On my last day in Lhasa, I had gone to the Sera Monastery, just beyond the edge of town. I toured the principal temples, and then I saw well up a mountain a retreat called Tsongkhapa's Hermitage. I began to climb up toward it. But Lhasa is at 12,000 feet, and my lungs were not in the best of condition after my pneumonia earlier in the year. Halfway up there was a large shade tree by the path. I sat down and wrote in my journal. There was a magnificent view of Sera Monastery, and of all of Lhasa and the valley it lies in, with the Potala on its hill right in the middle.
A monk came by in a saffron and maroon robe. He had a bunch of peaches girded up in the folds of his robe, and he gave me half a dozen. Then he sat down beside me. I had my Tibet Guide out and beside me for proper names as I wrote. He picked it up and began looking through it aimlessly. I took it and turned to the picture of Sera Monastery before the Cultural Revolution, when it was much larger. He was old enough to remember. Then I turned to a group picture of the Dalai Lama escaping from Tibet in 1959. He asked exactly which person was the Dalai Lama, and when I pointed him out, he focused on him for a long time. I had the impression he was rocking back and forth. We shared only a few words of Chinese, so communication was difficult, but one message did get across. He said, ``Dalai Lama,'' then pointed to Lhasa, then wrote ``1999'' in the dirt, then held up his fingers and said ``Zhongguo'' (China), and then blew on his fingers to show the Chinese flying away. ``That would be nice,'' I said.
He invited me to his quarters for tea. We went around the corner of the hill to a small temple, and upstairs to his two small rooms, a flower pot in the window and a view of the Potala. In the corner, his pallet and a shrine with a picture of the Dalai Lama, and below that a Coca Cola can. He made me tea, gave me some bread and more peaches. Conversation was slow. He was 57, had been at Sera for two years, and was at a nearby monastery for four years before that. I took his picture and promised to send it to him.
I'm afraid I got monasteried out three days later in Shigatse. I'm reluctant to say this, because I feel contempt for the American tourists who go to Europe once in their lifetime and don't go into the Florence cathedral because they've already seen a cathedral in Paris. But I'm afraid after seeing Tashilhumpo monastery in Shigatse, I decided I didn't need to see any more.
Actually, it would be more correct to say that I got dogged out in Shigatse. I have a thing about dogs. I view them as carnivores and myself as carni. Actually, this is my view of dogs in America. I'm afraid of dogs in America. I'm not afraid of dogs in Europe. In the Third World, dogs are afraid of me. This in part is because I'm usually, by necessity, more alert and assertive--well, aggressive--when travelling in the Third World, and in part because of the random and frequent cruelty practiced against dogs by the people in the Third World. I remember the Indian village I went to in the Bolivian jungle three years ago where the dogs must have viewed human beings, from toddlers on up, primarily as creatures that would whack them with sticks at unpredictable moments.
But China is different from the rest of the Third World. When I was in Taiwan two years ago, I noticed the packs of wild dogs that slinked around the streets of Taipei during the day and took over the city at night. In the street markets vendors have baskets full of cute little puppies that they sell. People apparently buy them, but then after a year when they are no longer so cute, they turn them loose in the streets to fend for themselves.
I had a run-in with a Taiwanese dog when I was driving through the interior of Taiwan, south of Taipei. At Sun-Moon Lake I parked in a parking lot across from a temple. Next to my car was an array of shitake mushrooms drying in the sun, so I took a picture of it. Then over in the corner of the parking lot, at the end of a row of shops, I saw two men washing shitake mushrooms in a tub of water, and I thought that would make a good picture. I went over and asked their permission. They said yes, so I positioned myself to take a picture. Then I happened to glance down and see a small but very vicious-looking dog about ten feet away, next to his doghouse. He was on a leash, but I was well within his reach, standing in the one small patch of the planet Earth that he thought of as his own, making what in his doggy mind might have been interpreted as threatening gestures toward his owners. So I decided to take a few discrete steps backward. I don't know whether this saved me or triggered the attack, but he charged and lunged for my ankle, and I backed up so quickly I tripped and fell and skinned my elbow; it's still scarred. He didn't break my skin, but there were now three neat incisions in my pants leg and I had a bruise on my ankle the size and shape of a canine tooth.
That incident was always fresh in my mind in Tibet.
I guess in the rest of China, the Communists, especially during the Cultural Revolution, made a concerted effort to rid the cities of dogs. I was told that in Tibet the people view dogs as reincarnations of bad monks, so they gave them refuge in the monasteries.
I realize that dogs and people live parallel lives, rarely intersecting. Dogs care mostly about other dogs. As I paid my admission at Palkhor Monastery in Gyantse, I heard a dog barking angrily and charging past right behind me. I wheeled in alarm, but he was only attacking another male dog that was attempting to copulate with apparently the wrong female.
In Lhasa and Gyantse I had no trouble with the dogs. They were mostly sleeping in the shadows, and I'd triangulate among them, trying to maximize my distance from the nearest, holding my day pack between me and it.
In Shigatse, during midday when the monastery was closed, I walked through a Tibetan neighborhood and up the mountain to the fortress. As I entered one small plaza in the town, a dog with a limp limped into the wrong part of the plaza and several other dogs attacked it loudly and chased it back. That made the dogs around the corner perk up at the noise and wait alertly to see what was happening. And what was the first thing they saw come around the corner, but me. Well, it made me nervous, but I managed to keep them calm by speaking softly and carrying a big daypack.
But later that afternoon as I went around Tashilhumpo, the incident happened that completely unnerved me. As I came out of a temple into the narrow street, I heard a dog, not barking, but giving off that low growl that lets you know he means business. I looked his way and saw that he was looking directly at me. I don't know why. A couple of other dogs joined him, ready for the attack. I ducked into the closest open door I saw, and closed it. It turned out to be a storeroom, and in the corner was a stack of walking sticks. I picked out the biggest I could find, something about six feet high and two inches thick, and I went out onto the street again, thumping the stick loudly on the pavement. It worked. The attacking dogs turned and slinked away. So I continued around the monastery thumping the stick as loudly as I could, and dogs avoided me.
But there was a down side to this strategy. There was one narrow place in a passage where three dogs were sleeping. Several French women ahead of me deftly stepped between the dogs' legs and got past without disturbing them. Then I came along, thumping my stick. The dogs woke up, and moved out of the way, but stood watching me from a moderate distance, highly agitated. Then I came to another narrow passage, with a dog in the middle of the path. When I thumped, he got up and barked at me, also highly agitated, and stood his ground, having no place really to go. It was a standoff, and finally I decided I had had enough of this monastery, and as it turned out, monasteries in general, and I left.
(At least I was not alone in my concern about dogs. In Tingri I met a backpacker from New Zealand who had just walked to the Everest base camp and back, and he said the entire way he had to fight off dogs with his walking stick. It didn't help to bend down and pick up a rock. They would just wait poised til you threw and then attack. They would gang up and he felt he was being pack-hunted.)
On the bus the next day, the only other foreigners were two Japanese waifs--young women traveling with backpacks the size of large handbags. True to form, they got off at the utterly desolate turnoff to Sakya Monastery, to wait for whatever might come along in the next day or two. I had intended to myself. But on the spur of the moment, I decided that I'd seen enough monasteries and that I should push on.