Stupa Stoop

I apologize for ending the last post a tad abruptly–the internet decided to enter a flaky mood, so I figured it was best to get the post up when I had the chance, as soon as the connection appeared again.  Yay, non-broadband.  Brings back memories of 1997.

And I’ll warn that my husband and I are apparently getting sick yet again.  Yay, dysentery.  Or other random bug, or bad food, or…

We were much better back at the end of the monsoon season, happily ascending Swayambhunath for some sight-seeing and pleasant exercise.  As I said yesterday, the entire hill is one continuous shrine.  From the bottom up, there’s more to look at than you can take in.  I keep studying my own photos and discovering new things in them all.

A pair of carved pillars flank one entrance to the hill.

A painted arch marks another entrance. (You're looking back down at the world outside.)

Note the kneeling deer in the picture above, and keep an eye out for them.  They’re a common symbol of Buddhism, commemorating the deer park where Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) delivered his first public sermon on Buddhism, an event that appears in artwork as commonly as the Sermon on the Mount in Christianity.  The wheel (or “chakra”) between the deer is another common symbol of Buddhism, and represents the teachings that lead to Englightenment.

Statues adorn the hillside, too.  I have numerous pictures of intricately carved stone, weathered by centuries.  But the three largest statues demand your attention as you start to ascend from the archway above.

A trio of Buddhas on the slope of the hill, each forming a different mudra (gesture of blessing and protection.)

A close-up of one of the Buddhas.

…And this is all still just the beginning.  I call it the “stoop” because, well, in case you haven’t noticed by now, I like word play.  But, too, this really is only the “porch” of the hill, the entrance, the introduction.  You may be wondering, “Where’s the stupa?”

If all goes well, tomorrow we’ll climb the steps.

Nepali of the Day:

meerga:  deer

teen:  3

paTak:  time; instance; occurrence

biraami:  sick

chu:  I am

mehina:  month

malaai ___ laagyo:  I feel ____

waak-waak:  nausea

chiso:  cold

taato:  hot

TeenpaTak, ek mahina-maa, ma biraami chu!

Malaai waak-waak lagyo.

Mero shrimaan-laai chiso laagyo.

Malaai TaaTo laagyo.

We’re Off to See the Stupa!

So, have you had enough of the stupa south of Thamel?  Good.  Time to feature our next stupa.

This one ties for “breath-taking” with stupa #3, which should also appear later this month.  In fact, this pair are two of the top tourism destinations in all of Nepal; many of the guidebooks feature one or the other of them on the cover.  We visited Swayambhunath first, and it has a solid claim for notoriety.

Do you remember the story from Nepali Politics 101, about the legend of the boddhisatva that meditated atop a hill and then cleaved a gap in the surrounding hills to drain the primordial lake that once filled the Kathmandu Valley?  Swayambhunath marks the spot where the boddhisatva is said to have meditated.

Honestly, the stupa is so old that no one seems to be quite able to tell exactly when it was built, or by who, or why.  Guidebooks and tourist sites like to throw around words like “ancient” and “mysterious.”  But an old chronicle, and a damaged stone inscription, and archaelogists’ best guess, all agree that the stupa is approximately 1500 years old.  No, not built in 1500–I mean, it is likely at least one thousand, five hundred years old.  Tradition says that there was a previous structure in the same place even earlier than that, and I don’t disregard the tradition.  People do like to rebuild things.  And if I were a prehistoric person wandering around the Kathmandu Valley, I think I would have naturally been drawn to the hill.  Anyone would.

Can you find the stupa? Review what you've learned about stupas, and look carefully... Oh, all right, it's hard to miss.

The entire area is important to the history and culture of the Kathmandu Valley.  The base of the hill itself is chockful of smaller monuments–and stretching from the base to the top, simply endless streams of prayer flags.

Even as you drive around the small ring road at the base of the hill, prayer flags wave over your head.

Really, the entire hill is a shrine. And the prayer flags continue, and the waves of monuments grow more complex, as you ascend.

Nepali of the Day:

pahaD:  hill

upateka:  valley

paani:  water

tol:  lake

chaDnu:  to climb

ko: of (possessive)

Haami Swayambhunathko pahaD chaDyau.  –  We climbed Swayambhunath hill.

Dherai bharsha aghi — Many years ago

Stupas are Stupendous

So, to review, when we last left off in the stupa saga, my husband and I had stumbled on this stupa just south of Thamel:

Note the smaller shrines around the large stupa.

Or, to be more exact, I was telling the story of the first time we saw the stupa, along with the photos from the second time we saw the stupa.  The day of the pictures was a day of many sights; I had my camera with me because I’d just been shooting pictures in Kathmandu Durbar Square.  Many of the best of those pictures I also STILL haven’t posted–even though, as the looming clouds in the pictures bear witness, these pictures were taken way back in monsoon season.  Apparently on October 5th, or thereabouts.

