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Guru Viking Podcast

Ep260: Boudhanath Kora with Lama Glenn Mullin

During a recent trip to Nepal, I met with frequent podcast guest Lama Glenn Mullin, spiritual teacher, Tibetologist, and author of over 30 books on Buddhism.

Glenn was in Kathmandu to lead a group of over fifty pilgrims into tantric retreat in the nearby mountains and graciously agreed to film with me at various sacred sites before and after their retreat.

In this video, we join Glenn before his retreat as he carries out his early morning circumambulation of the Great Stūpa of Boudhanath. As we walk, Glenn explains the story and significance of the renowned holy site, reveals the esoteric symbolism of stūpa design, and discusses the healing and spiritual power of pilgrimage.

Glenn also reflects on his own life experiences in Kathmandu, recalls his early dharma training, interacts with people around the stūpa, and considers the implications of Kālacakra prophecies for recent history and current events.

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Link in bio.

Also available on Youtube, iTunes, & Spotify – search ‘Guru Viking Podcast’.

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Topics include:

00:00 - Intro 01:06 - Glenn’s early dharma training 02:54 - The sacred land of Nepal 03:28 - Movement of Buddhist masters and lineages from India through Nepal 04:30 - A local offering ritual 04:59 - History of Boudha 05:53 - History of the Tibetan exile community in Nepal 10:22 - Shechen Gompa and Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche 11:44 - An enlightened being 12:26 - Walk to the stūpa 13:16 - Stūpa architecture and its symbolism 16:59 - Morning circumambulation 17:43 - Glenn and students 18:53 - How to do kora circumambulation 22:59 - Kora in Dharamsala 24:21 - Why morning kora? 25:51 - Clockwise or counterclockwise? 28:51 - Healing power of pilgrimage 31:32 - Anecdote of life extension through kora 33:24 - The power of pilgrimage 33:49 - The meaning of ‘ani-la’ 34:49 - Many temples of Boudhanath and city migration 38:02 - Kangyur recitation 39:11 - Cakravartin or spiritual teacher? 41:45 - The story of the Great Stūpa 43:32 - An auspicious lineage 44:12 - Misconceptions about Buddhism in Tibet 45:37 - Damage and renovation of stūpa 47:08 - Making a donation 48:45 - Walking around the stūpa 49:50 - Prophecy of Buddhism coming to the West? 54:37 - Kālacakra prophecy about age of darkness or golden age 55:56 - Buddhist and Newari art 01:01:46 - Glenn’s favourite monastery in Boudhanath 01:03:25 - Walking around the stūpa

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Previous episodes with Lama Glenn Mullin:

  • https://www.guruviking.com/search?q=glenn%20mullin 
To find out more about Lama Glenn Mullin, visit:
  • http://www.glennmullin.com/
  • https://www.facebook.com/Maitripa.Glenn 
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For more interviews, videos, and more visit:

  • www.guruviking.com

Music ‘Deva Dasi’ by Steve James

Duration:
1h 5m
Broadcast on:
28 Jun 2024
Audio Format:
mp3
During a recent trip to Nepal, I met with frequent podcast guest, Lama Glenn Mullen, spiritual teacher, Tibetologist and author of over 30 books on Buddhism. Glenn was in Kathmandu to lead a group of over 50 pilgrims into Tantric retreat in the nearby mountains and graciously agreed to film with me at various sacred sites before and after their retreat. In this episode, we join Glenn before his retreat as he carries out his early morning circumambulation of the great stupa of Bodhana. As we walk, Glenn explains the story and significance of the renowned holy site, reveals the esoteric symbolism of stupa design and discusses the healing and spiritual power of pilgrimage. Glenn also reflects on his own life experiences in Kathmandu, recalls his early Dharma training, interacts with people around the stupa and considers the implications of Kalachakra prophecies for recent history and current events. When did you first come to Kathmandu? My early Dharma training was in Dharmshala, so I was there from 1972 until about 1990 and after that my main teachers there had passed away and also Tibet had started to open its borders for pilgrimage by western Buddhists and so in 1991 I came here and then with some friends organized to go travel through the sacred places of central Tibet and at that time I probably had about 10 or 15 books in print from various publishers in Europe and America so I started doing quite a few lecture teaching and reading tours of the in the states and from that time on rather than base my time in Asia in Dharmshala I generally would do it from Nepal and for the Tibetan Buddhists of course Nepal is a very blessed land it's part of what Tibetans refer to it's give they have two names for it but it's part of Arya Desh the Indian subcontinent you could say with the Himalayas so in that way from the time of the Buddha it's been a center of meditation and study training practice and many many lineages that come to Tibet especially Vajrayana Tantra lineages come through Nepal and this is especially true of the lineages of the Renaissance schools of the 11th century at that time Buddhism in India was being hammered a little bit by the Muslim waves of Muslim invasions and many Buddhist masters were moving north into the Himalayas and everywhere you go in Nepal you will find some traces of their footprints for instance here in Bodhanat this was a standard meeting place for many centuries