September 8, 20009 – Day 257 – Lhasa, Tibet

When talking about a place as colorful and detailed as a Tibetan Buddhist temple, how is it possible to describe the interior without pictures? No photos are allowed inside any Buddhist temple and it makes it difficult to fully paint a picture with enough or the right words.

Monk in the temple

The sounds and atmosphere are just as important as the enormous wall paintings, the inside architecture, and the grand statues of Buddha. We began our visit to the Jokhang Temple by walking through a dimly lit old doorway with huge, heavy doors propped open to accommodate the high traffic entering and exiting the temple every minute. There was a line out the door of locals coming in to pray and pay respect to their diety and add yak butter to the candle stands to keep them forever burning.

Praying in front of the temple

It felt strange to step inside this other world that it is difficult to recall in detail all the sensory attacks that happened during our brief visit. We felt oddly out of place, not abated by the fact that every single local inside the temple was staring with wonder at us as we quietly walked by. It was like being let in on a secret, getting to see the inside and intermingle in the clockwise lines of Tibetan Buddhists worshipping their god.

The temple is divided into many smaller chambers that house statues of Buddha and other “protector” dieties behind glass cases. Each statue is painted brightly and with great detail as well as decorated with pieces of colorful fabric and quite often money from temple patrons. Each chamber is different and sometimes the dieties will have their faces covered with a piece of cloth depending on what time of year it is and if an honoring holiday or festival is going on for that particular one. These smaller chambers themselves are low and dim, lit with only a wide shallow bowl of yak butter and a candle wick constantly burning in honor of the gods. The doorways are narrow and very short, accommodating the typically small stature of most Tibetans, and creating cranial hazards for typically taller western tourists. The floors are uneven concrete and slick from the spilled yak butter that is poured for the candles in each room. Around the door frame are wooden carvings with symbolic motifs in traditional Tibetan style, often with floral patterns intermixed with gods or Buddhist symbols.

Outside on the roof of the temple

Outside these smaller chambers the walls of the temple are painted from floor to ceiling with many varying images. Sometimes these are murals of all the other Buddhist temples in Tibet, other times the paintings tell legends of the temple’s founding and who founded it. And sometimes there are paintings of Buddhist symbols or specific animals such as lambs or peacocks that are important to Buddhism. Bright yellows and oranges, deep reds, rich gold, pale green, and dark blues seem to dominate the paintings all coming together to make an astoundingly rich and intense image.

Though I could probably write all day just to describe the inside of this one temple, that was only the start of the morning! We enjoyed walking through the temple and seeing the brilliant artwork and religious images but we also enjoyed visiting a tea house run by a nunnery where we tried milk tea.

Milk Tea

It is just tea made with mostly hot milk and, depending on who you ask, is not very good. It is neither sweet nor bitter, merely something that could be tried and not easily described afterwards. The teahouse was absolutely packed with locals taking a break from their day or old folks socializing. When the four of us walked in, it seemed as if we were a circus act and everyone was waiting for us to break into a theatrical routine. We smiled politely, took the only seats available and tried our milk tea.

A few "older" patrons on the tea house

From the crowded tea house we hit the streets again and had a brief walk through Barkor Street, the well known Tibetan market for monks’ attire, prayer wheels, and tourist souvenirs. For lunch we checked out a cave restaurant that was a narrow, dim single corridor. The ventilation was poor and thick spots of grease and smudges of cooking smoke spotted the ceilings and walls. It was here that we had our first taste of yak meat. We ordered yak momos, a traditional Tibetan dumpling usually filled with meat or vegetables. It was a strange taste, not necessarily unpleasant but rather not to either of our liking. Saben described it as tasting like “a game-y cow.”

Yak momos

After lunch we were scheduled to visit another monastery but the 4 of us decided collectively that we were not that crazy about seeing yet another monastery (we had seen some in China and they all start to look the same to us after a while). Our guide seemed genuinely hurt that we did not want to go but it was our trip and we dismissed him for the afternoon so we could each explore the city on our own.

We (the 2 of us) spent our afternoon wandering the market and strolling around the edges of the old city. It was a nice day and while there are a few nice parks to hang out in, we were happy just to take a walk and see what we could find. Before we knew it, it was dinner time and we found a little hole in the wall restaurant that apparently only sees locals. The staff were greatly amused at our presence and seemed very happy that we were there. We could not speak to each other, us not knowing Tibetan and they not knowing English, but we met in the middle with the handy (and big!) picture menu covering one whole wall of the tiny shop. The food was cheap, RMB7/plate, and very tasty. Feeling quite pleased with our day, we enjoyed the cool night air as we walked back to our rather awful hostel.