It may be as a result of the fact that the first place in Asia that first grabbed my attention, and ultimately caused the surprising change of course that put me on my current life path.  I was taking a course called “Post-War Japanese Literature” (love those wildly-impractical Wesleyan courses).  We were reading the Sea of Fertility tetralogy by Yukio Mishima.  I was in love with these books as we read them in English translation.  At the beginning of one of the books (the third, I think) we find one of the main characters sitting on an old boat drifting on a misty Ganga at dawn, smelling corpses burning.  Then we follow him as he travels around the city and there’s a detailed description of the sacrifice of an animal at a temple.  This story grabbed me by the throat.  It was so vivid, yet so alien.  I stopped to speak to the instructor after class, and in my ignorance asked her if things like this were still to be seen still in Varanasi today.  She said he hand’t been to Varanasi before, but other places in India, and was certain things were still so.

About six months later I was landing in India at the beginning of my semester abroad, my first real expose to a culture different from my own.  Things went well.  I saw and experienced so many amazing things.  Every day was an adventure.

For months it had been my plan to go travelling after the study abroad program was over.  I wanted to go to Varanasi and the surrounding Buddhist holy sites of Bodhgaya and Sarnath.  Things didn’t work out and it ended up that I was going home instead of traveling to these places.  I was perfectly fine with that, not feeling like I was really missing out on anything, because even then a part of me knew that I would definitely be back.

And now, 8 years later, I’m finally going there.  It will probably be more crowded and dirty and annoying than I imagined it.  But I also know that it will probably be amazing in ways I could have never guessed.

So now it’s time to leave my work behind.  I think it fair to say that I’ve been working hard for almost all of the last eight months.  When I look back, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished in my research.  I feel like once I get home and settled, I’ll be ready to start writing my dissertation without much delay.  And that means I’ve done my job.  So I’m leaving myself the last 5 or so weeks in India to just travel around.  My plan is to go Delhi-Bodhgaya-Varanasi-Ajanta and Ellora Caves-Mumbai-Goa-Kerela and then back to Delhi for my flight home.  But I’m not bound to this itinerary.  Of all the time I’ve spent in Asia, and even when I was cycling across the U.S., I’ve always been in a rush from one place to the next, always trying to accomplish something tangible.  Now I’m going to try to just live in the moment, experience India, and hopefully get some new perspective on my life.  I feel like it’s time for that to happen.  There are a lot of things about me that need to change, and I think taking a break from my normal self for about a month is a good way to start that process.

One might  well wonder what it is I do all day.  I mean, I’m in India doing research in preparation for writing a book about Tibetan holy madmen… What does that mean?  How does one go about doing that?  This is what yesterday looked like.  This is a typical day for me while living in Bir, where I’ll be for about six weeks, all told:

I was woken up some time before 6 by the sound of long horns.  My guesthouse is about a hundred meters from a monastery, and they start their morning rituals pretty early.  Horns, drums, chanting.  Even though I’m wearing earplugs, it wakes me up.  I lie in bed until 7, pretending to still be asleep.

When I do get up I’m thinking about a problem.  This was prompted by a conversation I’ve been having via email with a colleague from UVA whose dissertation touches on some of the same issues as mine.  The question is about a Tibetan term, brtul zhugs, which means something like “taming discipline” or “engaged discipline” or even just “asceticism.”  This term is used a lot to explain the behavior of the crazy yogis I’m writing about.  But what does it mean?  I start looking back through all my notes on it, looking at different sources I’ve gathered.  Some say it’s about taming oneself; some say it’s about taming others.  Some say it means crazy practices in general; some say it necessarily involves a yogi’s making use of a sexual consort.  Some include it in a set of 4 types of higher tantric practices; sometimes it’s a set of 5.  They use this same word to refer to a set of practices used by non-Buddhists all the way back in like the 5th century BCE–does that have any bearing on what the word means for Tibetans?  Is it one word with a lot of different meanings, or is there a single thread that runs through all of them?  What’s missing?  Am I reading these things wrong?  Is there a definitive explanation to be found?  Maybe I’m not asking the right questions?  I need to figure this out, otherwise chapter one is not going to come together.  This will be in the back of my head for the rest of the day.