for traders from Tibet coming down and they've set up camp here what's happening here oh this is I presume some sort of offering for some sort of local spirit would you say yeah if it's she'd up tarma or something I don't know but naga like kangwadi teshiva okay so just auspicious offering for the household and Kathmandu Valley I mean Buddha is kind of a new town you know and when Tibetans came into refuge from the communist invasion of Tibetan 1959 this was all farmland there was just a stupa that had been there for many centuries and when Tibetan traders came out they would camp there generally and trade with the people from the city and also meet traders coming up from India so it was sort of a drop-off midway point you could say and it didn't really become a built-up urban center like this until the 1960s 70s 80s 90s and so on so if you see photos of Bodha back in the 1960s you're only the stupa but two or three farm houses around it but in the first I think when Tibetans came out they thought the problem in Tibetan may be solved within a few years then it became obvious it wasn't going to be in 1963 the heads of all the schools of Tibetan Buddhism held a conference with the Galma Rinpoche the Dalai Lama in Danam Salah and he had just moved there and they sort of made plans looks like we won't be going back very quickly so we have to get things together and they then set up schools you could say for all the different different lineages of Tibetan Buddhism and started to make plans for rebuilding creating proxy centers for the traditional trainings outside of Tibet and from 1964 back in Tibet the so-called cultural revolution took over which was what you really should call a cultural Holocaust all but 13 of Tibet 6500 monasteries temples libraries were destroyed and even the 13 that were not destroyed were just turned into warehouses so three or four llamas had who had long-term connections with trading in Nepal set up their basic beginning training programs here the Jim Rinpoche of Nyingma who in 1963 became the first ever head of Nyingma traditional Nyingma didn't never head ahead had had llama each of the different main monasteries had its own tripa its own throne holder and also Gilgo Kenze set up hair because being from calm and calm having a lot of traders a lot of accomplished settled hair some quite a few compounds from his area from Derek settled hair and so that started to build up in that way then other llamas Ergin Toku Kamakargu Llama set his center hair and then slowly hear the people connected with them gathered around and bought little pieces of land or leased them and went from having just one or two farmhouses to having a few hundred residential houses and a probably half a dozen or more Buddhist monasteries temples now I think there's the kids of your eka te la lachung probably 50 75 temples and monasteries are out here by different llamas and representing all different schools of Tibetan Buddhism are most of the main lineages of Tibetan Buddhism and they take young monks train them for a decade or so and then send them off to South India for where the sort of finishing monastic schools were established yep but if we were walking here 30 or 40 years ago there would be no motorcycles no cobblestone path no buildings so so this is an important dividing point on this little path go go right that you come to the chaise and gampa the monastery of and so that I think has been the one of the two or three strongest training monasteries in Nepal since the refugee exodus and continues today with several hundred monks it was somewhat damaged by the earthquake of 2015 and the main temple is still under renovation from that earthquake situation do go kensai became quite well known around the west because some because of some of his students like songs are kensai the filmmaker making the film the cop and travelers and magicians in Tibet and so this sort of brought a lot of attention to their monastery you could say and as answer kensai has become a major teacher internationally and with many many wonderful projects including sponsoring translations of many books and so on namaste by naji how are you very good yeah we're just taking a little walk this is a friend of mine steve is uh he does podcasts and he wanted to and he wanted to get pictures of what an enlightened being looks like so this is it this fella is what an enlightened being looks like and shine on me this is what an enlightened being does not look like does not look like yeah yeah we're gonna just do a few choras and talk a little bit on namaste tashle how are you i like to come to new paul every main june because it's mango season in canada every mango is one or two dollars mango season here you get these beautiful beautiful works of nature's art so in general stupas in ancient times were symbols of the formless nature of enlightenment dharmakaya mind or the infinite mind and in ancient times very great masters meditation teachers and lightened beings their their relics if they were cremated their bodies if they were simply in turn would be placed inside of on a vajre seat inside a stupa and the stupa built around them and the round shape sort of embracing the sky sort of representing the infinity but became a that round shape in zen but it's in the far east became the circle where there's no beginning no end but the infinity of being a symbol of emptiness something is there inside the circle and outside the circle but they're purely mental creations they are like rainbows