broadcast 05.18.04--first weeks

"i smile when i'm angry, i cheat and i lie.

i do what i have to do to get by.

but i know what is wrong and i know what is right,

and i die for the truth...

...in my secret life"

- leanoard cohen

settled in nicely now. i'm in a little monastery about ten minutes walk out of macleod ganj, along the bagsu road. walking into macleod each morning for breakfast i have a beautiful view down the side of the mountain as it spills out into the vast plains of india. it even looks hotter down there... but the nightlights of mccleod spilling down the mountainside in the evening adds to the coolness. temperatures are very high though, even up here in the mountains, but not enough to stop me hiking up the moutainside at midday every wednesday and thursday to watched delayed 'live' broadcasts of premiership games in a little cafe where the owner lets me use the tv.

my schedule is quite busy - or rather, 'intense' rather than busy, since there's no feeling of being rushed. i'm doing both of the courses in buddhist philosophy on offer: a course in logic and debate on tuesday thursday and saturday afternoon, and the abhisamayalankara course on the other three days (sunday is free). mornings i slip inside my cd player and listen to geshe michael roach's teachings - compacting five years of weekly two hour classes into 8 months of daily classes, with homework and meditations and memorisation requirements. evenings i usually teach english to one of the monks here (who tells me tales of his roughneck eastern tibetan family and fights over women, and comes up with example sentences like 'yesterday i caught a rat in the manager's office so i took it to a restaurnat in bagsu'), and sometimes watch movies or chat with people on the street in the cool of the evening.

i love the 6pm movie showing - you walk in off the sunlit street, dive into the movie, then come out again and the street is dark, and the contemplative darkness of the cinema and the emotional impact of the movie accompany you into the street. the streets here are lit up the way i remember childhood streets - maybe its because of the lower wattage used here, the bare bulbs and lack of neon, and of course the indian way of making all of space quietly dramatic, which creates the accompanying sense of dream. the last two movies i've seen (and even the book i'm reading at the moment - about a woman who wanders through the realms beyond death for five days and recounts what she saw) have both had people in comas - 'kill bill' and 'talk to her'. i'm tempted to use the 'old' language and talk about possible meanings, about cinema's attunement to the 'emergency' of our culture, its 'speechlessness', but more and more i find it better to just observe such things, leave them floating in the text of a quiet message, almost missable, like the sound of a police siren twenty blocks away on those summer nights when you sleep with the window open. ultimately 'coma' can mean anything.

sometimes i take geshe michael out of the cd player and listen to a music cd: leonard cohen or fernando alvarez - talking about the same things as geshe michael but in different languages. two nights ago i sat on the mountainsideside in the evening listening to brian eno while reading the abhisamaylankara for the first time. the abhisamayalankara is a text dictated by maitreya (the future buddha) to the 2nd century monk asanga (or as western scholars put it: written by asanga). it is 50 pages of highly condensed, incomprehensible text that requires years of study with a lama to unpack the 'code' and appreciate its meaning. essentially it describes all the stages along the path to buddhahood. before studying it the monks memorise the entire text, and before they begin their study of the text (in about their 3rd or 4th year of study i think), the monks spend six months just praying to have enough virtue to understand it. isnt that beautiful? - i mean is there anything in our culture that we would spend six months praying to understand or appreciate? i've seen some amazing football matches on tv over the years but i cant imagine sitting in front of the tv for 6 months before turning it on - at least, not with the european championships only 5 weeks away. no wonder someone once called tibetan monks 'athletes of devotion'.

not sure if i will go to nepal to watch the european championships and renew my visa early, during course recess - there are reports of the border being closed. so i will just have to go in september in mid-course. i can watch the football here of course.

email is really bad i'm afraid - sometimes it crashes unexpectedly, erasing everything. sometimes when it comes to sending something it just disappears at the moment of sending. i've lost this message twice like this! so forgive me if my mailings are rare.

shenyen