cookie. We spent about an hour talking about our practice and their practice. It turns out that the translator had been to America, but mostly in Boulder, where the Tibetans are. We talked about the differences in our practice and so forth, and when it comes down to it, practices are not that different, and there are different ways of approaching practice, but the essence of the practice is really the same. And when he talked about the visualization part, which is everywhere, is kind of preliminary

[11:16]

practice for them, and the higher practices are like what we do, like Zazen. So he described their meditation practice of like Mahamudra, which is the same, seems like very much the same as Zazen. So he had that kind of agreement, and then he gave us some nice big fat incense which I'm going to burn today. It's all natural ingredients, it says. So, that was kind of a nice highlight to actually get to meet. But when we were in Sikkim, we went to a wonderful monastery that was built for the Karmapa.

[12:20]

I don't know if any of you remember the Karmapa. Karmapa is the second to the Dalai Lama. They have somewhat equal and in the late 70s the Karmapa was in America, 16th Gwalior Karmapa, and he visited us here when our Zendo was in the community room and they had the Karmapa's guard The Dharmadattu people, they all dressed up in suits and ties, and they had limousines parked all down the street, and people were peering in the window, and he served them tea. Actually, they wanted to serve him tea, but they wouldn't let us serve him tea. My wife was rather indignant because they took the tea serving away from her and did it themselves.

[13:22]

So we visited the Karmapa's monastery there, and they let us go into the Buddha hall, which is an enormous place, and all these monks were sitting there doing their service. And they were lined up, seemingly according to age, because they had little boys that were all dressed up in their monk's suits, and seemed like they were about six years old. seven, eight, nine, ten, you know, and they're blowing the horns and chanting, and it's really quite a wonderful experience. And so they have a very lively kind of practice, a lot more noise than we do, and Doug liked that a lot. He said, geez, you know, when I sit in the zendo, I kind of miss all that noise. The last day, the last full day in Bhutan, they scheduled two activities in the morning.

[14:46]

The surgeon went from one room to the other, and Daniel went from one room to the other. The other, in our case, was climbing to what they called the tiger's nest. Tigers usually had lairs. that brought Guru Rapji to Bhutan and landed him high up on this cliff, a couple thousand feet above the valley. And he meditated and converted all of the demons in Bhutan to Buddhism. This tiger was also one of the forms of his demon wife.

[15:49]

So he meditated in his bed and kept this in his belt. So we climbed up this mountain, and it was a long subject on a dirt path. It was a terrifying climb over a lot of stairs and some pretty exposed areas and ledges to this temple just stuck in a cliff like with superglue, I hope. And it had burned down. So, then there were several other temples, like there's one that's, there's a waterfall and a big cliff and then you go up a long, there's ledges and stairs to get to the tiger temple.

[17:02]

And along the way there's a little place where monks meditate. They do a lot of meditation around the asana. They took us to a little chapel where it had a gate or a door with a little window, and we could look into the cave. And then they took us to a little, a very small Buddha hall with very big Buddhas.

[18:04]

And there were these monks from one of the, I think the oldest sect. And they didn't have shaved heads, they had long hair. The queen had asked them to do a ceremony for the sake of the country. When they say a ceremony, they mean a ceremony. This was like 27 days from 9 in the morning until 7, 9 at night until 7 at night. And they had horns. They would, the way it would work, they brought us in and fed us that. We were in there for like 15 or 20 minutes. In this small area, maybe as big as And they got the big horns, and they got the drums, and they got the cymbals, and they got the chins. And they just would go through something that lasted maybe a couple of minutes, and then the horns would come in again, and then they would ping the bells for a little while, and then they'd start over again.

[19:17]

You just sort of washed all the personality out of your brain and left you there as an entity that just took in information. So it was very impressive. And then he came out and climbed back down the mountain. You said they shoot betel nut? That's a narcotic? Yeah, I think it gives them a little bit of a kick, you know? Gets them to grow and hard to... Betel nut is pretty common in Bhutan.

[20:36]

And people give it to each other as presents. And when we were driving through Bengal, North Bengal, toward Bhutan, there were all these thin little trees, which were pointed out as betel nut trees. And they would not say that it gives you a high. They wouldn't admit to that. No, but it does, it's something. It does something, but they wouldn't say what. But it makes your mouth all red. So that's how you can tell that somebody's been chewing betel nut. Mary. Well, you know, the food that we ate was fine. I don't know whether it was prepared, I think it was largely prepared for us.

[21:37]

Everywhere we went, it was fine. I don't know. It was, it was fairly much the same everywhere. So I think it was, someone gave them a menu, but there was a lot of Indian food, hot food, hot stuff. And there was white bread toast, wonder bread, and gruel, not gruel, but porridge, which is mostly oatmeal. And then a lot of fried foods, you know, and a lot of cut fish. and meat, and curries, and rice, and dahl, those things.

[22:41]

Yeah. Well, in Bhutan, you know, In contrast, in India, you see many different kinds of faces. When we were in our hotel, which was the fanciest hotel in Calcutta, supposedly, outside the door was a kind of big shopping area. You know, people set up their shop, and there's so many people, there's like a flood of people during the day, busy out. like going both ways. And you just see all these different faces, you know, and different kinds of people. And as you go to north, there are less people, less, and there becomes more countryside, and the people change.