in the sky manifest seemingly substantial yet in substantial and many examples of that are given in the buddhist sutras all scupas going back long before the buddha would have a square base representing the earth they're all things solid on top of that the water mandala representing all things fluid then the air mandala then the fire mandala then the air mandala so those four levels earth, water, fire, air representing the quintessential balance of solidity and fluidity and temporacy and finally the energetic flow combined with space the balance of the four and those that balance of the four elements is considered absolutely imperative to healthy and happy living for all human beings and on top of the this but then they probably not mandalas they love to have the eyes of enlightenment looking into the four directions the steps below the eyes usually there's they represent various levels of samadhi and to achieve that enlightenment when it must achieve deep levels of meditation so the steps below the eyes and so on represent the stages of samadhi and on top the parasal once one has achieved enlightenment when it's always under the protection you could say of the victory banner in other words when it changed the state when changes from being sometimes up and down up and down in one's life to the mind always abiding in the infinity of being while engaging the multiplicity of being without fear, attachment, repulsion and so forth on the basis of the two bodhicitta's infinite love compassion and the bodhisattva mind or awareness of the beyond appearance nature of all things traditionally Tibetans start their morning walk around as it's called kora at about five five o'clock five thirty so it's thinning down a little bit now as we come up towards seven o'clock and just after seven but uh and on full moons and new moon days then all Tibetans from and uh other Himalayan Buddhist kingdoms all come in the morning and evening for a walk around kora and it's said that one walk around gathers the merits that if all uh you know what is it if that merit was to take form all face would be all space would be namaste bhanaji hello how are you yeah yeah we're doing a small podcast okay this is guru Viking these are two of our most beautiful three of our most beautiful flowers who are coming came came up from India four of our beautiful flowers you see the flowers are gathering five people were were we doing a retreat up in parping for a week and then going up to maratika the amitayas great healing meditation bhajrana tantra keeling meditation caves of pamasambaba about seven or eight hours strive up into the mountains on the old road to Tibet but there were a pair for a few days first and everyone like everyone they come out for the morning gathering the merits and getting some some sunshine and pigeons yeah see you later back in the hotel how exactly do you do kora i'm from canada and i once asked some Tibetans who had refugees who had been brought to canada in the early 70s what they missed most about living in the west and they said kora the morning and evening walk around of sacred places so Tibet was really a valley village culture every it was really a federation of three or four hundred countries many of which had its own king or three or four hundred kingdoms you could say but all under the you could say central peace making law and order creating central administration out of lassa beginning with the yarlung dynasty kings going back to the yarlung valley and so on but all of those other valleys used a common language and basically where 90% of them were buttery on that tantric but it's coming from India well they they the litiges coming from India I should say and for them your valley your homeland represented the perfect balance of spiritual and secular the name of the Tibetan government was kenden potron sichi zung trow so zichi zung trow means the worldly life and spiritual life in perfect harmony and so when they when they wake in the morning and do a walk around their valley then there would be a cave where some great meditator from a thousand years ago or 1,500 years ago meditated another place where there had been a monastery or some great mystic had passed through and given teachings pada alpa sange padma sambhava attisha those kind of sort of immortal figures you could say so in a way no morning walk around was sort of a refresher of the physical history of your valley but also of the great spiritual accomplishments and spiritual inspirations and whenever any great master would die they'd build a stupa now this is a grand stupa but most stupas were small sort of more human sahis you could say if a hundred years ago a great local master died and was cremated and they'd make a stupa for him so people include that in the kora walk around three times out of respect and remember some of his great spiritual teachings and in that way a kora because kora literally means to circle and usually you'd have a starting point and you go around and come back to the same spot and in many cases it would tell the history of your little kingdom or your little pocket of the universe and in the in the way of sishi songtrel the world and spirituality imbalance or harmony he said some people translate this as politics and religion but he said what to see the world inside means our body and the she the spiritual side means our mind and so we all have both a body and a mind and having a balance of spiritual and temporal or physical is a quintessential element in successful