Really Big Buddhas

Sunday 13 January saw us doing some sightseeing. First stop was Wat Intrawihan quite close to where we were staying. The Buddha image there is 32 meters tall. We were there in the morning. Frankly I could spend all day in these places. I never saw it at sunset. I will one day. It's not an ancient monument but it was impressive all the same. My slide is covered in specks of dust and little fibers/hairs. I need to get some more compressed air to blow the dust off before I scan it and the others again.



These next two photos were taken on a subsequent visit many years later. On this occasion the Buddha was swathed in a saffron sash.



In the covered area at the Buddha's feet are more images, themselves larger than life, where votive offerings are made. I bought (I think for 10 baht) two incense sticks, two flowers (like unopened water lilies) and a square of gold leaf. You arrange the flowers, light the incense sticks and apply the gold leaf to the Buddha image and then offer prayers. The length of time it takes for the incense sticks to burn out is a good indicator as to how long to spend in doing this.



Our next stop was Wat Pho. I guess we took the Chao Phraya Express to the Tha Thien Pier. I can't exactly recall. To tell the truth I've been back there a few times since and that is the way to get there. My notes say nothing about any problems that we might have encountered but I am really surprised we got in unaccosted. When you have disembarked the Chao Phraya River taxi you walk up a short street from the Pier to the main road. On the left is Wat Pho and on the right Wat Phra Keow. It is really easy but just as you get to the top of the short street you are invariably stopped by a friendly local who tells you that Wat Pho is closed for an official ceremony just at present but will open again in a couple of hours. Luckily this guy can take you to somewhere to see gemstones at a factory/showroom and will take you there for free.

I have been back to Wat Pho on numerous occasions since this first one and on one of them I was whisked off in a Tuk Tuk to a gem factory/showroom. Very boring and a real waste of time. There was no way I would be buying any stones. The angle often worked is that if you can afford the time you shouod go because the Tuk Tuk driver will get a commission payment just for bringing you. I don't buy that as a good reason to agree to go either.
Anyway, don't get suckered in by the Tuk Tuk hucksters. Politely turn them down, cross over the road and walk to the left. You will soon find the entrance. The entrance fee was very cheap. 10 Baht, I think. It is free for Thais. It is a temple, after all and so they can come and go as they please for free. 10 Baht was 20p and therefore quite affordable. The main attraction at Wat Pho is the reclining Buddha. 10 Baht is frankly much too cheap to be able to see such a thing. Ten or twenty times as much would still be very reasonable. The reclining Buddha at Wat Pho is a place that I never tire of visiting. I have been back on numerous occasions since and each time its beauty and serenity surprises me.

It doesn't make a hard woman humble

The title of this post will make sense later. It doesn't make any sense now.

Alan, Marilia and I then went on some kind of walkabout. The notes say so. I can't remember whether there was any point to the wandering. There didn't have to be, just being in the street was an experience.

The notes also say that I went to the Burmese Embassy. I had less success there than I had had when I made enquiries in London before I set off. At least there I had the feeling that I was being understood. At the Burmese Embassy in Bangkok I was met with blank incomprehension.

That was it, then. No chance to visit Burma, at least not by organising it myself.

It seems that after that we must have made our way back to Banglamphu where we sat around chatting. I seem to remember having my first bowl of kuaytiau - noodle soup - and falling in love with it. What a fantastic way to eat and take on a substantial amount of fluid at the same time! My notes say "some washing" and this was an example of how Bangkok was back in the modern world. Just around the corner from the Clean & Calm was a place that took in washing.

So what? Well, this was no dhobi wallah place. This was a a place with a proper 20th century front loading washing machine. It was fantastic. I think they charged by the kilo.

The highlight of the daylight hours was the Golden Buddha and the highlight of the evening was visiting the Patpong Road. Trust me, I really didn't want to go. It was Alan who was most keen. I had read a book called "Borderlines" by Charles Nicholl in the year before setting off and that had related an episode regarding the Patpong Road. It is the red light district, full of girlie bars and strip clubs.

Alan, Marilia and I arrived by Tuk-Tuk - a truly amazing form of city transport, the Thai version of the auto-rickshaw and much better. As soon as we were off the Tuk-Tuk the hassle started. Within a second a tout was accosting us telling us to come in to a particular bar with the promise that there was "No cover charge! No cover charge!". We had come to see these bars so we let this guy take us in to the place he was promoting.