I miss the monsoon.  It was warmer then.  And, too, barely an hour after taking these stupa pictures, I caught the double rainbow over the old royal palace.  That day, I came very close to capturing an equally momentous sight at the stupa itself.  Not that this close up of the Buddha eyes on the stupa is bad:

Apparently this is only done in Nepal, but all the stupas here have eyes painted on all 4 sides. The curled nose is shaped like the Nepali numeral "1" which looks like the Western "9."

…But every time I see it, I remember that I came *this close* to catching a lightning bolt rending its background.  To my shock, I saw it with my naked eye in the same moment I snapped the photo, but the camera didn’t catch it.  At the moment, my only relationship with electricity is with the generator making some for our house, and with the static kind that is often making my hair actually crackle when a metal necklace over my head.  Oh, what I wouldn’t give for some rain.  Aside from the sprinkles on Christmas (closer to a White Christmas than I could have realistically expected), and the 15-minute hard rain on December 26th, we’ve had no rain whatsoever since the monsoon ended back in October.

Still, we visited the stupa on a good day.  As I pointed out in my last post, a pair of men were diligently repainting the entire area with brilliant paint.

A man adding fresh paint to the shrines around the stupa.

A pause in the painting.

The paint wasn’t just for the large stupa–it’s common for many smaller Buddhist shrines to surround an impressive stupa.  With the fresh paint, on that day, the entire place looked like a mythical land.

With everything so brilliant under such a leaden sky, I felt like I was no longer even on earth. Judging by its design, I think the building in the background is a monastery attached to the stupa.

I promise, I really will look up the name of this place soon!

Nepali/Tibetan/Sanskrit of the Day:

stupa:  round shrine over a Buddhist saint’s relics

gomba:  monastery (also written gompa or gumpa)

dharma:  religion

Buddha dharma:  Bhuddism

Hindu dharma:  Hinduism

mannu:  to believe

kaam garnu:  to work

dekhnu:  to see (by chance)

uniharu:  they

haami:  we

Uniharu kaam garnubhayo.  — They worked.

Uniharu Buddha dharma mannuhunchan?  –  Do they believe in Buddhism?

Haami stupa-le dekhyau.  –  We saw the stupa.

Discovering Stupas

Um, the U.S. Capitol Building looks a bit like a stupa.

I didn’t intend that comparison.  But when I look at my blog today, there it is, quite hard to miss:

A broad dome, surmounted by a square, topped with a tapering tower.  (Though the tower is gold, and prominent eyes are painted on it.)

And then you scroll down the page to the previous post… and find a stack of rectangles, surmounted by a broad dome, topped with a tapering pillar.  In white marble, in D.C.

In fact, though you can’t see this in the previous stupa picture from the last post, the broad dome of a stupa in fact commonly sits on a stack of rectangles/squares.

I sincerely doubt that the style of one really influenced the other.  People do, after all, like to make things by stacking shapes–snare an American child, a Nepali child, a Japanese child, and a Somali child, and give them all a pile of blocks, and just watch them all go to work happily building things by placing one shape atop another.

Still, the juxtaposition is amusing.

The Capitol Building didn’t even get its completed dome until Lincoln’s presidency.  The stupa I’m currently featuring, on the other hand, is undoubtedly several centuries old–although I am having a frustrating time trying to get any solid information about it.  I THINK its name is Kathesimbhu, or Sheeghal Baha, but that’s from combining snippets of clues from some pictures on flikr, a google search, and a stray entry in wikipedia.  I really need to go find my map, and see if it’s marked.

The most important point at the moment is that stupas are built to be three-dimensional mandalas.  And mandalas could easily lead me into an entirely different post–just, for the moment, accept that a “mandala” is a diagram formed by concentric circles and other shapes, with each color and shape in the diagram (or stupa) laden with symbolic meaning.  So the stack of shapes, and the bright colors, are not random, but carefully planned for a specific purpose.

They’re utterly shocking in the middle of Kathmandu.  Less than an hour after we first stepped off the plane, as a friend drove us to our new house, my husband and I simultaneously dropped our jaws and peered out the window, and kept peering out the window long after the shock had passed out of sight behind us.  Then we poked each other and said, “Did you see that?  Was that really…  That looks like the pictures!  And it’s just sitting there!”

I now know that was the Chabahil stupa, a relatively small and unimpressive stupa down the road from the stupa we visited yesterday, Boudanath.  But Boudanath is set off from a road leading away from the city, whereas Chabahil now happens to lie right on the busy Ring Road, very close to the Kathmandu Airport.  So it’s the first one most new arrivals see.