life on as human as a humanoid on our little planet earth and when Delilama settled in damselah he was given a house at the top of a little mountain just outside of the town of upper damselah maklou and maklou gangs it used to be called after a general there and very quickly Tibetans sort of cut a little path walkway going around the house going around the mountain top and that became the kora for all balmsful of Tibetan and wherever Tibetans settled it became like that in lassa you had the nangkor chikor and lingkor so if you're lassa in the morning you go to the jokam and do the inner walk around a few times then you may do the chikor outside going around the and also called the bar core where they you hit temples all the different places around from the over the history of that great temple and then the four lings the monasteries of the great lingtokus and people would do those one of those three here sometimes two of those three sometimes even three of those three depending on the occasion of the year but the idea i think is in the morning you get up and you start your morning by rec-licking who am i what am i what's going on well i'm from Bodhana and if i come to Bodhana then we have this wonderful stupa we have temples all around people doing the kora will visit those temples that they have a longer time and it will sort of bring bring together well jilgo kenzi armpache did this every morning dojum rapache did this every morning back in the time of sangsangampo 1500 years ago it was used this way and so it sort of brings a connection of the whole cause and effect nature of enlightenment you could say and sort of the importance of context dualization a sense of oneself not as merely a banker or a taxi driver a king or whatever but as a spiritual pilgrim who whatever life form you took in this in this lifetime is basically a pilgrim that of a pilgrim staggering towards enlightenment by circling around the deeper meanings of being and those are symbolized always in every temple every stupa and so forth why clockwise? yeah clockwise or counterclockwise in ancient india whenever one approached a great being a great teacher one would uh and in india usually they didn't wear like shirts and pants and that sort of stuff they often wore just sort of wraparound robes which was very popular today one still sees those with many parts of india pakistan bangladesh they call those kind of clothing lungi they're just kind of wraparounds so when you came to a great being you take your wraparound and put it put this wrap around you'd put it like this and this arm would be bare and you'd walk around three times showing your bare arm and it was just a sign of respect uh 90 percent of the planet is right handed and so that was i think a little bit like the old way of a handshake or a greeting and we often do the handshake with the right hand in the same way now when it comes to vajriyana buddhism and uh in male tantra we core uh clockwise but if we practice female tantra we should core counterclockwise but female tantra is done in secret so you don't see people going counterclockwise uh in public like this they would do it in this what's called the bayou the secret um the secret power places of the Himalayas that are blessed by the Dakinis a great female um Buddha's body softness and so forth but it's uh before Tibet before buddhism came to Tibet the bunpo whose traditions were more closely linked to the east Persian empire they like to walk the other way so when you go to old bunpo sites that were bunpo before they be before buddhism became so prevalent in central Asia the old bunpo's will still walk around Mount Kailash counterclockwise and the buddhist will go this way so if you're a buddhist going this way you don't see many other buddhist because you're all walking kind of at the same pace every a hundred meters or so so there's someone behind you and someone you only see two or three the whole way around of the 52 kilometers but every two minutes you're meeting a group of bunpo's coming the other way but uh I think in both traditions the idea is you're just honoring a sacred power spot and very interestingly we're here i'm here with about 45 or 50 people to do a healing retreat and one of the prescribed methods of healing for certain kinds of illnesses is an extended aura and I think there's something about walking and moving breaking your daily routine which has a healing effect because illnesses are often caused by getting locked into negative physical emotional or intellectual sort of square square blocks that are sort of clunking along the road of your life not doing very well for you and uh so very often in in in the healing manuals you'll often see it said that go on a six-month chora and they will start say here and then maybe they'd walk down to Lambeni which should probably take about five or six days something like that then we'd walk up to Popra and maybe up to Longtongue go through the miller epic caves and the guru refugee caves up in the yolmo area and uh in Tibet you'll see them coming all the way from calm walking sometimes prostrating taking a rock laying out the prostration putting the rock down standing up taking two steps picking up the little pebble all the way from lassa from calm or with a birthplace coming out usually in small groups but it's uh it breaks the general pattern of living and brings a whole different energy and a simple chora like this you just come out and you feel the spiritual energy so it's sort of like almost