Travels in the Riel World

One of the most impressive but least known sites in the world is the Indonesian monument of Borobudur. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on this stunning edifice, which is considered the largest Buddhist monument in existence.

Making lists of the world’s most impressive monuments is an irrational and ultimately pointless enterprise: Who has seen all the wonders of the world? And what would the criteria be? Yet scribblers have been at it since the second century B.C., when a Greek poet named Antipater of Sidon came up with his canonical seven, now all gone or reduced to rubble except the pyramids of Giza.

If Antipater had lived a millennium later, he would surely have put Borobudur, the astonishing stone mountain of exquisitely wrought sculpture in Central Java, on his list. No construction of the preindustrial era makes a more wondrous impression…

Borobudur rises to a height of 400 feet, nearly as tall as Cheops’ pyramid, in a series of concentric terraces. Its walls are lined with exquisitely carved bas-reliefs illustrating episodes from the life of the Buddha and his teachings, amounting to more than a mile of continuous sculpture — and that doesn’t include 504 life-size statues of the Buddha…

Like its Egyptian predecessors, Borobudur poses many enigmas to archaeologists. One visionary, slightly mad aspect of its design is that the ground plan, visible only from an aerial perspective, is a perfect mandala, a symbolic schema of Buddhist cosmology that serves as an aid to meditation. Or perhaps the monument represents a lotus blossom, a nearly universal image in Buddhist art. In 1931, a Dutch artist named W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp proposed the whimsical theory that the plain surrounding Borobudur was once a lake, and the monument was conceived as a lotus flower floating on it. His hypothesis became less fanciful in 2000, when archaeologists found stratigraphical evidence of a paleolake in the area.

I enjoy reading the travel writings of Pico Iyer, so I was happy to find this recent article of his about a trip he took to Ladakh, a Tibetan culture in the Himalayan region of northern India.

I knew before I came to Ladakh — the high, dry region in northern India that borders Tibet and is often called ‘‘the world’s last Shangri-La’’ — that I would see one of the planet’s great centers of Himalayan Buddhism, which arrived in the region, in fact, centuries before it got to Tibet. Books like Andrew Harvey’s radiant ‘‘Journey in Ladakh’’ had told me that I would see people living as they might have several centuries ago, in whitewashed houses amid fields of barley and wheat irrigated by glacial snowmelt. And though I’d traveled to Bhutan, to Nepal, to the Indian Himalayas and to Tibet repeatedly over the past quarter-century, I’d heard that Ladakh, the ‘‘land of high passes,’’ as its name means, was the one place where this pastoral existence was still preserved…

Compact, otherworldly and highly magical, Ladakh is the latest secret treasure to dramatize all the paradoxes of civilization and its discontents. Its temples that mock gravity, its khaki-colored stretches of emptiness with small white Buddhist stupas above them, even the tree-lined walks out of Leh were more beautiful than almost anything I’d seen in Bhutan or Tibet itself.

As he often does, Iyer catches the paradoxes of the culture, caught between its past and its future…

For me, in any case, Ladakh seemed a beautifully unfallen place next to the blue-glass shopping malls of modern Lhasa, the global village of pizza joints and guesthouses that is urban Nepal, or long-isolated Bhutan with its chic new hotels. I couldn’t help smiling at the ‘‘He and She’’ shops scattered around Leh’s market, the prayer wheel in the main road that my driver drove around each morning to get blessings for our trip, the sign outside Pizza de Hut that said, ‘‘Thanks for the Visit. God Bless You. Take Care. Bye-Bye.’’ …

Often, as I made such walks, I found myself pushed off the road by honking cars. When I went on a Saturday evening to the Desert Rain coffeehouse for an ‘‘open mic’’ night, it was to find myself the only foreigner among Ladakh’s fashion-conscious teenagers, all fluent in every verse of ‘‘Hotel California.’’

Yet walk just 10 minutes out of town, and you come to shady rustic lanes where people with ancient faces are working in the fields or walking to the temple as if they’ve never heard of Paris (or Paris Hilton). One day I found musicians sitting on the ground among the poplars, playing at intervals while a team of elegant men in black robes took on a team of elegant men in white in a traditional archery competition.

His article reminded me of my own trip to Ladakh a few years ago, which I wrote about in my book, Two Laps Around the World.  You can read an excerpt about my time in Ladakh here. Meanwhile, here is a photo that I took there - a view of the Himalayas as seen from the upper level of a Buddhist monastery.

Interesting story in Newsweek about efforts to rebuild an ancient Buddhist university in India.

Centuries before Oxford University even opened its doors, a school in northeast India attracted thousands of the brightest minds from China, Persia and Turkey. Deeply influenced by Buddhist teachings, it was known as Nalanda—the “giver of knowledge”—and its vast campus included temples, meditation halls, gardens and a library filled with rare manuscripts. In keeping with a Buddhist tradition of openness to new ideas, the students studied theology along with medicine, astronomy and the arts. And while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, these young scholars were encouraged to take part in vigorous discussions and to advance the intellectual debates of the day.

Over the decades, Nalanda declined in prominence. In the 12th century it was destroyed by Turkish-Muslim marauders who all but pushed Buddhism out of India. But now, centuries later, political leaders from throughout Asia have joined forces with Nobel-laureate economist Amartya Sen, the Dalai Lama and other notables to rebuild this once great institution. Over the next five years, they plan to spend $1 billion to establish a new Nalanda on a 200-hectare site not far from the old university. They will hire 450 teachers, including four dozen from abroad, and plan initially to enroll 1,150 students from throughout the world. The school’s backers are hoping research will begin as early as next year.