Around 8 I go downstairs for breakfast: fried eggs, a chapatti and a glass of hot tea for about 42 cents.

Then back to my room to spend a few hours to work on the main text I’ve been working on off and on for the last year–the Life of the Madman of U.  I’ve already translated it and gone through it again asking questions about the difficult parts to the head of the Tibetan publications department at the library in Dharamsala.  Now I’m going through it again with a teacher at a monastery here in Bir.  This will be my last good chance to get another opinion on these issues before I sit down and finalize my translation, so I have to be thorough.  I look at each problematic word and passage and think long and hard at it, often re-looking-up words I’ve alread looked up twice before.  If I’m confident that I’ve got it right, I move in.  If not, I highlight it in pink, to be gone over with Kenpo in a couple of days.

At a little after 11 I get a cab to the monastery.  The 25 minute ride costs about 4 dollars.  Along the way the driver leans out the window to hit a friend of his on the ass as he’s peeing by the side of the road–hilarious.  A few minutes later he stops the car, turns off the ignition, and gets out to greet someone he knows, bending low to touch the man’s feet out of respect (a family member?).  They chat for a few minutes, then he’s back in the car and we go.  We don’t talk during the ride; I wish I spoke Hindi.

When I get to the monastery the monks are having lunch.  When lunch is over I meet with kenpo and we walk together to his rooms.  We sit down on the floor and get started right away.  I ask questions like, “what does mtshan byus mean?  From context I feel like it should mean something like ‘bad omens’, but it doesn’t quite work…”

“No–it means ‘he fled at night.’”

“Oh!  That makes perfect sense…”  Next question:

“Look at this long title here… is this the name of one practice or two?  The one version of the text I have splits it up into two, while the other version makes it look like it’s one.”

“It’s definitely one.”

“Okay.”  Next question.

We do this for about 40 minutes, covering about 10 pages of text, and then I get out of there.  Kenpo doesn’t have much time these days.  They’re in the middle of three months of an intensive session.  They have four hour-and-a-half meditation sessions daily, plus teachings in the morning and afternoon.  And he’s the one giving the morning teachings, on the Hevajra Tantra.  Once I leave he needs to take a nap, otherwise he’s falling asleep in the afternoon meditation session.  So I try not to take too much of his time.

Then I have a nice hour and fifteen minute walk home.  I wade a stream, walk through rice paddies and cornfields, the campus of a huge Tibetan Children’s Village school, and two Indian farming villages.  It’s lovely, as long as it’s not too hot.

I stop and buy some potato momos (Tibetan dumplings) for lunch, chatting with the shopkeeper and his wife, who are from eastern Tibet.  Today they tell me about their kids.

At home I take a shower and then do nothing for a while.  Read some of “Shogun,” which I picked up used (technically I stole it, but it would have been cheap) back in Dharamsala.  These days the main thing I look for in books is length.  I have lots of time to kill.

In the afternoon when I finally get working again I’m reading and taking notes on the life story of a different 15th century Tibetan holy madman.  It’s 550 pages long, and seeing as I can get through about three pages an hour, reading closely and taking copious notes, it’s going to take me a long time to finish.  But I absolutely need to do it.  So I plod along.  It will take me a few months at the very least.

In the evening I go pick up my laundry–two pairs of pants, socks, underwear, some shirts, which comes to under three dollars.  The clothes took an extra day to dry because it was rainy yesterday.  No problem.