like taking a bath positive positive morning energy and as you see when you see people doing it they're all looking very happy relaxed joyful hopeful they may be refugees and they may be living in some somewhat wealthy but others quite bare hand-to-mouth subsistence you couldn't say but regardless when you do chora you sort of step outside your ordinary sense of self and you link to that me as a timeless being on this evolution evolutionary path to liberation and for that reason i think it's one of the general recommendations for certain kinds of illnesses i remember maybe 10 years ago i had a south student in florida who came to me with the lady dying of cancer and she had been given three weeks four weeks to live and they came to me for advice on how to die nicely and they asked for a divination which is a Tibetan sort of way of reading a little bit like the Chinese e-king or the tarot cards in the west but you do it with dice and a manual and it said if she doesn't want to die she doesn't have to die she could live for another five or six years and one of the recommendations was chora pilgrimage and another one was daily meditation on the seita on the emitias healing methods so i taught her that she came here and we went to Tibet together as part of a small group and basically the she had a cancer growth below her rib cage on the on the vein growing on the vein leading to the heart so it was inoperable and they figured she was too weak for chemo and so they just recommended hospice so she came traveling and i had her do a month of meditation first and then we went with a small group into Tibet to the great emitias cave of pamasambaba near yomo near uh well it's up in the mountains from samya about three or four hours drive and when we came back that cancer had gone from size of half a grapefruit to like a little bump the size of half a grape and she got back to the states and went on to live for another five and a half years quite quite successfully and it's i think the power of pilgrimage is that it makes you step outside your ordinary sense of self and it's that sense of self which fixes one into those energy patterns that results in a disbalance of earthwater fire airspace so you so to say and you could say also just the joy of living when all things are in balance there there's great i couldn't resist sorry about that teasing uh teasing a very beautiful uh Tibetan anila sometimes we translate the word anila as nan but ah it's the wisdom of all Buddhism bodies out this past present and future so the female so-called nuns are really it really ah is primordial wisdom well of all butters of all types of spaces knee in Tibetan is uh it's a sound of emptiness it's a pause and law is great respect so it's the when we say when we say Buddhist none it really means oh an embodiment of the primordial wisdom of all enlightened beings yeah you know there's a lot of different temples so if you see photos hair of of 60 years ago when the Tibetans came into exile there's none of these buildings are hair just the stupa and farmlands and a few farmhouses but now we see many many different temples have been built one problem with the Chinese closing Tibet was all of northern Nepal although sparsely populated as the vast territory and those 20 or 30 little kingdoms mainly their economy was based on at least 50% based on trade back and forth with Tibet and so when China invaded in the 1950s they cut that trade which made it difficult for peoples in those regions to have a successful life and also people's born in those areas going to monasteries and nunries which spend a few years at in their home monastery or nunnery in that valley but then would be centered Tibet for higher training that can no longer happen so now they're all sent to bud down to this area hair and swam boo the Kathmandu valley pokara and they'll spend a few months in the summer up in their birth places just to stay connected with it but every autumn and all winter they'll come down here to study and live down here and do the basic trainings so right behind us for instance is one of the Himalayan organizations so this represents many of those Himalaya yeah so represents one of the sort of groups you could say because those 20 or 30 little Buddhist kingdoms lining Tibet on the north basically are all sparsely populated and when they came down hair they made committees you could say or organizations but they work together come over ladies come come come one on this side one on this side one on this side one on this side there we go yeah and so these also are two of the the wonderful merry gold flowers blossoming flowers and lotus flowers coming on our retreat up in the mountain anyway so with temples like this the one behind those many Himalayan little states of northern Nepal as well as northern Bhutan Sikkim over the west of Himalayas up Lahul spittikan or Ladakh they sort of formed these committees because their homeland had been thrown into utter devastation by the Chinese takeover lack of ability to continue their thousand-year-old trade back and forth and cultural exchange and cultural reliance so they built these kind of temples to be a kind of gathering spot so as we see here they've got a sign up they're soon going to start a kenjur reading that means some monks who are very good at chanting fat quickly will take the 108 volumes of the kenjur all the sutras and tantras taught by the Buddha and they'll chant them over a period of quite a few days probably they'll put up a tent hair