This year the Tibetan New Year, Losar was celebrated at the 14th of February. I was so fortunate that I could visit the Tibetan Settlements here nearby on this particular day. My dear Ladakhi friend, Gurmet took me along with a Chinese yogi from the shala (which was a real act of compassionate and undicriminative friendliness, as the Chinese are not really welcome on Tibatean areas in the last years...)
About 90 kms from Mysore there is a big land which was given to the Tibetan refugees a few decades ago. By now there is a real community which is said the biggest settlement outside Tibet. Little villages spread on a big territory of hills and grass fields. We had long walks in the afternoon sun between the villages, enjoying the emptiness of the fields, the silence of the landscape and the look of the monks passing by on they scooters, in sunglasses and traditional red dresses. It felt like a different country - no crowd, no dust, no dirt, but silence, tranquility and peace of mind.
We visited huge and magnificent Tibetan Buddhist temples with amazing wall paintings of the wrathful and peaceful Buddhist deities, talked to very friendly and ever-smiling monks (they were the first in India who did not want to sell us anything!!!), watched the little kid-monks playing or carrying water and just sat long on the temple-stairs. Sera, a clean and light village of tranquility has only monks as inhabitants, about 5000 of them study here advanced Buddhist studies. It turned out that the first day of Losar is celebrated with family and friends indoor, so besides the temples all shops and restaurants were closed and the streets were quite empty. We didn`t mind at all, after the everyday noise and crowd `outside` it was like a present to enjoy some silence. Thanks to Gurmet who knows the place and some monks quite well, we could visit places which are not open for every visitor: without realizing it first, we were taken by a monk to the residence of the Dalai Lama, which was like the biggest blessing for the coming year. It had a very special energy field.
That day we entered the year of the Iron Tiger - let me citate here the greetings from Tenzin Palmo about the coming year:
`No matter how fierce the next 12 months, as
Shantideva so rightly said, "This world is full of sharp stones and
thorns, and we cannot cover the world with leather to make it soft to
walk on. But we can put leather on the soles of our feet as shoes and
sandals, and that way, we walk everywhere."
However hard we try, we can never make the world perfect and according
to our own wishes. That is impossible. But, the good news is that we
can change our minds, we can change our own attitudes, we can, indeed,
learn how to come back to our own pure awareness where we stop making
judgments and trying to change everything to our own egoistic ideals
and just relax into the present moment.`
Shantideva so rightly said, "This world is full of sharp stones and
thorns, and we cannot cover the world with leather to make it soft to
walk on. But we can put leather on the soles of our feet as shoes and
sandals, and that way, we walk everywhere."
However hard we try, we can never make the world perfect and according
to our own wishes. That is impossible. But, the good news is that we
can change our minds, we can change our own attitudes, we can, indeed,
learn how to come back to our own pure awareness where we stop making
judgments and trying to change everything to our own egoistic ideals
and just relax into the present moment.`
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