Top of the World

Carol Ardman

The Potalala Palace

Word Count 887

My first night in Tibet, a waiter brought soup and dumplings to our wooden table. I brought a spoonful to my lips, pretending the room wasn’t spinning. Suddenly, I puked directly into my bowl. “You didn’t make a sound,” my cousin’s wife noted, sympathetically. Fifteen years ago, getting into Tibet was as difficult as going to North Korea today. The Chinese government was taking over the autonomous region and discouraging Western visits, but my Nobel-prize-winning economist cousin and his wife had scored an official invitation and I was tagging along.

Back in my hotel room, I slept in my jeans, too weak from altitude sickness to undress. I lay on my thin mattress the entire next day, unable to stand for more than a couple of minutes, drinking only a few sips of water from my canteen and eating a couple of stray M&Ms I found in my suitcase.

Finally recovered, I spent that evening at a banquet hosted by Lhasa city officials. My cousin’s wife and I were the only women at a table for sixteen. Amazingly, my pork dumplings tasted almost exactly like those at the Empire Szechuan restaurant at home in New York City. As we ate, lively toasts were made and translated but I could feel something was amiss.

“Some of these people aren’t speaking Tibetan,” an American friend who lived in China whispered to me, incensed. “They’re either Chinese or collaborators, doing all they can to eradicate the culture of Tibet and replace it with mainland Han Chinese."

Even I could even hear the disturbing contempt with which some guests almost spat the word “Dalai”, conspicuously leaving out the honorific “Lama”. To me, the Dalai Lama seemed the epitome of wise, almost saintly beneficence. The idea that he could be insulted that way seemed unthinkable.

Drinking tea at a cafe on the second floor, the next afternoon, looking down at ordinary people going about their daily routines, a man dressed as a Buddhist monk came up behind me, intentionally jostled my chair and peered brazenly at the post card I was writing. It wasn’t subtle. He was a Chinese secret policeman, letting me know I was under surveillance.

The next day we climbed more than 400 steps up to the Potala Palace, so big it was almost a city in itself. The air became noticeably thinner and the increasing lack of oxygen no doubt contributed to my mood, which bordered on ecstatic. The ancient white monolithic structure with its many courtyards, its opulent golden roof spires and domes was, for centuries ,the home of the Dalai Lama.

We browsed huge marbled chambers, turned tall cylindrical prayer wheels, passed rows of monks sitting on the floor, praying or meditating. Shelves going up to the sky-high rafters held thousands of ancient parchment scrolls that had been saved from mice by resident cats. The spiritual force of thousands of years of Buddhism being studied and practiced emanated from the walls.

But, descending those steep stairs, out on the street again, we stopped, seeing a pilgrim crawling on his belly toward another monastery. He was dressed in rags, protected only by a thin sheet of tattered cardboard from rough cobblestones and earth. Often, our guide said, pilgrims traveled this way, inching forward to temples over hundreds of rocky miles from their homes in the mountains.

My cousin, always the economist, had a question for this impoverished man. “Do you give money to your temple every month?”

“Yes,” the man said.

“And does the temple do something for you?”

The man looked up at him. “Nothing.”

The guide nodded unsurprised. I, an atheist, was stunned by – even envied -- this man’s devotion, his sacrifice, his courage. But was he also a chump? My heart went out to him on all fronts, regardless of the gulf between our daily lives.

For a two day trek in the Himalayas, we drove up a ribbon of mountain road, past vast fields blanketed with bright yellow mustard flowers, past villages flying colorful prayer flags. Our hosts made the tents wind-proof, the bed soft and warm, and topped off the delicious dinner with sour, foul-tasting yak butter tea.

In the cold sunny morning we made our way up the gorgeous trail, goji berry bushes growing by the sides of gurgling creeks, everything green and lush. Sometimes we greeted passing families with their smiling children, rosy-cheeked from sun and wind, dressed in brocades. Sometimes a cow was being led to market. Families who weren’t farmers killed one single yak and then made its meat and bones and hide last for an entire year. We arrived at the top of a small plateau, where, hewn into the white rock, we saw a smooth, perfectly round white bowl the size of my kitchen sink. A stone pestle lay on a ledge nearby. We had come upon a Sky Burial, where for thousands of years Tibetans have offered the dismembered, decomposing bodies of their dead to the vultures wheeling overhead.

Thoughts of corpses being pulverized and feasting carrion birds made me cringe. And yet, it began to make sense. Actually, I might prefer this wild, natural, uncomplicated way of disposing of my earthly remains to being embalmed, loaded into an expensive coffin and left underground in a crowded urban cemetery.

Carol is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in the New York Times and many other publications. She is the co-author of five books about medical conditions for a lay audience. She is also the author of an e-memoir, Tangier Love Story: Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles and Me.