and they'll have 10 or 12 or 50 different monks and nuns chanting away and some people will sit in for the merit because although nobody has a clue what they're saying because they're all chanting different pages at the same time nonetheless there's a stream of positive energy from all of the different sutras and tantras being read so we'll see that one here and if we go over here we see another temple over here and i think that was built by some karmakargulanas for the karmakargu side hair and as we walk around we'll see other temples but when the Tibetans came here as refugees in the 1959 in the early 60s there was nothing just the stupa and farmlands and now there's between 50 and 100 temples monasteries and training institutes and boys and girls of a young age would be put it kind of like boarding school and after 15 or 16 years of age they'll be decided are they enlightenment material and be sent to the higher training institutes of south india or are they what do you call dharma chakra barton are they their enlightenment path to be great worldly accomplishments bringing benefit to the world on a secular level represented by the chakra chakra barton the wheel holding emperors then they'll go to varanasi and get a bachelor's degree and they'll disrobe as monks and nuns and from there they'll go to an m a and some other university in india or the west and then a phd and then we'll become chakra bartons of leading a secular life but bringing the best of dharma wisdom and dharma knowledge the all things secular and spiritual in harmony bringing those into their lives and furthering those as qualities of the human experience so if we see if we look at the delalama for instance and the people around him we see many people who were monks or nuns as young children and then they completed their monastic training and later went to western universities and got master's degrees phd's and so forth and now are doing dharma works in a kind of a secular way to bring dharma knowledge into all of the nooks and crannies of human experience from restaurants dishwasher taxi driving running banks business enterprises and so forth but all of that way of sishi junkrau the world and peace the world and liberation body and mind and harmony a hair that became the Tibetan refugee situation hair caused a great explosion of that in Nepal oh and by the way if we look at this the stupa the story of how it was built is that i think maybe a couple of thousand years ago they're not quite nobody knows how long there was a grandma who wanted to build a stupa and she had three sons and she went to the king and asked for a piece of land to build a stupa and the king was a bit of a tightwad so he gave her a piece of cloth say a meter or two square and because some people do build small stupas like just not much bigger than the ground on which one stands and so but that wasn't her vision of what to do so she took this cloth home and unstrung it then rewove it so that each knot rather than being a fraction of a millimeter became like a couple of inches so the grandma received this couple of square meters of of cloth and was gonna put it down and she had a different idea so she unwove it and then wove it back with each knot a couple of inches rather than a couple of millimeters and it became this size and the king came and looked at it and she said that's very clever so obviously a revised woman and I'm okay with that and so she got this and she and her sons worked away to clear and put in the foundations and of course in all probability other locals joined in and this great stupa is said to have come from there and later of those sons in the legends of the stupa one was reborn in Tibet is Song Seng Dumpo the great king who basically unified all of Central Asia and created the Tibetan's head scholars create the Tibetan script which until today is the script used by Vajrayana Buddhists we can say the Tibetan Buddha script but in Bhutan it's on all the road signs in Mongolia they use it in all the temples eastern Russia Sikkim, Lidakla who spent all of the llama world you could say use the script that was created and then I think another one of the sons became Trishang Dutsin who brought Pama Shanta Rakshita to Tibet and also Padma Sambava and many other great Indian masters he himself was India was him yeah so he brought many great Indian masters to Tibet and built Tibet's it's often said first monastery but that's not true Tibet had already Seng Seng Dumpo had built 108 monasteries so there were many hundreds of monasteries around Tibet at that time but what he built was Tibet's first indigenous you could say Acharya training program before that every monastery in temple in Tibet was run by an imported monk scholar from either India, Kotan on the north Tengut in the northeast or China on the Far East eastern Persia on the west Kashmir so there are always the head monks and the teachers were all imports from the great Buddhist lands surrounding Tibet but he built the first Shudheh in Tibetan so when it said he built the first monastery in Tibet nonsense back Tibet and Buddhism had been the national religion of the country for 150 years at that time yeah so the stupa was built in that way by the grandma and her three sons and continued from then until today of course it suffered damage from earthquakes and attacks of foreign countries and all of that sort of thing Muslims invaded from time to time the Gurkas Hindu Gurkas of western Nepal invaded and created some damage but generally