My Religious Experience on the Way to Tibet

In my first year in China I realized one of my childhood dreams; I traveled to Tibet. I’m not entirely sure where this dream came from; it might have been from Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks, or W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. But the idea of traveling to the other side of the world and up the Himalayas to catch a little Oriental wisdom and a chance at enlightenment had enthralled me ever since I was about 16 or so.

My friend Sasquatch and I left Beijing one summer day on a train for Xining, the capital of Qinghai province – a part of China so beautiful the PLA tests it’s nuclear weapons on it. On a mutual dare, Sasquatch and I decided to take the 3-day train ride by ‘hard seat’, the lowest class of ticket available. Back then hard seat was double rows of metal and wooden benches facing each other separated by a small table in the middle. At any one time there might have been up to 150 in a car. Mind you, except for two large young Americans, these were mostly peasants and maybe some university students.

Accommodations were fetid; thankfully Sasquatch and I stayed fairly well lit on a steady stream of baijiu, warm beer and Tang on top of a diet of Riz Crackers and instant noodles. These were things that were all readily available at almost any train station in 1993. To this day, I swear nothing will keep you healthier if you happen to find yourself on a Petri dish / cesspool rolling through the desert. Baijiu kills the germs and the Vitamin C in Tang gives a nice boost to your immune system – we created a cocktail mixing the two, it’s called a Wrench.

Sixty or seventy hours later, we arrived in Xining thoroughly done in by exhaustion. My nerves were frayed, I was filthy, and my digestive system wanted to separate from me and fly back to America. When we hit our hotel room Sasquatch promptly collapsed. I was too excited and after a long hot shower I was almost a new man. It was time to see what Xining had to offer, after all we would only be there one night because we had to catch a train to Golmud the next day before jumping on a two-day bus ride to Lhasa.

The first order of business was food. There was a kebab stand not far from the front gate of the hotel and I descend on it like a jackal after the carcass of a Cape buffalo. This is where my religious experience happened.

Now you might think that after three days without sleep and plenty of bad food and booze I was ready for a hallucination of Christ himself selling kebabs and demanding penance for my misspent youth. Not quite, it wasn’t that kind of religious experience. Although I once had something like that a Grateful Dead concert in Vermont.

This was another kind of religious experience, not one in which I experienced God, but rather where I experienced religion in a new way. I bought a beer and ordered a fistful of spicy kebabs; after I satiated myself greedily for a few minutes I struck up a conversation with my neighbor at the kebab stand. He was also enjoying a beer and a large quantity of kebabs; he looked like a fellow backpacker. Sure enough he was, my new friend was Japanese and he was also on his way to Tibet; he was also very excited about it because he was a monk.

This struck me as odd, I don’t know many sects of Buddhism in which it’s OK for the monks to swill beer and eat meat. It seems to me that’s how one ends up being reincarnated at as dung beetle or something else equally undesirable. So I asked him, “What gives with the beer and meat? After all, you’re a Buddhist monk.” He rather serenely replied, “That’s true! But I am a bad monk.”

OK, this is not the same thing as the Madonna revealing herself to me and granting the power to lay hands on the sick, nor is it Buddha's Four Noble Truths. But it was a bit of an epiphany. You see, I grew up Catholic, and the whole time I went to Catholic school I never heard a priest, monk, nun or bishop declare themselves a bad one. Maybe that would have undermined their authority, who knows? They all admitted they were sinners, but that goes with the territory. For me, it was refreshing to meet a self-deprecating monk who admitted he was weak, but still trying.

The self-proclaimed ‘bad monk’ and his example helped me realize something. On the road to enlightenment or the path to Heaven, or whatever, it’s more about the journey then the destination. We all have our failings, but it’s the commitment to being better and picking ourselves up after we fall that defines who we are and where we are going.

Looking back on that trip to Tibet, I guess I was looking for something, and it seems kind of wonderful where I found it.