Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  When we arrived in Rishikesh, we went directly to the Sivananda Ashram where, as a student of Satchidananda, I was welcomed. We were given a room and meals at the ashram but we were also free to look around. It was here that I saw for the first time sadhus (wandering ascetics) and yogis living in the open, completely unclothed, often with their thin bodies painted and using a trident for a walking stick. Mostly you didn’t see them, as they lived alone in the forests around Rishikesh. Local people claimed that the sound “om” could be generally heard around there due to the many, many yogis living in retreat in the area. We never spoke with the ones we would happen upon walking in the many footpaths in the forest. Instead, almost invariably, we would be greeted with a beaming smile, a very slight nod, and they would walk on right past us. I did take some yoga classes with a young man who was living in the ashram, but I already knew the asanas he wanted to show me, and he seemed disappointed in our meeting.

  When the residents of the ashram learned I was a musician, they insisted I meet their “music” yogi, an elderly man living in the ashram. I was introduced to him, but he never spoke to me. When I entered his living quarters he was already playing a vina, a string instrument often used to accompany singers. He sang hymns and devotional songs for the several hours of my visit. He was far from the great musicians I have known, but he was clearly transported by this practice of playing and singing. I was told that most of his waking time was passed in that way.

  I learned that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, also had an ashram in Rishikesh, though I didn’t visit it at the time. Later, on my way back to Europe and passing once again through New Delhi, I attended a big public talk he gave. I believe that this was about the time that George Harrison met him or was even visiting him. He was very “at home” with a very large crowd and easily held our attention. I never met him personally, though later I met many of his TM students.

  Among my most memorable experiences was taking a refreshing dip in the Ganges. The river, though not wide at this point, is very fresh, fast-flowing, and clean. JoAnne and I found a quiet spot just outside the town, took off our clothes, and bathed in the Ganges. The sky was blue and clear, the sun unclouded and strong. Even though it was now November and we were in the foothills of the Himalayas, we weren’t at all cold.

  To return to New Delhi from Rishikesh, we traveled by bus and then by rail as before, but we didn’t stay at the Birla Temple, where we had previously lodged and which had provided accommodations much like those in Amritsar. After weeks of traveling, we had already outgrown the Indian hospitality system, so we found a small hotel near Connaught Circle where we were close to most things of interest to us.

  We decided that our next stop would be Katmandu, Nepal, in order to visit Boudhanath, an ancient massive stupa, reputed by some to be the holiest Tibetan Buddhist temple outside Tibet. That meant a train ride east from New Delhi to Patna, a major rail junction in the northeast of India. From there it was a long and bumpy bus ride to Katmandu. Nepal was (and still is) a mix of Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist culture all through. It seemed very exotic to us. Clearly this was a place that drew from far and wide. There were also more wandering sadhus, just as we’d seen in Rishikesh. We stayed at the Tibetan Blue Moon Hotel, which was modest but authentically Tibetan, and I had my first experience of the food, tea, and beer of Tibet.

  Katmandu in 1966 was much smaller than it is today. It was little more than a muddy-street town, and Boudhanath was located outside of it. (These days, it’s inside Katmandu itself). On our first day we took a taxi through the surrounding fields out to Boudhanath. It is a most impressive stupa, with large eyes painted on all four sides, indicating that the compassion of the Buddha is without limit. For some reason, as we were looking around, we were taken to see Chinia Lama, the director of the temple. He seemed very pleased to see us and spoke English quite well. We had tea with him and then, to my complete surprise, he wanted to know if I was interested in buying a thangka. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that these paintings were even for sale. He took my hesitation for a yes and showed me two vivid paintings. About sixteen by twenty inches, they were oil-based paintings on canvases sewn into a much larger brocade of Chinese silk, complete with two red ribbons that hung down either side of the main image. The paintings were not that old (perhaps ten or twenty years) and the colors were still strong. I later came to know the central images very well. One was a simple Shakyamuni Buddha and the other was a meditational deity. I was sure that JoAnne and I didn’t have the cash for anything of that quality, but it turned out that we did. I told Chinia Lama I needed to think about it, and we returned the next day and paid the asking price—seventy-five dollars for both. That was the beginning of my serious interest in the art of Tibet, and by the time we returned to Europe we would be bringing home seven thangkas. In almost every case they were offered to me for sale or barter.