I go to a dingy noodle shop for dinner.  All the eating establishments are pretty dingy and uninspiring in this town.  But the food’s okay and it’s cheap.  I have an aloo parantha and a “non-veg meatbread.”  There used to just be meatbread, until they started making vegetarian meatbread, at which time meatbread became “non-veg meatbread.”  A Tibetan guy who’s paying his bill starts asking the Indian kid (he’s probably about 9)–who does most of the work in the restaurant and is watching Tom and Jerry while I eat–what my deal is, in Hindi.  The kid tells him I speak Tibetan, so why doesn’t he ask me himself?  The guy looks at me, shrugs, and leaves.

After dinner I have some sewing to do.  A seam in the pants I had made a few months ago is coming apart.  I do an okay job of fixing it; it should hold for a few months.

Then I go back to work for a few more hours, not because I feel like it but because I don’t really have anything else to do.  It’s “light” work this time.  I’m looking through a text by the 15th Karmapa called “Crazy Words of Instruction.”  I’m skimming through this collection of poems looking for the theme of madness.  I look through the whole text but don’t find anything.  But the fact that the text bears that title is significant in itself.  This is one of the nuggets of information out of which chapter four will be constructed, about madness as a literary troupe.

I’m done at around 10.  Then I spend a few hours reading “Shogun” until I start to feel tired.

This is what things are like these days.  All the time in the world to focus on my work, and not much else going on.  One more month like this, and then I go off in search of adventure.

Eventually one starts to crave stability–in the sense of being in one place and, more importantly, having relationships with the people around you that aren’t stamped with a definite, inescapable time limit.

I tell you, it’s not all samosas and chutney.

Now the trouble is deciding how to go back and forth to the monastery everyday.  My options are: walk (takes about an hour and twenty minutes); take a cab (120 rs each way, which is like $2.40); or try to rent a motorcycle (probably like 400rs or $8 a day?).  Unfortunately the road crosses a stream at one point, and these days it’s almost a foot deep.  Do I really want to try crossing that everyday with my laptop on my back?  We’ll see.

I returned to Mcleod Ganj from Ladakh at the end of July and was there for about 10 days. During that time I finished looking into a few things at the library, had meetings with the Karmapa and Tashi Tsering, gave another lecture at the library (this time to the annual Intensive Translation Workshop), and shipped home a whole lot of books. I was tying up a lot of loose ends and preparing for the new phase of research I was about to enter. My first six months were focused mostly on reading the texts that I had to read in order to be thorough in my research. With my remaining three months my plan is to spend as much time as possible talking to people–lamas and khenpos and rinpoches mostly–about what I’ve been reading. This is the fieldworkey part of my nine months here.

So, leaving Dharamsala and my old ways of spending my time behind, I went to a small town called Tashi Jong, about two hours away. There is a Drukpa Kagyu monastery there where I hoped to do some interviews, staying for a week or two. All the rinpoches who usually live there were away and the kenpos in the shedra were “too busy” to meet with me. But one monk suggested I try meeting with an old khenpo who’s sort of semi-retired. He met with me twice for an hour and helped clear up some questions I had about the Life of the Madman of U. But he was about to leave for Malaysia and Singapore on a fundraising trip, so he couldn’t meet with me any more than that. It was a small town with nothing to do and not much to eat and no one was very friendly for some reason, so I got out of there.

Next stop, Changchub Jong, where two rinpoches from Tashi Jong are living these days, building a new monastery on top of a hill in the middle of the forest. The monastery was half constructed and there was nowhere for me to stay. Chogyal Rinpoche (who wrote the foreward to Keith Dowman’s translation of the Life of Drukpa Kunley…) was able to meet with me for about half an hour. He had some really juicy things to say about the holy madman tradition, but didn’t have any more time to talk. And despite my asking three times, he said the other main guy I was there to meet, Dorzong Rinpoche, had no time to talk to me at all. I suggested I come back again the next day, and he assured me there again would be no time. (This is after I spoke to Dorzong Rinpoche’s secretary back at Tashijong and he told me rinpoche would have time to talk to me.) So what to do? I called a cab and moved on to my next destination, Bir.

