Holy Cow by Sarah Macdonald

Author:Sarah Macdonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767918145
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2004-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Upper Dharamsala, or McLeod Gunj, is the spiritual center of exiled Tibetan Buddhism. I'd passed through the town on my way home from Vipassana and I'd found it peaceful and pretty, but as I head back to the tiny settlement perched on a ridge of the Himalayan foothills, I'm shocked to see it bursting at the seams. It takes hours to travel up the packed potholed path on a precipice. Finally my bus splutters over the hill, farts a toxic cloud of black diesel smoke into the air and unloads monks, nuns and tourists. The town no longer looks as it did when I came down from Dharamkot with stars in my eyes and love in my heart. It's developing dramatically to match the exploding Western interest in Buddhism and, at the moment, it's not big enough to cope with the largest influx of spiritual tourists in history.

Waterfalls of plastic bags and bottles cascade down the slopes. Red-arsed mangy monkeys and rabies-ridden dogs graze on huge piles of garbage. Steel pipes snake the paths, and faded prayer flags wrap around barbed wire fences. The thin mountain air is clogged with dust and the stench of sewage; face masks sell alongside silk scarves. Goan trance music, screams of chain saws and the throb of jackhammers drown out the gongs and chants from the monasteries. The sunken faces of squatting lepers plead up at me and the Dalai Lama's face peers down from massive advertising billboards. I have to walk a long way out of town to find a room.

Ladies Venture looks like a sweet and cheap guest house. Inside, a woman wearing a beautiful Tibetan tunic dress with a striped apron shakes her long plaits in a nod at my inquiry and laughs at my relief.

“Hello, lovely lady, there is not much water, and no power at night, you have a great time.”

In my bare room that looks up to the snowcapped Himalayas I have my first existential crisis. There's a centipede in my sink. Buddhists should not kill and in their town I should honor that belief. It takes me half an hour to get the creature onto some paper and out the door; it takes seconds for a monk to walk past and unwittingly stomp on it.

I head out for dinner. The Tibetan shops and restaurants are crowded, and the health-food cafés, chocolate bars, Italian restaurants, Internet centers and video theaters are full. Walls are covered with layers of posters advertising courses. There are reiki, aura reading, Thai massage, yoga, Tibetan cooking, clairvoyance, plant healing, tarot card reading and Jewish mysticism. At the moment, the Dalai Lama's annual lecture course is king. I sit in a café and eavesdrop on raves about His Holiness—one of the few heroes on the planet. A Swedish girl says “HH” speaks the most wonderful wisdom, but a dopey-looking hippie with an incredible cockney accent admits he's having trouble.

“I'm dropping out, man, the three days of emptiness are killing me, just how empty can you pleading be? I'm going to watch Terminator in the movie café.

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