EPIPHANY IN LADAKH
It’s -19 degrees C and you are trudging back to the hotel after a sumptuous thukpa dinner at the Amdo Tibetan restaurant on Leh’s main market street. Your companions are much younger, not given to wheezing as they traverse the frigid streets, not given even to the debilitating episode of altitude sickness that kept you in bed for a day, your heartbeat booming in your ears like a murderous foghorn. You notice too that they are still keen on quizzing religious figures like Gyalwang Drukpa, head of an order of Mahayana Buddhism popular in the Himalayas, about the BIG questions: “What is tantra?’ and are generally full of a liquid enthusiasm for life that, in you, has congealed into the bland all-knowing soul borscht of the middle-aged.
Still, there are some mysteries that continue to intrigue you. Like, why would a woman willingly opt for a life of self abnegation, one that steers away from the firm pleasures of the flesh, unhears the quiet shout that urges most to be fruitful and multiply?
“I was interested in spirituality from an early age,” says 27-year-old Jigme Tingdzin Zangmo, a kung fu-practising nun attached to the Drukpa sect, when you meet her at the 386-year-old Hemis monastery, where crowds have gathered to celebrate the Winter Hemis festival marking the advent of spring. “I became a nun when I was 14. If you just study and have an ordinary life, of course, you can have money or become famous but there is not much point in that life ” Jigme says As English and Hindi and did her “preliminary practice” involving the execution of 4,000 prostrations a day. “It’s quite tough,” she says with classic understatement. Did she ever miss her family? “As a spiritual practitioner you shouldn’t get too attached to your family because, from the Vajrayana point of view, all of life, everything, is an illusion. You shouldn’t be fully involved in samsara. The main intention of being a nun is to be alone and to be a practitioner,” says Jigme, who believes she has a karmic connection with her guru, the Drukpa, who named her as a child.
As an agnostic, you are constantly surprised at how Ladakhis speak in a matter-of-fact way about karma and their own multiple births.
“In my life, in this life, I have done this mela (the traditional Naropa festival to be celebrated as ‘the Kumbh of the Himalayas’ on the banks of the Indus in July this year) only in Ladakh,” says the Drukpa, who wears his power as a spiritual leader lightly. Dressed in robes that expose his arms to the elements while his audience of nonplussed big city journalists shivers in three layers of woollens and windcheaters, he laughs easily, answers even inane questions sensibly and presents abstruse philosophical concepts in digestible nuggets.
Despite being a skeptic, you are impressed by this cheerful guru who speaks of both spirituality and the very worldly need to care for the environment. His interest in environmental issues and the general Ladakhi sense of impending doom brought on by climate change and worsened by the cloudburst of 2010 that left many dead has led to the launch of many