Today I went to the Kagyu monastery in Bir to see what could be arranged. They’re in the middle of 30 days of intensive teachings. Everyone is attending the teachings all day and no one has any time, basically. I felt stupid for not looking into things before hand. I thought I was going to have to leave without having accomplished anything here. But the monk I was talking to suggested we go ask the head khenpo, just to see. And he was incredibly nice and has agreed to meet with me everyday for the next few weeks, and to put me up in their guest house and feed me and everything. He said he thought it was great that people like me were taking such an interest in his tradition. So tomorrow I will embark upon this hopefully very fruitful period of research.

The reason why I’m writing about all this? Because it really shows what “fieldwork” is like. You need to have a loose idea of what you want to do, but not a plan per se. You need to sniff out opportunities, pursuing a few different leads at the same time, and as soon as one of them looks like it’s going to work out, you jump on it. You’re never going to be able to meet all the people you want to meet and ask all the questions you were planning to ask. But if you’re flexible and keep on trying, it will work out and you’ll get what you need. Some people will be helpful and welcoming and do whatever they can to help you, and others simply won’t.

So this is what my life will be like for the next few months. After Bir I’ll move on to Rewalsar, Dehradun, and maybe Sikkim. Depending on how it all goes I may finish my work early and spend my last month just traveling. I’d like to see Varanasi and Mumbai, and maybe spend a week on the beach in Goa. I earned it, right?

There’s no turning back now, here they come they’re finished now it’s you, go go, one foot in front of the other, and prostrate…  Prostrate yourself in thanks to the universe for offering you this moment of clarity and utter awareness.  I am alive.

Oh wait – who cares about Tibetology?

Oh wait – I’m a Tibetologist.  How did that happen?  When did I sit down and decide that that was what I was going to be?  I can’t imagine this ever not being exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.  I guess that means the decision I can’t remember making was a good one?

One time I was walking along the Kyichu in Lhasa and saw a guy dipping thankas in the dirty river water. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was making them look old, so he could sell them for more money.

Some of the older Tibetan folks who live near Gankyi (the Tibetan government-library complex) spend time each day circumambulating the library. They’re mumbling prayers, spinning mani wheels, chatting. Oftentimes I think to myself: would they still see the library as such a holy place if they knew that I was in it? What if they really knew what kind of person I was? Surely not then.

When I first came to India in 2001 I did some research at a monastery in the Darjeeling region. The monk whose job it was to take care of the library and who knew English better than the rest was my main contact person, and I would stop in to chat with him most days. One time the toner in the library copy machine ran out, and it was going to be at least a week before a new cartrigde would arrive. A lot of the other monks were really mad at him for not ordering an extra cartgidge ahead of time, because they couldn’t make copies of the text they were studying and it was throwing off their schedule. I remember one monk coming in and chastizing him and even smacking him in the head a few times. They were seriously very mad.

The more I study the actual history of Tibet, the more I realize that the long-term success or failure of an individual Buddhist sect was never about the profundity of their teachings, the efficacy of their practices, the purity of their lineage, or whatever. Basically, it’s never about anything Tibetans traditionally said it was about. Instead, a sect rose to a position of import based on the strength of the military forces they made alliances with. First the Sakya, then the Karmapas, then the Geluk. You form an alliance with some Mongols by flattering their leader with blessings, prophecies and poems, basically, then cross your fingers and hope that they can get the job done marginalizing all of your rivals. Sometimes the religious battle between two rival sects was determined by the military battle between the different groups of Mongols who had pledged to support them. At that point arguments about how to interpret the three turnings of the wheel, whether the higher sets of vows supersede the lower ones, about whether a text was composed on Indian soil or Tibetan–are merely academic, serving as cover, as excuses or justifications for what’s really going on.

Does all of this matter? You bet your life it does.