  AFTER RETURNING FROM KATMANDU back to New Delhi, we began to plan the last and most important part of our Indian tour, which would take us first to Darjeeling and then to Kalimpong—our ultimate destination—both in the foothills of the Himalayas in the far northeast of the country.

  After obtaining the necessary permits for traveling to Darjeeling at an office in New Delhi, we began our journey. It took five solid days on the train to reach Siliguri, the last rail station before the Himalayas. Because the upgrades to second class were all taken, we traveled the whole way in third class. Our car in the train was more like a village on wheels than a modern railroad car, with waves of people leaving and arriving at absolutely every station. But what a panorama of life, both inside and outside the train! It felt to me like the first, but not last, initiation and benediction to life in India. Days and nights were endless, one blending into another. The railroad car was filled with humanity, and the difference between sitting in a seat and on the floor was indistinguishable. A whole family could surround you completely for hours at a time and then disappear at a wayward rail stop, only to be replaced by another complete family. JoAnne and I desperately held on to our spot on the floor of the train when one of us had to leave for a comfort stop in the latrine at the end of the car or, when the train was at a station, to dash to the platform to buy tangerines or peanuts. This was without a doubt the most difficult journey I have ever experienced, before or since. The long train ride, however, had one mitigating feature. Every station of any size had a bookstall that carried the whole Penguin Books series, brought out from London. I clearly remember reading George Orwell’s Burmese Days between Lucknow and Patna Junction, and Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers between Patna Junction and Siliguri.

  Every rail stop also had food sellers, but by then I had learned to be careful about drinking and eating in India. We confined ourselves to bananas, tangerines, and peanuts, often for days at a time and therefore never had dysentery problems. In later years I would prepare for a rail journey by buying a loaf of bread and making a dozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I never drank liquids of any kind, not even hot teas, since the water usually never had reached the boiling point in its preparation. Fresh oranges or tangerines, which we were able to peel ourselves, were our entire source of liquids. Hard travel to be sure, but, for me, never uninteresting.

  During the whole of my time on the trains in third class I never once saw a ticket being collected, or even a ticket collector. Perhaps the trains’ functionaries kept themselves to the second and first class carriages. Years later I did take a first class train and traveled in a sleeping car. I went to sleep in the evening and was awakened in the morning to find myself on a side spur of the main track. It was the gentle knocking on my sleeping compartment door by the chowkidar, which seemed to be the general name for a personal servant, to let me know we had arrived. No such waking service was either available or necessary in this, our first cross-country Indian rail journey.

  We descended at the Siliguri train station, quite a small place just big enough to have
jeep transportation up to Darjeeling (literally meaning “the Place of the Thunderbolt” in Tibetan). Jeeps were the main transportation in the hill towns of the Himalayas. The seats behind the driver had been removed and replaced by two facing wooden benches each made to hold four persons. It was very airy as there were only open spaces where windows might have been, and every bump and turn of the road was made known to the passengers. The drivers always seemed to me to be driving too fast and too recklessly, but no one ever complained. The road climbed quickly from the plains around Siliguri, and we were soon passing through the Himalayan foothills. We would climb, in all, about 7500 feet in four to five hours, which meant a most dramatic change from the landscape of the plains to that of the Himalayan ranges.

