Gyantse
By Thomas on November 27, 2007 | No Comments »
Gyantse is easily the most beautiful and atmospheric town in Tibet. There was so much to see. I could have easily stayed a week – but, unfortunately, we only had one day, now that we are on a tour schedule.
To fully take advantage of our single day, we started early – even before sunrise. This may sound terribly early, but the sun doesn’t come up before 8 AM in Tibet – China can’t be bothered to introduce time zones. As we walked over to the Gyantse Dzong, a fortress high on top of a hill in the middle of town, vendors were opening their stores, sidewalks were being swept, and children in their blue school uniforms (which looked more like jogging suits) were watching us curiously. After we took some photos of the Dzong in the warm morning light, we grabbed a bite to eat and headed over to the monastery.
We spent a good part of the day in Gyantse’s wonderfully unique monastery, which is particularly famous for the Kumbum, a circular multi-storied building that houses over twenty small temples each unique and dedicated to different Buddhas or protector deities. Pilgrims and tourists wind their way up the Kumbum ladders leading to the upper level with magnificent views over the monastery, its fortified walls, the surrounding Tibetan quarter, and the distant mountains beyond the city.
But as impressive as the Kumbum is, we were tempted to walk out of the monastery complex. Shortly after paying yet another high-priced entry fee and entering the monastery, we were aggressively chased by a monk who sharply demanded to see our ticket yet again despite the fact that we had clearly just left the ticket window. Already annoyed, we walked over to the Kumbum only to discover that we had to buy a camera permit before we could pass the two monks blocking the entrance. We said that we didn’t want to photograph the interior, but it was either pay or leave your camera here, meaning we couldn’t even photograph the views from the Kumbum’s upper platform. This extortionate policy (extreme even for Tibet) made us really mad. And the aggressive demands for money were very upsetting. I swear, I’ve seen more monks counting money than praying in the temples here in the TAR – and this goes for most of the monasteries, not just for Gyantse. It seems that Buddhist monasteries are more like financial rather than religious institutions where tourists have to pay through the nose (sometimes $30 for ONE photo permit) and where money, left by pilgrims as donations, is carried away in buckets.
After Tony argued that the obsessive materialism does not at all go with Buddhism (and calling them bad monks for being so greedy), they offered us a 2-for-1 deal which we hesitatingly accepted. The Kumbum was incredibly beautiful, and even though it was totally worth seeing, it was the idea of charging money for every little thing that made us angry. As we found out later, most of the exorbitant entry fees for monasteries in Tibet don’t go to the monasteries themselves but are pocketed by the Chinese government. (Perhaps some of the money goes towards the latest models of Nike tennis shoes some of the monks are wearing.) Actually, we don’t even know if the people at the ticket booths were real monks. They certainly didn’t act like the monks we had seen in Kham and Amdo.
After we left the monastery, we strolled through the Tibetan quarter of town to explore the narrow back roads and to look at the amazing adobe architecture. We wound our way up past walls dotted with drying yak dung to a viewpoint covered with prayer flags and mani stones. After enjoying the view of the monastery, the Gyantse Dzong, and the town itself, it was time to leave. We returned to the car to continue our trip on to Xigatse.
Topics: Tibet | No Comments »