So where was my wallet? I knew I had had it the evening before when I went to a shop on Temple Road (Laxmi Electronics Botique, I believe) to add money to my phone. The most likely place to have lost it would have been while I was walking home in the dark. I did some serious fishing around in my bag in search of my flashlight (it’s actually a lighter that also happens to be a flashlight), which I never found, and figured that I probably jostled my wallet out then. At 9:30 in the morning I had no hope of finding my wallet wherever it was that I had dropped it, figuring that so many people would have covered that same ground, if it was to be found it would have been found already. Probably by a roadworker. So I would retrace my steps on the off chance that the wallet would return to me somehow. And if that didn’t work, I’d end up at the police station.

I went to Moonpeak Espresso, where I stopped the night before to chat with some friends (including the guy who makes a hundred dollars a month) after the electronics shop and before going home: it wasn’t there. I went to the electronics shop and asked. It was then that I realized that I didn’t have any money with me. I had 300 dollars in rupees back at home, but hadn’t thought to bring any of it with me. Stupid, stupid. I knew that I’d eventually have to get to an internet shop to go online and find phone numbers to cancel all of my cards. I figured I could come back and pay them later? There’s a shop on Jogiwara road where they know me–they would trust me, right?

I asked at the electronics shop: no, they didn’t find any wallet. I asked about the 63 rupees recharge they were supposed to have put on my phone the day before that didn’t seem to have gone through. It turns out they hadn’t done it. Did I want them to do it then, or get my 63 rupees back? Relieved, I took the money. Now I had approximately a dollar and twenty-six cents in my pocket. Fortunately you can do a lot with that in this town.

I went to the main square to try to talk to the police. They informed me that there was nothing they could do; I would have to go to the actual police station, which is about a mile away near the cantonment, to file a report. I pleaded with them, but to no avail. Evidently their job is strictly to stand around and do nothing all day.

I hopped in a Dharamsala-bound jeep that was waiting for one more passenger. The driver let me out on the road below the police station. I gave him the 5 rupees fare (about 10 cents) with the slightest tinge of concern, knowing that I didn’t have a whole lot money to work with. Lunchtime was approaching, and I still had much more to do.

Inside the police station the cop (I only saw one the whole time I was there) was sitting at a desk writing in an oversized ledger in Hindi. I told him I had lost my wallet and wanted to file a report, in case it turned up. He told me he’d help me in a moment. I sat and watched him as he worked: he was copying a report from one page in the ledger into another. Why, I wondered? Why wasn’t he using the computer that was sitting in the corner under a dust cover? And why, having written out this report once, was he writing it all over again? Was it too sloppy the first time? Was he preparing for an audit? I sat in wonderment and waited. Time crawled by. There was no rush in this man’s work.

Eventually he used a block of wood as a straight edge to draw a thick line under the entry he had written (or, rewritten) and was ready to deal with the next case, which was me. By this point I realized the futility of what I was trying to accomplish there, but decided to go through with it anyway because it would have been more awkward to say, “whoops–never mind” and just leave. He gave me a blank sheet of paper and a pen and told me to write a “small story” about what had happened. I started my task, and he started recopying another report. I finished in about two minutes, then spent the next five painstaking minutes watching him write. When he was satisfied with his rewriting, he drew another thick line under his entry and again turned to me. I showed him what I had written. He suggested I also add my address in the US and my father’s full name. Then he arranged a fresh piece of carbon paper and set to work rewriting my report in his ledger. He rewrote my report in English, with a bunch of Hindi (presumably a translation) before and after it. I asked him if he thought there was any chance my wallet might somehow come back to me. He didn’t sugarcoat things: he said no. His exact words were, “In this place honest people are very few.”

When he finished writing he, with a very proud accuracy, signed and stamped the carbon copy of my report, tore it out of the book and handed it to me. He suggested I make a photo copy for safe keeping. As I walked out I had zero confidence that spending the last half an hour in the police station would make the least bit of difference in finding my wallet. The copy of the report I held in my hand I felt was little more than a one-of-a-kind souvenir. I was certain the wallet was gone forever. My main concern now was to get my cards cancelled.

