It’s a grey day and beginning to snow, when there’s a knock at the door and Konchok Samphel, a 24-year-old Buddhist monk walks in. I haven’t seen in him in over a month, since we last met in lower India, in Dehradun. I’m delighted he has found me here in the mountains of Ladakh. We sit by the window and talk. He has come to attend the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies, to complete the extensive higher education curriculum he began five years earlier in Varanasi.
I ask him if he intends to be a scholar. We’ll see, he answers. It is not just for anybody, it depends on how much one learns. Of course, I agree, but is a scholar what you want to be? He shrugs the question off. How about a Khenpo then, I ask, a teacher? He says maybe. Outside the snow is coming on strong. You’ve studied for five years, I say, and you plan to study for five more. What is your goal? What is it you want to be? I want to be a good person, he says. And there we sit, the Buddhist monk and the guy from the West, beside the window, watching it snow. |
photo by Nathan Whitmont