Getting interviews with monastery leaders, dance masters, and top scholars has been surprisingly easy. Often I get to meet them inside the main temples, where we sit alone together (well, along with my crew and interpreter, and usually a monk or two) and I get to ask them any question I wish. It is truly one honor after another.
The hard part has been finding a translator. Almost all my subjects speak in Ladakhi. As the weeks have passed and the interviews pile up, the greatest hitch to the production has become finding someone to translate all this material. I have been reaching one dead end after another.
Finally just two days ago my interpreter and I got a promising lead. Then yesterday morning we received a phone call from an old monk who had just returned from Delhi. He has translated several books, has even worked with a Rinpoche who is a friend of ours. We hurried up the hill to meet him.
Finally just two days ago my interpreter and I got a promising lead. Then yesterday morning we received a phone call from an old monk who had just returned from Delhi. He has translated several books, has even worked with a Rinpoche who is a friend of ours. We hurried up the hill to meet him.
Konchok Phanday is a wonderful old man, perhaps over 70. He lives in a small room that doubles as a kitchen, with south and west facing windows letting the little sunlight that shines in Ladakh these days seep in. He listened to us for thirty minutes, then told us to come back in the afternoon. |
That afternoon, as the sun sank into a haze, I sat with my interpreter, and worked out the details of the translations with this wonderful old man I had just met. (It turns out he is an expert on language and grammar and has even written papers on the techniques of translating scripture from one language to another. He is also friends with many of the people whose interviews he will be working on). Then we had tea. There was a long silence and I requested to ask the old scholar some questions.
For forty-five minutes we sat in that little room and discussed the emptiness of existence. You know how it is – you read about and become dazzled by the wisdom and magic of philosophy and scripture, but after a while you forget. You also know how it is that reading a book can be amazing, but to sit in a little room in the Himalaya, beside the stove as the sun sets, talking to a 70-year-old monk about the nature of the universe, can be absolute magic. And he explained again how the universe is emptiness, and from that emptiness form arises, but that form is ultimately only a mental construct, created by our actions and attachments, reinforced so many times over the millenniums that it has come to seem concrete.
It makes sense to me that all this external world, all this form, is emptiness. It’s something that somehow I can grasp, if only a little bit. But one thing that seems concrete to me is the tie between the special people in my life. I wonder often what it is in the spectrum, in the midst of this eternal circus, that exists between me and the people I am close to.
Walking out of that little house into the evening haze, surrounded by Himalayan peaks, I felt as though I floated just a little bit.
For forty-five minutes we sat in that little room and discussed the emptiness of existence. You know how it is – you read about and become dazzled by the wisdom and magic of philosophy and scripture, but after a while you forget. You also know how it is that reading a book can be amazing, but to sit in a little room in the Himalaya, beside the stove as the sun sets, talking to a 70-year-old monk about the nature of the universe, can be absolute magic. And he explained again how the universe is emptiness, and from that emptiness form arises, but that form is ultimately only a mental construct, created by our actions and attachments, reinforced so many times over the millenniums that it has come to seem concrete.
It makes sense to me that all this external world, all this form, is emptiness. It’s something that somehow I can grasp, if only a little bit. But one thing that seems concrete to me is the tie between the special people in my life. I wonder often what it is in the spectrum, in the midst of this eternal circus, that exists between me and the people I am close to.
Walking out of that little house into the evening haze, surrounded by Himalayan peaks, I felt as though I floated just a little bit.
photos by Nathan Whitmont