A few weeks later, we confused a taxi driver while searching for a specific restaurant in Thamel, so utterly that we ended up a few blocks south of Thamel.  When we gave up and decided to hike back north, we stumbled on the undetermined-name stupa for the first time.  Though we didn’t have the camera with us at the time, I captured the sense of the place during our second time passing it–which happened to be the same day as our major walk around Kathmandu Durbar Square.  Again, as we wandered north to Thamel, and as the neighborhood began to look familiar, we suddenly glanced to the left.  And instead of this:

A typical street in Thamel. Yes, it IS typical for the cars to almost be running over people. After a while you don't even notice it anymore, whether you're a car or a people.

We saw this:

Um, not your typical Thamel sight?

Seriously, THIS:

Radiant with fresh paint--Note the painters.

And we stared a bit, and then walked around and snapped many pictures.

Nepali of the Day:

taasbir kichnu:  to take pictures

rang:  color

changirangi:  multi-colored

ghumnu:  to wander

haami:  we

wadee-padee:  around

Haami stupa wadee-padee ghumyau.  =  We wandered around the stupa.

Ma changirangi stupa-le tasbiir kichay.  = I took pictures of the multi-colored stupa.

Om Mani Padme Hum

I have a song–er, mantra, er, song–stuck in my head.

Thus the title.

Nepal is a strange place, a grape balanced between two massive stones.  The stones, of course, are India and China, both far larger in area, population… and even in the amount that people in the West know about them, which is still, admittedly, often not very much.

But to be even more specific, Nepal is in between India and Tibet. I’ll decline to even try to go into the Tibet issue in much depth here–if I so much as tried, in order to give some decent perspective on the subject, I’d probably need a “Tibetan Politics 101″ series that would be even more infinite than my “Nepali Politics 101″ series.

Instead, I’ll just point out something that’s incredibly obvious to anyone who lives here:  while the majority of Nepal’s people are Hindu, a large minority are Buddhist.  And, in general, the people go with their regions:  the closer you get to the Indian border, the more likely that the people are Hindu; the closer you get to the tallest Himalayas, on the Tibetan border, the more likely that the people are Buddhist.

Especially Tibetan Buddhists.  In fact, a significant portion of the villages along Nepal’s border with Tibet historically had far closer ties with Tibet than they did with Kathmandu.  Maybe I’ll do a Nepali Politics post on that later; the trade caravans (of yaks!) were fascinating.

Right now, just note that those ties are there.  And that, when China got a little too eager with their whole “Cultural Revolution” thing–and even earlier, when the Chinese government emphatically claimed supremacy over the Tibetan government in the early 1950’s–tens of thousands of Tibetan people scrambled down the slopes on their southern border, streaming into Nepal.

After all, many of those Tibetans–or their families–already had some experience with travel to Nepal, even as far as Kathmandu, for purpose of trade… or pilgrimmage.

Which ties back into the mantra currently stuck in my head.  (Though, honestly, Rihanna’s remixed “Umbrella” is starting to give it some competition, since I’m listening to Rhapsody while I type.)

In Thamel, much of what’s sold is indeed authentically Nepali.  Some is Indian.  But another, prominent, part is Tibetan. And from a bewildering array of Tibetan bookshops, Buddhist paraphernalia stores, and general CD shops, as you wander through Thamel, you hear the endless recording of Tibetan monks sing-chanting “Om Mani Padme Hum.”

And you also, especially, hear it at Swayambhunath and Boudhanath, the two largest Buddhist stupas in Kathmandu. I’ve now–finally! after already being here 7 months!–visited them both.  Today we were at the latter, and I promise, we took plenty of pictures.

And I’m finally getting over being sick.  My voice is still scratchy from the latest round of cold/laryngitis, but I’m less tired now, so the poor voice quality will have no effect on my posts.  And February just began today… and this year, February 25 is Losar, the Tibetan New Year Festival.  So it seems appropriate to finally post my stupa pictures.

Granted, I’m still getting over being sick today.

I’ve managed many words.  Pictures… maybe not so many.  But I’ll start with my current wallpaper image, a picture of a *small* stupa just south of Thamel.

The first stupa we ever circumambulated, after stumbling upon it when we wandered too far south of Thamel.

Tibetan/Sanskrit of the Day:

(your regularly scheduled Nepali of the Day will return soon)

Om:  indivisibility; universality

Mani:  jewel

Padme:  lotus

Hum:  limitless compassion

* This chant is commonly translated into English as “The Jewel in the Lotus,” which is the literal meaning of the pair “Mani Padme” in Sanskrit.  But, around about India, Nepal, and Tibet, “jewel” and “lotus” each take on LOTS of symbolic meanings, and the harmonic “om” and “hum” make things even more complicated.  And when you put them all together, things get even more complicated, to form a short phrase that many Buddhists can meditate on throughout their entire lives.