We sat at the bar and ordered three small beers. They weren't particularly expensive, only 20 Baht (about 40p at that time). As we sat at the bar a couple of naked girls were sort of dancing in a very bored way on a sort of stage which was elevated behind the bar. I had never seen less enthusiastic exotic dancers. I seem to recall going to couple of strip clubs in Paris on a trip there a few years before with a girl called Liz (not the same one as mentioned previously). Somehow or other that experience was completely different. The clubs were genuinely tiny bars where a series of girls stripped off with the only prop being a typical Parisian bar chair. We were in Paris and it looked like art, it wasn't particularly erotic. The participants did however seem more than half interested in what they were doing and got genuine applause from the surrounding crowd watching the performances in the dark.

This place had none of that ambiance. It was all rather sad and tired. There was loud music and along the dimly lit back wall I remember seeing a couple of older pot bellied men sitting with a naked girl on each side of them. Add to sad and tired the words sordid, sleazy and seedy.

We were all on a tight budget and we all merely sipped our beers. After a few minutes the bored dancing girls disappeared and they were replaced by a girl whose trick was to produce ping pong balls from her yoni - I use the Hindu term because there doesn't seem to be a word in the English language that ever works very well, the English words are usually either medically correct or extremely and offensively crude or sexist. Anyway the girl produced ping pong balls from her yoni and dropped them into a pint mug. Bravo! Incidentally I use the term "ping pong balls" because I am sure table tennis enthusiasts would not want their balls associated with the genitalia of Bangkok's exotic dancers. I think Finbarr Saunders or Julian Clary would be proud of that last sentence.

This went on for a few minutes. Look, let's get something straight. Apart from the strip club bars in Paris with Liz I had never been in any establishment populated by naked girls. I had, however, seen the film Emanuelle both in the UK and in Paris. I am sure the UK version was cut more savagely than the French version. I won't relate the story but it involves Sylvia Kristel's character flying to Bangkok where she has various erotic experiences. At one stage there is scene in a sleazy strip joint not unlike the one we were in and in the French (uncut) version one of the performers inserts a lighted cigarette into her yoni and there is a close up of the woman using the muscles of that organ to almost literally inhale and blow out the tobacco smoke (I cannot decide whether an image I have in my mind of her blowing smoke rings is a memory or my depraved imagination). The movie poster shown here comes from a website called Wrong side of the art. I want to credit the owner and don't want to rip anyone off so follow this link to see it in the location that I found it.

In all honesty it had been nearly 15 years since my Uncle Lourens a.k.a. Lout Henkes had taken me to see the movie in Paris and I had forgotten all about it being set in Bangkok. My visit to Bangkok and Thailand had nothing whatsoever to do with having seen that film. OK?

Having said that the next girl on after the ping pong ball artist exhibited similar extraordinary yonic control. This one gyrated around for a minute or so and then inserted a blowpipe you know where and fired paper darts out of the blowpipe with sufficient power to burst balloons!

By this time Alan, Marilia and I had had enough. We got up to leave and asked for the bill for our 3 beers. This was when things started to get a bit more edgy. We had ordered 3 beers at 20 Baht each but the bill was for 1,860 Baht. At the prevailing exchange rate that was nearly £37.00. We said we were not paying that much for 3 beers. We had been told there was "No cover charge" whatever that meant and we had been assured the beers were only 20 Baht each.

At this we were led to the part of the bar nearest the entrance where there was a sign which explained how the place worked. There was no "cover charge" and the beers were 20 Baht each but you were expected to pay 150 Baht for each performance you watched and, including the girls mooching around when we had been led in (straight past the sign at the entrance) by the tout, we had seen 4 "shows" and thus owed the bar 600 Baht each for the entertainment and 20 Baht each for the beer.

We protested that we had not been shown the sign on the way in and insisted we were not going to pay. While this was going on at least one English woman in her mid to late forties came over and said she and her husband were effectively being held prisoners because they couldn't or wouldn't pay their bill.