[23:49]

And the further north you go, the more the more the people have the same feeling, same looks. And by the time you get to Bhutan, it's a different kind of people. They're distinctive, distinctive feeling. But in Bhutan, everybody seems to be very compassionate. It's a very different feeling. You never get the feeling of ego. with the people in Bhutan. And the further north you go, it's that way. In India, everybody drives with a horn. The driver, the guy that's looking out the window on the other side to tell people what's happening, and the guy that pushes the horn. But the guy that pushes the horn is the driver. They should have a third person because the horn is going all the time.

[24:50]

no matter whether they're stopped or just like, you know, it's just part of driving is honking the horn. So everybody's honking horns and passing each other, you know, and never slowing down for each other and missing each other by a quarter of an inch. It's really harrowing. In Bhutan, by the time you get to Bhutan, the drivers are much more careful. They're driving slowly and they stop for people on curves you know, to go by and it's a different feeling, you know, quite different. And people are very friendly, and they're always waving, you know, and so it's just, it kind of expresses the feeling of the country, of the Buddhist, actually, the Buddhist atmosphere in the country. Because it seems to me that the atmosphere in the country is that it comes from, well, there's the king who very much wants to preserve the Buddhist ambiance of the country.

[26:00]

So the people, he wants everybody to wear the traditional clothing, which causes problems with people who are not traditional. And it seems like the religious The religion is the center of the country and it just permeates the whole country, so that everyone is connected through Buddhism. And it's a small country, so there's not a lot of variation, a lot of variety in the country. So, a place like Bhutan, which is really small, can be a kind of testing ground for how to preserve a Buddhist environment, given the fact that all the Western culture is invading at the doorstep.

[27:09]

You know, for a while, smoking is banned. You can't smoke cigarettes. People do sometimes, but it's really discouraged. And television was banned for a while, but now you can only keep it out for so long. But you don't have the same feeling about traffic in Bhutan as other places. has a lot to do with the population density, but very rarely you see people driving the same way that you see them driving in India. I think it does have a lot to do with the population density, because there are only some small cities and the rest is countryside, and everything's separated by deep valleys and high mountains. As you go up from, well, Darjeeling is, when you get to Darjeeling, you start going up these mountains, and the buses are, you look down, there's nothing there.

[28:28]

It gets more and more scary as you go up, but that was just part of our trip. And then as you go up to Sikkim, it gets even more so, It's all just sheer mountain, sheer drops. So the people are separated a lot. They're not so cohesive. What kind of trees did they have in Bermuda a lot of them that you wrote that about? Well, there's a lot of different kinds of trees. You know, West Bengal is a big place and it extends actually into Bhutan. The border is, you know,

[29:29]

we say, well, this is West Bengal and this is Bhutan, but actually that's just an arbitrary line. So, Bengal extends, so they have wild elephants and rhinoceroses, and tigers, panthers, or something like that, cats. So, in both Bengal and Bhutan, but you can tell Bhutan because it gets higher and higher, so it's getting higher, whereas West Bengal is not so high. But the trees, it's tropical, they have tropical, and they have mountainous, and they have various kinds of atmospheres. And before we got in the Himalayan Tibet, we drove to Manasi, Manasi Peak, where it's a beautiful place.

[30:45]

And they had a guard, most of the people living in Manasi. And we didn't see any yaks, because the yaks at that time of year go up to 13,000, 14,000 feet. What kind of religious life would a woman have, a woman that you've seen?

[31:51]

How would they express their religious life? Well, they don't have any women in Bhutan. No, I'm not kidding. They treat... Women are treated by men very well. How they treat each other, I'm not sure. But... It's a very traditional kind of country, so they don't have the same kind of desires, you know, that people in Western countries have. So, they seem to get along very well with each other, the men and the women. We had one very famous temple, I'll call it song, is dedicated to a man named Kinle, who is the madman, the mad monk, who everybody loves the most.

[33:05]

He's the most loved monk in Bhutan. He's famous for his sexual exploits. And this temple, many women go there who want to have children. And so they go there to get fertile, right? And Qin Lei, one of his famous for his exploits, and so there was this demoness who was harassing people on the path, right? So he said, let me take care of this. So he waited for the demoness to come by on the path at night, and he exploded her with his penis.

[34:07]

And then they built this temple And there's a monument, there's a kind of little chorten of sorts, where the demon, on top of the demoness, right, and these wooden penis, you know, that when women come and they want to have, be blessed, you know, he, the priest, taps them on the head. So there were several women who actually in our group who were blessed for their future happiness. Is that the answer you expected? I'm surprised that they are not out of their homes. So, everybody in the family worships the One at Home.

[35:22]

And they all depend upon our monks to come and do ceremonies to help solve their problems or to mollify their problems. And I think everybody practices together. I don't know about nuns. We didn't see any nuns. There's about—the population of the country is about 600,000. And there's somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 monastic monks, which makes it one to two percent of the population, partly supported by the state and partly supported by the populace.

[36:39]

And their job is to And Tonkas is a teaching instrument, and when you're not using it for teaching, you pull this cover down. And they're kind of magical. I mean, I look at this one and it changes from day to day. I think we're running out of time.

[37:45]

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