  Just before arriving in Darjeeling we stopped at Kalu Rimpoche’s monastery in Sonada. In those first months in India, I sought out any number of Tibetan teachers. By then I had formed the idea that perhaps it was still possible to meet a Tibetan teacher and find out firsthand, as it were, whether the practices of Tibetan yogis were still known and followed. It may seem a strange question now, since today there are many books and teachers of the four well-known Tibetan lineages. But in 1966 it was not obviously so. When I met Kalu Rimpoche that first time in Sonada, I received from him my first spoken explanation of a Tibetan text. On the wall next to his sitting room was a painting of the Wheel of Life (Sipa Khorla). With the help of a translator, I asked for and received a detailed account of the cycle of existence as rendered in this painting.

  Our next stop was at the Samten Chöling Monastery (Ghoom Monastery), fewer than five miles from Darjeeling itself. It was one of the places frequented by Lama Govinda, a German Buddhist who had written some of the first books in English about Tibetan Buddhism. He was the student of another very well-known teacher, Tomo Geshe Rimpoche—literally meaning “the Blessed Doctor of the Tomo Valley.” That particular Rimpoche was known as the “former body” of the next living Tomo Geshe Rimpoche, whom I would soon meet in Kalimpong. (There is a third Tomo Geshe Rimpoche, who is now twelve years old.) I eventually got to know some of the lamas and teachers of the Ghoom Monastery. In future years, whenever I was passing through Darjeeling on my way to Kalimpong, they would send vegetarian dumplings to my hotel and, to this day, I receive a card from them on Losar, the Tibetan New Year, every February.

  Darjeeling was the most beautiful of the hill stations I had seen, an old town that seemed to be a reflection and presentation of the past and present. It had once been the residence of the British raj during the long, hot Indian summer months.

  JoAnne and I stayed in the Prince Edward Hotel for very little money. I ordered a bath one morning. Moments later, a ladder appeared outside our third-floor bathroom door (facing the mountains) and a young man scampered up with a full bucket of hot water. It took him eight or nine trips to fill the bath, and such was his speed in climbing up and down that, when complete, the bathwater was still piping hot.

  It was in Darjeeling that I first met an Anglo-Indian community, which was quite present there some fifty years ago but is probably hard to find anywhere today. These were people who had somehow fallen between the cracks. I found them a most interesting and likable group. For years I would stay in the same place—the Prince Edward Hotel—when passing through Darjeeling. JoAnne and I were very happy there, with its ridiculously beautiful mountainscapes and its steeply winding streets full of antique shops. It was December when we arrived that first time, and I remember hearing Christmas carols being sung to us by Christian Indian carolers in a popular restaurant on Christmas Day of 1966.

  We stayed longer in Darjeeling than we intended and finally needed to leave before our permit to stay there had expired. Our permits for Kalimpong, which we had obtained upon our arrival in Darjeeling, would allow us to remain in Kalimpong for only five days at a time. This meant that as soon as we arrived there, we would have to apply at the Kalimpong police station for an extension. Since the permits and extensions could only be issued in Darjeeling, our passports would be sent back there by the Kalimpong police, a process which took four days or five days. As it turned out, we would wind up staying for fifteen days during our first visit to Kalimpong, so the whole time we were there our passports were traveling back and forth between the Darjeeling and Kalimpong police stations without us. For some reason I found the situation endlessly amusing, albeit a little nerve-racking.

  I was just learning about the political and military situation in that part of India, which was the reason for these permits. The Chinese had slowly taken over Tibet in the 1950s, supposedly to liberate Tibetans from themselves. At that time, there were other major global problems, including the Cold War in the West. The problems of Tibet, a country then virtually unknown to the rest of the world, and the subsequent border problems between China and India, simply were not interesting to the rest of the world. I myself ended up practically on the border these lands shared before I became aware of their recent history. Soon I would be seeing dozens of refugee camps—Tibetans who fled Tibet with the Dalai Lama, or soon after his escape to India in 1959. The permits were necessary because of the Indian military checkpoints near the border with China (formerly independent Tibet). Crossing the Tista River on the road from Darjeeling to Kalimpong, where our permits were scrutinized, could take several hours for that reason alone.

