A day of departure has arrived. Prostrations were all finished and it was time to move on to Shechen. I was reluctant to go. On the day that I was supposed to go, 200 Chinese Buddhist students of Shechen Gyaltsab Rinpoche were arriving there. I had no wish to suddenly end up in such a mass of people. Yet I promised Gyaltsab Rinpoche to come there. I met him a week or so before, when he brought some foreigners to King Gesar’s temple. We spent half an hour together and in that time he told me three times I must come to visit him in Shechen. Shechen was anyway in my plan and I had strong interest to visit it. Meeting with Gyaltsab Rinpoche was quite powerful - for the lack of better words - and three times I promised him to come.

Yet when I had to pack and actually go a kind of passiveness overcame me and I decided not to go on that day. But my friends in the temple would hear nothing about it. They all came to my room, packed my things and cleaned everything. At the end they celebrated with a huge fight, it was difficult to see who was on top and who bellow the pile of human bodies and who was flying where.

Senge and Tseten Tayo did not participate. They went with me to the village where we had to look for a truck. Every truck going away from Tsar Tsar goes pass Shechen so it was not difficult. Soon I was again on the move.

Shechen monastery is only one or two hours away - depending whether you go by jeep or truck. It was morning when I arrived and all local Khampa men were gathered on the grassland in the opening of the valley leading to the monastery. Dressed in their finest real tiger skin Tibetan cloths, sunglasses and cowboy hats, riding motorbikes and horses. Everybody seamed to be going somewhere and soon they were all gone. One monk explained the situation to me: they all go further down the road to welcome Gyaltsab Rinpoche with his Chinese students and escort them to the monastery. He advised me to go to the house where Mathew Ricard stayed. Mathew is one of the most well known western monks in Tibetan Buddhist tradition and visits Shechen every year. He is in charge of many humanitarian projects going on in Tibet under the leadership of Shechen Rabjam Rinpoche, the abbot of the Shechen monastery. He lives in Bhutan and rarely visits Tibet.

At that time Mathew was not in the house. I left my luggage there and escaped to the nearest hill. Up there I felt good, between rocks and fragrant pine trees, looking down at whatever was happening. Soon a long procession of horses, motorbikes, jeeps and buses arrived; slowly making its way on the rocky road leading from the main gravel road up to the monastery. Everybody got out in front of the newly constructed temple of Gyaltsab Rinpoche. His Chinese students sponsored the construction. There were some speeches in Chinese and Tibetan and everybody went in the temple. It was already late afternoon and I knew I cannot stay in the mountain forever; it was time to go down and face the crowd.

When I reached the new temple everybody was still inside and door was crammed with local people peeking in. Kunshab, a boyfriend of Kunsang Drolma, one of my Tsar Tsar’s sisters, found me there and without asking dragged me in directly to the throne where Gyaltsab Rinpoche was sitting. He was happy to see me and ordered his assistant to feed me. In Tibet nobody will speak or do anything else with you if you are not full. Only after stomach is satisfied it is time to do anything else.

Well to make the story short, I got a lot to eat and later went to see Rinpoche who gave me a nice room to stay in the new temple. It was packed by hundreds of Chinese Buddhists and together we got to spend a week or so. I don’t remember seeing so much food ever before. Every existing table was packed with meat, cookies, candies, cans of Red Bull, bottles of Pepsi and much other stuff. When not attending opening ceremonies in the temple we were hanging out together, eating, drinking, talking and having fun. It was a true reward for my prostration efforts.

Most people were from Shanghai, some from Beijing and many other places in China. They are all students of Gyaltsab Rinpoche. He is 33 years old, small and round. Gyaltsab Rinpoche is the highest Buddhist master permanently living in Shechen monastery with around 300 monks and many branch monasteries throughout Tibet. Shechen monastery was rebuilt by Dilgo Kyentse Rinpoche in 1980s when practice of Buddhism was again allowed in China. Five years ago Gyaltsab Rinpoche went to mainland China for the first time. With his relaxed manners, humor and loving patience to listen to peoples problems at any hour of day or night he became a friend and a teacher to many people in China.

I felt good in their company. They were very friendly people, sincere in their interest in Tibetan culture and Tibetan Buddhism, sincere in their wish to do something for Tibetan people. Meeting with them made it impossible to me to make a general statement like: “Chinese are doing bad things in Tibet.” Also I was surprised and inspired by sympathy and respect that Chinese people feel towards His Holiness the Dalaj Lama. It seams that people of Tibet and China share a long common history based on their mutual interest in Buddhism.

Shechen was also a romantic place.

There was a young girl from Shanghai…

Yet perhaps a monastery is not a good place for love - she could not speak English and I cannot speak any Chinese. We could only sit together in a temple, touch against each other in a gentle way and exchange loving glances. The feelings of sympathy somehow transformed into bitterness and pain. I was quite sad, and also she. But it was not possible to do anything, sadness was just getting bigger and distance between us grew. At such moments I went for a walk to the burial ground behind the monastery where they cut dead bodies for the birds. A small earth stupa is there; a wooden beam to which they tie the head, a hammer for crashing the bones… Mani stones and human bones were everywhere. Somehow it was the best place to bring and face the sadness; to find peace at the stones where every life will eventually end.

Most people left within one week. A few remained and together we spent one month doing nothing. Talking, eating and occasionally hiking in the mountains full of meditation caves where many masters of the past were practicing and left proofs of their spiritual realizations: hand and foot prints in rocks, knots in the trees…

In between, Gyaltsab Rinpoche took us for few days to Derge, a cultural center of Kham region of Tibet famous for its woodblock printing monastery. It was not destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and Buddhist scriptures are still hand printed there with carved blocks of wood.

This time I could really appreciate huge cement hotels - with good restaurants, electricity, shower, toilet - all the civilized things I didn’t have in the last three months. It is easy to look down upon material development, saying it is not really important while you actually enjoy the best of it.

Rinpoche will go to Lhasa in a few days and he promised to take me with him.