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Thursday 2005-09-29 - Ta’ersi, China
Surprise in the Kumbum Jampaling
The monastery in Ta’ersi (called the Kumbum monastery or Kumbum Jampaling) is indeed very large. Obviously the Chinese are ‘developing’ it as a tourist attraction and a whole new entrance has been built — which we ignore since the old entrance (now side entrance) is simply at the end of the street: there’s an iron gate, half-closed with a chain, which everyone simply ducks under to enter.
At first we can’t find where to buy a ticket but when we try to enter a temple we’re stopped and pointed to the ticket office. Officially there are nine ‘sites’ to visit but it seems one is closed while some other buildings (like the Kumbum Old Monk’s Home) don’t require a ticket at all. Alas at most temples photography is not allowed — except of course when one monk in a nice jacket over his robes asks me to take his picture!
The whole complex is so huge (and the weather so unpleasant with a constant drizzle) that we give up on the idea of seeing each and every building. One highlight we visit is the Dharma Protector temple where on the second floor, around the courtyard, a range of stuffed animals is looking down on us over the railing: a bear, a deer, a yak, etc.: animals that are also frequently pictured in Buddhist paintings.
Another interesting temple is the Kalachakra Mandala temple: while the outside of the temple building is square, the inside floor plan is laid out in the form of a Mandala, with a large circle within the square of the walls and inside that other squares and circles within each other, forming a three-dimensional mandala. Just inside the large circle (which I understand symbolizes the wheel of time) is a text made of individual Tibetan characters standing up, painted in different bright colors and interspersed with small statues of mythical animals. I’m half expecting the row of characters to start marching round — the whole interior of this temple somehow reminds me of a planetarium and I actually look if there isn’t a mechanism there — but no, I see nothing: this wheel of time remains stationary. What is weird is that when you walk around in a clockwise direction (as required) you’re reading the text from right to left (if you can read Tibetan that is) but the Tibetan script is actually written left to right. I wish I could read the text here!
At a third temple (of which the name has escaped me) we find a real surprise: a little gold frame propped up on a Buddha statue holds a portrait of the Dalai Lama with the (unofficial) Tibetan flag as the background. Portraits of the Dalai Lama are strictly forbidden by the Chinese (as is the flag) — didn’t they notice this or are they getting a little more lenient?
After a late lunch at a Chinese restaurant (our dishes beautifully decorated with flowers folded from thin slices of a kind of radish) and a birthday party with a big Chinese birthday cake in one of the upstairs gambling rooms of the hotel, we board our bus again which takes us to Xining.