The attempt to rebuild a world-class university in this remote corner of India reflects in part an effort to restore Asia’s reputation as an intellectual heavyweight. But it is also driven by a recognition that Buddhism is prospering in India. Seven years ago, there were just 8 million Buddhists there out of a population of 1 billion, making it the country’s fifth largest religion. Today there are more than 35 million Indian Buddhists, and demographers say the number is growing quickly, particularly among the poor.

Like the old Nalanda, Sen says, this new university will have a Buddhist outlook: “It is worth recollecting that ‘Buddha’ means ‘enlightened’,” he says. But he says it will also mimic the old Nalanda by encouraging students to go beyond the study of religion and classics into more-contemporary pursuits, including the arts, sciences and business. Students of all religions will be invited to attend.

Here’s an interesting confluence of religion and business - the Dow Jones Dharma for faith-based investing. Business Week has the story.

Back in India, a new generation of gurus is promoting the latest thing to hit the Indian stock market: values investing. Not to be confused with Warren Buffett-style value investing, values-based investing draws on the principles of Indian religions such as Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism. Last month Dow Jones launched the faith-based Dow Jones Dharma indices, which measure the performance of 254 companies that have characteristics like good governance and environmental friendliness in common.

Letters are pouring in to support the new group of five indices. They are not your typical congratulatory notes, but blessings and endorsements from assorted Indian spiritual leaders and scholars. “May the maximum number of investors utilize it, and thus globally advance core Hindu values,” writes Shastri Narayanswarupdas, a religious leader from Ahmedabad in western India. Writes another: “Trust is the breath of business, ethics its limbs, to uplift the spirit its goal.” …

The dharma-compliant stocks, according to Gor, are those that adhere to the precepts relevant to good conduct. They include opposition to animal slaughter, support of the environment, and adherence to good corporate governance. Assorted temples, scholars, and academicians support the idea…

There’s no shortage of companies that adhere to these Dharma principals. Already, in India, Dow Jones has compiled a list of 254 companies that are dharma-compliant.

Something is definitely sitrring in Burma (or Myanmar, as it’s currently called). In a country known for a repressive military dictatorship that tolerates no dissent, thousands of Buddhist monks are suddenly taking to the streets to lead peaceful anti-government protests in what some are dubbing a “Saffron Revolution” in honor of the monks’ saffron-colored robes. According to a report in the U.K. Times:

Twenty thousand people, including nuns, monks and ordinary Burmese, marched through the streets of Rangoon yesterday demanding freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate, in a dramatic escalation of the country’s Buddhist-led “Saffron Revolution”.

Ten thousand monks, joined by about the same number of ordinary supporters, marched from the gold-covered Shwedagon Pagoda through the centre of Burma’s largest city in the biggest anti-government demonstration since the bloody suppression of the first democracy movement in 1988.

After heavy-handed efforts to put down demonstrations earlier in the month, the junta has recently been more restrained, even allowing a large group of monks to march past the house of the detained Ms Suu Kyi and pray with her on Saturday.

But the rapidly growing scale of the demonstrations — from a few thousand a week ago to tens of thousands over the weekend — inevitably raises fears of another crackdown by a dictatorship that usually tolerates no challenge whatsoever to its authority. Bystanders cheered the monks as they walked by yesterday, and presented them with flowers and drinking water and balm for their bare feet.

Meanwhile, Australia’s Sydney Herald notes:

By linking the biggest street protests in Burma in two decades to the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s barefoot monks have raised the stakes against the country’s military government…

After a week of marching by the monks, the protests have become explicitly political, though the clerics prefer to make their point indirectly through chants and prayers at key locations. Members of the public who have joined them have taken up chanting the slogans of the pro-democracy movement: national reconciliation - meaning dialogue between the Government and opposition parties - freedom for political prisoners, and pleas for adequate food and shelter…

Soe Aung, a spokesman for a coalition of exile groups based in Thailand, said: “The monks are the highest moral authority in the Burmese culture. If something happens to the monks, the situation will spread much faster than what happened to the students in 1988.”

Interested in knowing how a Buddhist monk lives?  Some Buddhist temples in South Korea are now allowing visitors to sample the lifestyle of an ordained monk through a program called Templestay Korea.  Catherine Price recently spent two days living the life of a monk and wrote about her experience for the NY Times.

Meditation and prostration, both essential parts of monks’ lives, are included in every overnight temple stay program, as are meal or tea ceremonies, lectures on Buddhism and exceptionally early wakeup calls. Beyond that, though, programs differ. … temple stays can range anywhere from a few hours to a few months, depending on your budget and enthusiasm.

They also offer different activities. Lotus Lantern’s program included walking meditations through the temple grounds, calligraphy practice, a traditional Buddhist meal ceremony and a discussion about Buddhism led by the temple’s head monk.

The experience, however, was not necessarily a relaxing one, as she notes:

But be forewarned — the point of the temple stay is not, as the pictures on its Web site might make it seem, to lounge next to a brook nibbling crackers as you consider what it means to reach nirvana. The point is to live like a monk. And monks, it turns out, keep strict schedules, are vegetarian and spend a lot of time silently meditating in positions that can become, quickly and without much warning, incredibly uncomfortable for those unused to them.