Things then got ugly. A small wiry and extremely brassy woman with an excruciatingly loud and awful voice was summoned and she began to harangue us. She was shouting "You must pay, you pay now!" over and over again. We were not going to pay and this girl aimed a kick at Marilia.

Big mistake! Marilia was no shrinking violet. She was hard as nails and was wearing trekking trainer boots. Marilia just kicked the woman straight back at which point I slammed 100 Baht on the bar and we exited as fast as we could.

Once outside we were safe. It was a lucky escape but we all agreed that we had seen quite enough and we piled onto a Tuk Tuk back to the Clean & Calm. That was sufficient excitement for one day. Looking back it was pretty good value as an experience costing about 70p each.

The reference in the title to this post is to a song from the musical "Chess" which I have never seen. There was a single in the charts performed by Murray Head and there was a line: "One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble".

Bangkok

The filofax notes say that I was up early. I'm not sure why, perhaps because I went to be early. My body clock might have been slightly out of sync with the clocks in Thailand. My calendar was different too. It was 1991 AD in Europe but 2534 BE in Thailand. The Buddhist Era began 543 years before the Christian Era. Being in the 26th Century just added to to the feeling of having traveled forwards in time.

The Clean & Calm Guest House was, as advertised on its card, 30m from the Chao Phraya Express pier at Wat Samphraya. This was a major selling point for me. It was so convenient. The first task for me was to get to the General Post Office. This was (and could still be) on the Charoen Krung Road quite a distance from Banglamphu but easily accessible on the Chao Phraya Express. I needed to get there because I was desperate for news from home, a letter from Liz perhaps and I think I had arranged for my Lonely Planet travel survival kit to be posted from home so I could pick it up in Bangkok rather than cart it around through Turkey and the Indian sub-continent or South Asia.

I am not sure whether the ticket along side this text is a ticket from that day but it certainly is a ticket from the Chao Phraya Express. It is difficult to explain the Chao Phraya Express but you stand on the pier which is a sort of floating platform and after a few minutes you notice a boat heading towards the pier very fast. The Chao Phraya is a big river, it seemed to me to be significantly wider than the Thames, and it has a huge amount of traffic on it. The Express comes up to the pier, its engine roaring and one of the crew signals to the pilot with a whistle so that it goes into reverse and the back end swings round to the pier and a rope is briefly thrown onto the pier to "secure" it while passengers quickly jump off and then jump on. Within seconds the whistle is blowing and the boat is roaring off. You make your way to a seat and then a conductress walks up and down with a roll of tickets and a chrome tube shaped coin holder with a hinged lid which the conductress opens and closes rhythmically to encourage new passengers to own up and pay their fares.

I think I did pick up some mail and my book but the notes seem to say that Alan and Marilia had some problem or other.

The notes then say "pm to Golden Buddha + walkabout". The Golden Buddha is at Wat Traimit. It is at the junction of the Charoen Krung Road and Yaowarat Road and it makes sense that we would have visited it after the GPO on the Charoen Krung Road.



This ranks way up there in a category of things that might be called (like the BBC Radio 4 programme) "Things we forgot to remember".

The account in the leaflet on the left is also summarised in the Lonely Planet Guide. It says that the original golden Buddha image may have been covered in stucco to protect it from marauding hordes either during the late Sukothai period (13th and 14th Century) or later in the Ayuthaya period (14th and 15th Century) when the city was under siege by the Burmese. The leaflet says that the temple that housed it was deserted and it was not until 1931 that the image was moved to its present site and then not until 1955 when it was discovered that it was made of pure gold. The Lonely Planet guide book says that it fell from a crane while it was being moved.

How can it be forgotten that something has an image of Buddha more than 3 meters high and made of 5,000 kg of pure gold inside it? If it can be forgotten in relation to such a large piece of gold then it must be possible that there are smaller and possibly larger pieces out there. Thailand is (as will become apparent) very densely populated with images of Buddha.

Future Shock

So far on my trip things had been pretty much as expected. I thought I knew about Turkey, I had been there before, at least. As I had traveled east things had become less sophisticated, simpler and more real. India was a shock to the system. There is nothing that can prepare one for the experience of India. To a certain extent coming there after a decent length of time in Eastern Turkey did soften the landing. It was so steeped in ancient history with references to the more recent history of the UK that it was a little like gradually going back in time. Nepal was a similar if more serene experience. It was certainly somehow the simplest of existences too.

