Dear All
This was our last day in "KTM" before our trek. Yesterday
evening we had dinner with Karma's daughter Maisie, his son-in-law Sky, and
first wife Arlene at our favorite restaurant, Flavors which is next to the
stupa here in Boudha. It was a warm occasion repeated tonight at the
Kathmandu Guest House in the heart of Tamel, the tourist district in the old
part of downtown Kathmandu. We are glad to have stayed in Boudha at the
Rinpoche's quiet guesthouse away from the intense shopping and busy huckstering
of Thamel.
Today was our last day of teaching. After the last talk there was a
ceremony to thank the teachers, translators, and assistants. Then the students had a chance to offer a
donation to the Rinpoche and his translator. Donations – such as made on our behalf by our Friendly Helper
Monk before we went to Chitwan -- are placed in envelopes and then wrapped in a
kadha and presented. Below is a somewhat blurry image of Donna wrapping
her donation. When a donation is made, while the donor is bowing before
him, the Rinpoche drapes an acknowledging kadha over their shoulders. Quite
an elegant ceremony.
After lunch in the manicured gardens of Sechen Monastery and a little shopping,
we went back to our room and sorted out what we would leave at our hotel in
Pokara and what the porter would carry for us on the trek.
At 5:30 we joined Maisie, Sky, and Arlene at Pashupatinath to watch the
dances that are held at sunset (and sunrise) every day.
There was music playing before the performance, and two of sadhus were
dancing for donations. One fellow with a BRIGHT red beard, a red cap, a yellow
tunic, a large gold bracelet on each wrist and the trident of Shiva emblazoned
in red and white across his forehead, shimmied, shuffled, and pirouetted across
the stage in front of the audience. He spent quite a lot of time with
Donna who was "dancing" with him with the top half of her body from
her seat.
The picture below
captures one moment of the dance. Three dancers performed on
a wide platform above the river and across from the ghats where the highest caste
dead are cremated. In the picture below there is a small fire in the shape of a
clipper ship in the dark space in front of the little table on the edge of the orange carpet. That fire is the funeral pyre across the river of a Brahmin man whose cremation fire was
lit shortly after we arrived.
 |
| This dancer was in the center of the group of three. |
 |
| Detail of Brahmin cremation. Lower caste Nepalis are cremated on the other side of the bridge on the left of this picture. The Hospice House described in the post about our first visit to Pashupatinath is to the right of this image. |
Two singers accompanied by tabla drums [WOW! They were simply amazing.] and
a box harmonium provided the music for the three “dancing” men. Each
dancer began by placing an offering of flowers and food on a small table at the
edge of the stage. The table is in the picture and has a fringed cloth on
it. After they had picked up whatever burning object they were going to
perform with, the dancers stayed on a "door mat" in the center of an
orange tarp. They first lit three sticks of incense at the table and
inscribed a large circle or figure eight with the incense in one had while
ringing a bell with the other while slowing turning in circles on the door mat.
The flaming items that they held and moved up and down advanced from the
incense through a brazier with coals through a sort of candelabra -- on the left of the dancer in the
picture below -- to a cobra head with a bowl of flaming liquid below it that was held
aloft and brought to waist level, then held aloft again through perhaps a dozen
repetitions.
As the performance neared the end and the dancers were
handling larger flames, the audience stood, clapped, shouted, and some broke
into dance. One of the women invited Donna to join her group, and Donna said that
she thought that the dancing could have induced an ecstatic state if it had
gone on longer.
So, folks, what was that all about? I don't know, and I can't ask my
trusty source-of-all-Nepalese-knowledge, the Lonely Planet Guide Book, because
the pages on Pashupatinath are already packed. Stay tuned . . .
Tomorrow our guide Jawane will pick us up at 7:30AM for the drive to Pokara
where we will spend the night. We will start trekking the next day, and I am
not sure if there will be any WiFi connections on the trek that I can use to
send you news. If there is WiFi, you will hear from me, and if you don't,
it's because there is no Internet connection I can use. We will be back
in Kathmandu April 15, so see you then or form the trail.
Love and Namaste,
Marian, Dick, Donna, Karma, Maisie, and Sky, the trekking team.
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