it survived and was rebuilt and in 2015 it was quite badly damaged by the earthquake that killed I don't know 10 or 15 thousand Nepales mostly in the northern areas but here a stupa this tall has up the center was called the soxing a life tree which keeps the whole thing balanced and straight and so on so that was broken about halfway down so then in renovating they had to dig around it all the way down then get a crane to lift the whole thing out and later they had another one about I would say a hundred hundred fifty feet big and just laying out here for about a year and a half until it fully dried and once one hundred percent straight and that uh it was they did a huge consecration on it before it went in with the llamas from all the different temples in the valley coming and doing a three-day rabbne and then the crane put it up and put it in with all new kind of blessing substances earlier we were mentioning they're going to do a kenjur so one can come over here and then you make a donation so why don't we do that [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] okay so anyone can make a contribution and sometimes they put up tents outside when they do it for this time they're doing inside on the upper floor he said [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] I think one interesting aspect of the exodus of Tibetan llamas following the invasion of Tibetan the destruction of the culture there is that the Tibetan Dharma became internationalized and Buddha himself says in the Sri Lanka Sutra Lanka Bhattara Sutra 2,500 years after my passing my Dharma will go to the land of the red-faced people I think that means people like Steve James Guru Viking who always gets a little red in the face when his name is mentioned the Irish British the European don't almost said he thinks it means Europe and America the oxidantals because whenever they walk or do exercise they turn very red they drink a little alcohol they get red and they get angry they get a little red so devil ever said he thinks that refers to that and that year 2,500 years came to manifest in 1956 and at that time Nehru Prime Minister Nehru of India who was something you could say of a closet Buddhist invited Buddhist leaders from all over the world to come to India, to Bhagaya and celebrate that 2,500 year anniversary it just he wasn't aware of the prophecy but he just wanted to do it as a way of rebuilding Buddhist places in India and bringing a kind of a return of the internationalism of Dharma with say Japan, Korea, all the different China, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma et cetera and that was the first time that Buddhist masters from all traditions came together in one place and it happened on the very anniversary of the prophesied 2,500 years and from that time Dharma and the West really took off many Zen masters started teaching in the West in Chinese Japanese as a master's Chinese Chan masters Korean Sin masters Tibetan Lamas having three years later coming into exile a thousand of them were according to the prophecy of the 13th Stela Lama in 1932 said if we don't keep the communists out then our culture and our great masters will be scattered like ants around the planet that came to pass but within 20 years there was a thousand Tibetan Buddhist centers in Europe and America oh to Jaya to Jaya there's a flower for you sir oh to Jaya to Jaya to Jaya so this that particular monk who offered his flower very wonderful young monk he sort of slightly handicapped some sort of handicapped but he's sort of a fixture of the stupid hair and every morning he comes out and he offers some flowers to people or he just come up and give you a high five I wonder what is going on anyway so from that time on the great explosion of Dharma took place in the West at that time there was no western university with much of a study of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan enlightenment culture and now 20 or 30 universities around the world have such programs and two PhD levels and of course and the thousands of Buddhist centers that have sprung up from these seeds of enlightenment being thrown from Tibet so Della Lama often says of course the destruction of Tibet was very sad in many ways but in that the world was in such a difficult position at the time perhaps the best way Tibetans could contribute was by bringing the message of peace harmony compassion tolerance and so forth and hopefully this will make an impact upon our world culture and prevent a vast catastrophe like World War I and World War II and so on and the increased wisdom and merit of humans will perhaps help to prevent a third catastrophe of that nature of course in the Kalachakra Tantra it was said that roughly at this time were headed for other a thousand years of a golden era or a thousand years of darkness and if the forces of darkness take over then we'll it'll be a little tough for us humans for the next thousand years but if the forces of light can take over then there'll be a great cultural explosion spiritual explosion we'll figure out how to live on this planet without dumping poisons into the soil into the water into the earth and creating more diseases from those horrible chemicals and we actually save knives more people get killed by them who's then people whose lives are benefited long-term by taking policies of a sustained living on planet earth where we don't have to poison use poisons as the main source of success I started to mention from the home around another part