The culture shock on arrival in Bangkok was a future shock. It was like being catapulted from the distant past right into the future without pausing at the present day. At the same time the modernity of it all was juxtaposed with ancient religious edifices and fringed with frenetic independent private enterprise.

Let's just pause to credit the previous four months with having been positively fantastic. This leg of the journey was going to be even better. I knew it. I could tell the minute I set foot in the country.

The Clean & Calm Guest House had the advantage of being within a very short distance of the Khao San Road, the main Freak Centre and backpacker hub. It was however far enough away from there too. The Khao San Road was definitely a full on experience with every available inch devoted to the provision of some service or other to the traveler. Bus tickets to anywhere, visas to anywhere, excursions everywhere. Every place was not only an agency but also a restaurant and a hotel. The pavements were end to end with stalls selling everything from fake Levis to bootleg cassettes. Yes, cassettes. This was in the early days of CDs and that technology had not quite taken off in Thailand.

No note is made of any immediate visit to the Khao San Road but I am assuming that we must have looked in on the scene. All my notes say is "Riverside Rest". I recall vaguely eating a meal in a restaurant on the river's bank. I think that the journey from Kathmandu must have been a few hours in duration and there would have been a time difference too so that by the time we had arrived, dumped our packs and eaten it was quite late, local time. We went back to the Guest House and crashed.

Kathmandu to Bangkok

One of the things that I must have done prior to visiting Boudhanath the day before was pick up my passport from the Travel Agent in Thamel. It just occurred to me that I have the name of the travel agent. I think he was Navraj Sharma Poydeyal and was based out of the Lhasa Restaurant, 15/84 Thamel, Kathmandu. At least I think that was him. You'll note the visa signed by Prateep Yusuksataporn, an attaché at the Royal Thai Embassy in Kathmandu, was issued on 9 January 1991 and used the following day.



The passport stamps have to be right. I did depart Nepal on 10 January 1991 and the same day arrived in Thailand the same day and was given a three month visa. I do not understand why the ticket below bears the date 12 January 1991. All I can assume is that I must have changed the date or the flight or it must have been changed for me.



I had to check in at 7.00am. It was foggy. It was, as stated earlier, foggy every morning until after 10.00am. My flight was due to leave at 9.00am. The departure was delayed by the totally unforeseen circumstance of fog. Who could have predicted it?

Whilst whiling away the waiting time before the flight was called I got talking to a couple called Allan from Melbourne, Australia and Marilia from Sao Paulo, Brasil. We had something in common. Both of them had been living and working in North London. Marilia was employed behind the bar at the Town & Country Club in Kentish Town. It is highly possible that Marilia had served me with beer in a plastic glass on one or more of the many occasions I had been there to see a band. They had set off after me but they too had been in India. Allan said they had nearly not been allowed in because Marilia had got so pissed on the complimentary Air France vin rouge. On arrival she had kissed the tarmac like the Pope! They were very good company. The notes I made say that I also met a Japanese woman. I haven't made a note of her name, she must have made an impression at the time but now ... nothing.



I don't know who had a card for the Clean & Calm Guest House but it was a good recommendation. The notes are sparse. I actually wrote "Flight" and then "Arrive" then "200B taxi C & C G H" and on the next line "Riverside Restaurant". I am sure we arrived after dark and therefore arrived without a full appreciation of where we had arrived. I do remember that as we exited the airport we walked through a Duty Free shopping areas selling what seemed to be fantastic stuff at amazingly low prices. On close examination the prices were in US dollars so they were not that great. The goods were very western too.

On arrival at the Guesthouse we got rooms. I haven't found a note of how much the room was. I think it was about £1.00 per night which when I arrived was 50B. One thing is for sure my room didn't have a view of the Chao Phraya river. It had no windows at all because it was on the ground floor and the door was straight into the sort of dining/sitting area. It smelled very clean. It smelled strongly of chemical insecticides.