I went back to the road and waited for a car headed for McLeod Ganj. A few passed, but all were completely full. Eventually a teenage Indian boy came out and spoke to me. He asked if I wanted to go to McLeod Ganj. I said yes, was he headed that way? Yes, he said, on a scooter. A moment later his friend arrived on a scooter and he told me to hop on. I was confused by the whole thing, but he was about to take me where I needed to go, and the day was starting to get hot, so I jumped on. 5 minutes later he dropped me off in McLeod. I asked him where he was going. He said back to the cantonment. I then realized that the people who offered me the ride were not actually going to McLeod Ganj themselves, and were offering to take me there just to be nice. And I certainly appreciated it. I wished I knew some Hindi so I could thank them appropriately.

I went to an internet shop and started checking to see if any charges had been put on my American credit cards. None had. Then I called and got them all cancelled, which wasn’t too much of a problem. They would send new cards to my mom’s house, and if they got there in time my sister would bring them with her when she and my cousin come to Delhi to visit next week. I didn’t really need them anyway; they’re just in case of an emergency. Getting my State Bank of India ATM card cancelled was, however, a lot more of a problem. Being Monday, the local branch was closed. Of course. And their website had no phone numbers on it. And none of the contact numbers they gave me when I opened my account were currently working. After listening to a few different recordings I got when calling those dead numbers, one told the new number that replaced the old one. It took some fiddling with area codes, but I eventually got through to someone. He cancelled my card with no problem, but told me that I couldn’t get a new card except by going to the branch in Delhi where I first opened my account. This seemed ridiculous to me, but he assured me it was true. Fortunately I was headed to Delhi in a week and a half. I again thought it a good thing that I had those 300 dollars back at home.

I paid the 45 rupees I owed at the internet shop. I then used 10 of my remaining 13 rupees to buy a couple of samosas and went home. I was hungry, and hot, and tired.

* * *

Three days later on Thursday evening I was walking towards town to meet some friends for dinner at the Japanese restaurant (Thursday means tempura night) when I received a phone call from an unfamiliar number. It was a man who works in a travel agency. He had my wallet. It had been found and brought there by a baba (sort of like a Hindu priest). He had found my wallet on the road near his temple, which is exactly where I thought I had lost it, fishing for my flashlight in the dark. I suppose the baba was a friend of this guy’s, and not speaking English, took the wallet to him. I went to the shop and found the guy. He had all the contents of the wallet (but not the money or the wallet itself) in a plastic bag. He told me if I followed the baba (skinny, pink robes, long white beard, sandals) back to his temple I’d get the rest of it. The baba and I set off walking.

We didn’t talk in the five minutes or so to the temple, which didn’t feel at all awkward. This guy is a renunciant, and seemed comfortable with the silence. He led me inside and sat me down. He gave me the wallet, with all the money intact. We tried speaking a little bit, but he knew only a few words of English and I know only a little Hindi. I then tried saying a few things in Sanskrit, which he kind of seemed to understand, but not completely. (When I said I spoke “Tibetan,” he didn’t seem to understand. But when I said “Bhotiabhasha” I thought I saw a flash of recognition on his face.) It was painful, so I thanked him again and made a hasty exit, after leaving a generous offering at the altar beneath a crude image of Shiva.

I headed towards my dinner, past the giant bull standing outside the temple gate. I decided to have the croquettes and a salad instead of the tempura. It was an excellent meal.

In the end getting my wallet back didn’t really make much of a difference. It wasn’t all that much money, and the cards were all cancelled anyway. I suppose it will save me a trip to the DMV when I get home. But what’s awesome was the way something bad like losing my wallet actually became a very positive experience. And it was so because of the people I met along the way. I walk by babaji’s temple a lot. I’m sure I’ll see him again. Hopefully next time I’ll be able to say something meaningful to him. Because despite everything, our lives have had something to do with one another’s.