of the Kora with the great explosion spreading of drama seeds to the west there has been a wonderful revival of the Buddhist arts the fine art particularly Tonka painting and statue making most people practicing meditation in Asia will have what they call the lakong which means a sacred sacred room and we'll practice their meditation there and often they'll put up one or two paintings of their favorite Buddha image and other seated in meditation or in other other postures any of the five main Buddhist postures you could say perhaps also a bodhisattvas and tantric mandalas so very wonderful to see if you came here 60 years ago there wasn't a single art endeavor taking place over here it all happened over in Lalitpur with the building up of the Buddhist temples hair and the strong spiritual training programs not only for Tibetans many of those monasteries have wonderful programs for western people even including up to including three-year retreats and very quickly art schools started opening around the stupa and now there's probably 20 or 30 of them and people from all over the world come to get to select some pieces for their own you could say meditation room or their own sacred space in their home now Kathmandu Valley traditionally had a very strong noir Buddhist content so you had the traditional noir Buddhist hair but noir Buddhists are a little bit conservative in allowing sacred pieces to be used in a secular way and for that reason a lot of the great master noir artists didn't participate in this kind of internationalism you could say of their art and the sacred works but inspired by those great artists some of them created art schools that would bring sort of a kind of a Tibetan art fused with noir art that they would they considered to be shareable but like that without breaching their ancient coat and it's really just a matter of changing times when I was living in Darmesla there was no such thing as a Tonka for sale in some shop that just did not exist in the Tibetan or the llama world anywhere from East Russia through the Mongol Republics down through Tibet and West China and the Himalayas basically anyone wanting a painting went to the hardest and said my main practice is Shenresie please make me a Buddha of compassion and I love doing white and white and green Tara so please put a white Tara green Tara in the upper corners my other favorite practices are this or this and my Dharma palace protector practices or these so each Tonka was designed by the person acquiring it and that's the way Buddhist paintings had been done since time immemorial and this new idea of painting and having them displayed for sale in shops was completely new and it took off slowly but now in Nepal it's become very strong and you know to be honest I kind of approve and that until a Buddhist Tonka is painted it is just as consecrated it is just a painting it's just like a postcard or a print or anything else traditionally you take it home you're right or mahong that the back's back the paintings at the places of the crown throat and heart chakras and then you call the enlightened beings into it and it becomes a repository holding those spiritual energies so I think it's very wonderful that they've done that what's very interesting of course also the noir Buddhists had been the greatest metal artists in the Buddhist world for a couple of thousand years what's especially interesting here is in China with a cultural holocaust the so-called cultural revolution they destroyed all of their Buddhist art or 99 percent of it anything that somehow didn't get getting hidden or protected in some other way so over the last 20 years with liberalization in China Chinese now are allowed to have some Buddhist pieces in their homes so the biggest market for pre-made Tonka paintings and statues is actually the Chinese people so housing to have them as Buddhist scenic materials Buddhist decorative art but of course for the Chinese Buddhists they're very very strong Buddhist practitioners that they have them completely you could say in a manner of a devotional meditating practitioner but for the Chinese government still the Buddhist power places in China are not called Buddhist power places they're called religious scenic sites oh and this is my favorite monastery built here on the boat a path was built by a great Sakya monastery Chugel Sakya Chugel Trichen the great Chugel throne holder he passed away I don't know 10 or 12 years ago but he was very very strong in making transforming Bodhana into a re-established Buddhist center you could say and so he began by building this temple and monastery and now it's got a I don't know maybe 50 or 100 monks or more all being trained and when they get higher training they're sent to Dera Dun in India but if you have time to go in it's a complete re-made temple so inside on the frescoes he's got all of the old Nying Meliniges then the Kargus and the Sakyas and the Kadampas and Gulagpas Johnangpas and Shijepas so all the 10 main traditions of Tibetan Dharma are all enshrined as frescoes on the walls if you have time some time later during this visit we can go in and take a look at those but he was very very great master and he, Dilgo Kenze, Dijom Remete, Urgan Toku those four you could say were the great great masters who revived Bodhana, revived Bodhana as a great spiritual center [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Thank you for listening to another Guru Viking podcast. 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