Monastery’s were a big part of our trip which I totally loved. I felt extremely lucky to have attended the Kopan course as it gave me great insight to Buddhism and had a fair idea about what we were being shown. Of course everyone knows Tibet for it’s Monks (Dalai Lama especially) so in my opinion it was right that this was our main focus for sight seeing. Perhaps 2 monasterys a day was a little much though.

I’m not going to go into of each palace or monastery in detail, mainly beacuse I would have to google the specifics and I want to share what I found struck a cord with me.

Potala Palace is the image above. This is where the Dalai Lama should reside. No pictures were aloud to be taken inside but we saw where the his old quarters were, where he meditated, where he recieved guests, everything. The current Dalai Lama is the 14th, and inside the palace all of the previous Dalai Lama’s (except 6) bodies were kept inside Stupa’s. Each of them had seperate rooms dedicated to them it seemed and statues were gold plated with millions of pounds worth of gold. Quite something

Before we entered Tibet we had strict instructions not to mention the Dalai Lama as it is forbidden. We also had to make sure  we had no paraphernalia about him, particularly any books. I had to take off my Kindle App (prematurely I think) as I had some of his publications on there. It all just seemed like guilty behaviour if you ask me. Dalai Lama isn’t even aloud to come to Nepal as they don’t want to sour relationships with China. It’s just crazy.

Back to some of the beautiful buildings.

 

We were asked not to take picture but we could pay if we wanted to. A few of us took the chance and I did get caught. £2. So I really didn’t mind.

 

Kharma had it though that most of the images I took became blurry. Ha!

One Monastery we were able to watch some live debating between Monks. This was amazing. The tourists (me being one of them) absolutely lapped it up!

Of course we couldn’t tell what they were debating but it was great to watch. One Monk would stand up, ask questions about Buddhist philosophy and clap his hands together for the other one or two monks to answer. It’s a way of testing knowledge and understanding of the texts. I didn’t get to see this is Kopan as the Monks were attending inter-monastery debating competitions which I think is just awesome!

I think what I loved the most is the modernity of them all. We saw in Kopan that most of the senior monks had iphones but I loved watching them just hang out, take pictures and just being human. I don’t know what I thought they were it felt nice to be able to relate I suppose.

There was over 10,000 monastery’s in Tibet before the ‘Cultural Revolution’ now there are only 700. There is a restriction on how many people can become monks or nuns. Such opression seems inhuman to me. You could see why Monks burning themselves in protest is such an iconic image and something noone on this earth should be ignorant to in my humble opinion.