Return from Ladakh

I have returned from Ladakh, from remote villages in the Himalaya, where Tibetan Buddhism flourishes in hearts and the minds of the Ladakhi people. Their lives are simple, focused on hard work, family and faith. Ladakh is virtually unreachable by the outside world for nine months of the year, buried under snow and ice. With temperatures of 50 below, Ladakhis remain cloistered indoors with family in their mud-brick, windowless hovels, relying on light from the cow-dung fires that warm their homes and are used to cook meals. During the three months of summer, Ladakhis work hard preparing for winter. Life-size prayer wheels are at the center of each village. Monasteries and Buddhist temples dot the varied landscape, built centuries earlier into the mountain walls, allowing for the quiet and stillness essential to the Monks seeking the path to enlightenment. Mystical iconographic wall paintings and statues of Gods and Buddhas fill the ancient chambers of these religious shrines. The sounds of Monks chanting their mantras, calling to their Bodhitsavas for guidance, freeing themselves of samsara, human suffering, a natural product of our human desires, resonate in the pure mountain air. But most stunning is the heart of the Ladakhi people, their contentment with the simple elements of their lives and with full confidence that human existence is the closest state of reincarnated being on the wheel of life to attaining Nirvana. A more open, genuine and friendlier people could not exist anywhere no matter the degree of technological advancement or high on the mountain of financial power or success.

Stay tuned for images from Ladakh, the last true remaining ancient Tibet, situated 18,000 feet in the Himalayas, in the Kashmir state, tucked in between Pakistan and China.  The following is from "A Journey in Ladakh: Encounters with Buddhism" by Andrew Harvey: "Nothing I had read or imagined prepared me for the splendour and majesty of the mountains that first day; that was the first gift Ladakh gave me, a silence before that phantasmagoria of stone, those vast wind-palaces of red and ochre and purple rock, those rock faces the wind and snow had worked over thousands of years into shapes so unexpected and fantastical the eye could hardly believe them, a silence so truly stunned and wondering that words of description emerge from it very slowly, and at first only in broken images--a river glimpsed there, a thousand feet below the road, its waters sparkling in the shifting storm-light, the path below on the bare rocky surface moving with sheep whose wool glittered in the sunlight, small flowers nodding in the crevasses of the vast rocks that lined the road, rocks tortured in as many thousand ways at the mountains they are torn from, sudden glimpses of ravines pierced and shattered by the light that broke down from the mountains, of the far peaks of the mountains themselves, secreted in shadow, or illuminated suddenly, blindingly, by passing winds of light."