BOUDHANATH – LIFE AT THE ROUNDABOUT
What is it about Kathmandu? I think to myself at times, especially if I am struggling along a footpath which looks more like an obstacle course than a sidewalk. The roads are a dusty shemozzle, getting even simple tasks done can be frustratingly time-consuming, and the sky is often thick with choking brown smog.
Ah, but there is something about this mystical kingdom which even the worst afflictions of modern society fail to overwhelm.
Picture the highest, most hazardous mountain chain in the world, which cuts the Indian sub-continent off from China. Imagine then, a green valley which rolls gradually from the highest passes down to the planes of the sacred Ganges; one of the safest routes between the world’s two most populated countries. It’s high enough to avoid the crippling heat of the Indian summer, but low enough to avoid the winter frost. With such geography, Kathmandu has been a centre for trade, culture, and religion since time immemorial.
The city boasts thousands of temples, palaces, and holy sites which were built when the human psyche was very different to today, when people had no doubt that magic lurks around every corner. Those links to the past have been nurtured with offerings of flowers, food or incense in an unbroken lineage stretching back over millennia. It feels as though these beautiful places have been charged with a tangible spiritual presence, which evokes a sense of the supernatural. Some of them are tiny; a nook in the wall with a relief carving, or rock statue twisted into the serpentine roots of a banyan tree. Others take the form of multi-storey pagodas, intricately carved by people who lived 20 generations ago.
Where I stay, my local spiritual powerhouse is the Great Stupa of Boudhanath. This earthly representation of the Buddha’s enlightened mind has a base the size of two football fields, an enormous whitewashed dome, and a gilded, square-based tower which rises 100 feet into the sky. The iconic eyes of Buddha, which hold their transcendental gaze in each of the four directions, have become a symbol for Nepal itself.
Encircling the structure is a wide flagstone pedestrian zone, contained by a ring of temples, shops and restaurants. Each morning and evening, Buddhists both local and from around the world, stream down to The Stupa to perform the devotional act of khora (walking around a holy site.)
I love to join the throng of practitioners, circling in laps, with their rosary in hand, humming Sanskrit mantras. The air is thick with the scent of burned offerings, and devotional music spilling from the doors of the temples and shops adds to the overwhelming sense of tranquillity. Street vendors hawk all kinds of wares, from wheatgrass juice to feed for a huge flock of wild pigeons.
When I join that river of pilgrims milling around the monument, it feels like I am entering a special mind-stream as well. As though spun by the whirlpool of the stupa’s vortex, the ring of worshipers moves together in one great stream. Some walk fast, rolling the mantras off their tongues at breakneck speed, while others progress by prostrating their bodies on the ground all the way around, but somehow everybody weaves around one another harmoniously. There are young people chatting together while taking selfies, and elderly Tibetan women in gaily coloured tunics with long, black plaits and faces lined with a spider’s web of wrinkles.
With the daily ritual done, we sit around soaking up the atmosphere with a cup of chai or coffee. Maybe I do know what it is about Kathmandu; it’s just purely magical.
Kathmandu Durbar Square
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