  We left for Kalimpong, doubling back on the road by which we had arrived, and, just before reaching Sonada, we headed east down a winding road that took us to the small bridge over the Tista River. It’s a glorious ride going down several thousand feet in a few hours. The trees and foliage seem to change by the minute. I remember that short ride vividly with a crisp blue sky and the temperature rising as we descended to the floor of the valley.

  THE BLESSED DOCTOR OF

  THE TOMO VALLEY

  I HAD KNOWN FROM THE OUTSET THAT WE WOULD END UP IN KALIMpong. Kalimpong is about 3500 feet lower than Darjeeling but still high enough to rise to a cooler temperature as we drew near. If you look on a map, it will be just a small dot nestled between Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim (now an Indian state), and easy to miss, but I knew from my reading that for scholars, travelers, and Tibetan business families it was a major destination and junction. The goods that left Tibet over the Nalah Pass stopped first in Kalimpong. From there, they were sent either south to Calcutta on the Bay of Bengal or straight across northern India and Central Asia and on to Europe. Business families in Lhasa had homes and offices in Kalimpong, so there was a settled Tibetan community there.

  Really, everybody who was interested in Tibet passed through Kalimpong. Sir Charles Bell, who wrote some of the earliest authoritative books on Tibet as well as a handy dictionary of colloquial Tibetan and English, had stayed there in the early part of the twentieth century. Walter Evans-Wentz met Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup either in Kalimpong or Sikkim, and Theos Bernard met Gegen Tharchin, his major guide and contact to Tibet, there as well. Geshe Wangyal, a Lhasa-educated lama from Mongolia, had also spent significant time in Kalimpong. In 1966 entering the town was like coming across a campfire that had burned throughout the night and was still smoking in the morning. But if you got down on your knees and began gently blowing on it (and persisted) you would definitely see the flames again.

  Theos Bernard described Kalimpong as the most beautiful town he’d ever seen. I didn’t see it like that, but there the Himalayan peaks are very close, and the morning and evening sun make striking appearances. At 28,000 feet, the nearby peak of Kanchenjunga is the third highest mountain in the world. Many other mountains close by are easily over 20,000 feet. Yet it is never too cold, and I’ve often been there in the winter months. It’s a much more rural place than Darjeeling, and the Friday hat (market) brings people in from Bhutan and Sikkim. It only takes a few visits to easily distinguish them by their clothing, each area being that distinctive, though all so close together.

  When we arrived, JoAnne and I went to the Himalayan Hotel, made famous by generations of trekke
rs, climbers, and Indian and English officials on their way to and from Tibet. It had been built by David MacDonald, a veteran of the British Younghusband mission in 1904, which was a military invasion led by Colonel Francis Younghusband, with the purpose of countering Russian influence in Tibet. The hotel had been the family home until the family turned it into a hotel—one of the MacDonald daughters was still running it during our first stay. You could sit outside in the garden and have afternoon tea with Kanchenjunga appearing as if very nearby. It is said that Alexandra David-Neel, the French-Belgian student of Tibetan Buddhism who made it to Lhasa in 1924 disguised as a pilgrim, had stayed there, as well as Charles Bell. In 1966, I was close enough to those travelers that I felt their path not yet too distant from my own. Perhaps that is why I liked Kalimpong so much.

  There were three people I met in Kalimpong whose lives and experiences made a deep impression on me. The first was the previously mentioned Reverend Gegen Tharchin, who was in his seventies and semiretired from his business, the Tibetan Mirror Press. He described himself when I met him as a lexicographer, and at one point in our friendship he gave me a trilingual dictionary he had composed in Hindi, English, and Tibetan. However, I knew him as much more than that. As a much younger man in the 1930s he had been Theos Bernard’s guide and companion, friend and tutor, and, most important, the connection to the nobility and officialdom of Lhasa. Without Tharchin’s support and connections, Bernard would never have gotten to Tibet. I had read all about this while still in Paris from Bernard’s own accounts, and I was intensely interested in whatever details that Tharchin could (or would be willing to) provide.