Boudhanath or Bodnath

For the last few weeks this posting has been incorrectly labeled. I had it down as Swayambhunath Stupa. In fact it is Boudhanath. The reason I got confused is that although my slides say Boudhanath on them, the cover picture of my Lonely Planet Guide is identical to the second picture shown below but inside the cover it says "Front cover: Swayambhunath Stupa, Sonia Berto". Frankly, I think this is wrong. For a guidebook it is also quite a mistake to make. I have also googled the photographer's name, "Sonia Berto" and nothing comes up at all. I think this is very odd too. I mean, perhaps there never was a Sonia Berto. What is going on?

There may very well have been a Stupa on this site since the 6th or 7th Century and what is there now has been there since the 14th Century. That's what the book says. The book was published in October 1990. It is a First Edition. It was published after I had set off. It could hardly have been more up to the minute. How could they get it so wrong? Perhaps one day the book I have will be worth a fortune as one of the last examples of the Lonely Planet Travel Survival Kit First Edition - the one with the famous mistake regarding the cover photograph.






This has been causing me some worry because my notes are not very good (as usual). They might not be very good but so far they haven't been completely wrong. The entry is clear. It says "all am posting stuff home" then there is a gap and it says "Boudnath pm. prayer wheel".

Although Boudhanath is not very far away from Pashupatinath it would appear that I did not try to see both places in one day. I went back to the Nama Buddha Guest House and headed out to Boudhanath on Wednesday 9 January 1991 after a good night's sleep and a morning at the Post Office.



The pictures here are in the wrong order. I was only carrying one camera and had not finished the black and white film in the camera so the slides can't have been taken until I had finished the black and white. I have started here, however, with the above slide of the entrance. You can see the Stupa through the portal/gateway. It is definitely Boudhanath. The picture should be sufficient proof that it is not Swayambhunath. A picture from just inside the entrance is shown below.



The image below is on the cover on my guide book and must be taken by every visitor to Boudhanath. It is impossible not to try to take the picture. I certainly did not resist the temptation and think I did a pretty good job.



Honestly, this has really bugged me over the years. I had been quite uncertain as to whether I had actually visited Boudhanath. I have had a nagging feeling that I might have visited somewhere else and fooled myself into believing I had been to Boudhanath. I mean how uncool to believe and say you have been somewhere and show someone the photos only to be told it is somewhere else and not the place you thought. It maybe apocryphal but I have heard a story of people who booked a beach holiday in Israel but their tour operator (having reserved the right to do so) changed their destination to Cyprus. They spent two weeks on Cyprus believing they were in Eilat!

We are back into the last few black and white photos. These last few come from a film that purported to be Ilford FP4. The box said "Refeel in India". This can only mean that the cannister was made up from stock of a much greater length wound onto the spool in India. "Refeel" is "Refill". Wobble your head as you say "Refeel". You see?



The film is quite contrasty but it looks like something happened when I developed the film after I got home (it doesn't spoil any narrative to give it away that I did get home, does it?). There are black marks across all the photos which almost, but not completely, spoils them.

The mounted elephant sculptures in this one confirmed me that I was not mad and that I did visit Boudhanath. I know because I had been googling Swayambhunath and attempting to identify the location of my pictures and slides. That wasn't very helpful but when I googled Boudhanath there were my mounted elephants. That confirmed it. Follow this link for a better picture by someone else. The problem now is that if you do a google search of images using the search term Boudhanath my picture also appears and thus adds to the body of evidence that this is Boudhanath.



The Boudhanath or Bodnath Stupa (says my Lonely Planet Guide) is the largest Stupa in Nepal and one of the largest in the world. It is, again according to the guide book, the religious centre for Nepal's considerable population of Tibetans. Hey, I'm not getting involved in the Tibet question. There are many Tibetans in Kathmandu who are refugees from troubles in 1959 (before I was born).





I went in the afternoon when things were supposed to be less crowded with tourists but there were still quite a few. Are the people climbing the steps above the same people who had been bathing in the Bagmati River in Pashupatinath the day before? There were tourists but they were more local. These monks seem to be visiting. Perhaps they were coming to pray before undertaking a journey into the Himalaya. The guide books say that people still did that.



I have read some of the teachings of Buddha and I can confirm that what I have read says nothing about ice lollies. There is no reason why any person let alone a Monk should not enjoy an ice lolly while taking in the view from a clockwise perambulation of the Stupa. The trick is to understand that ice lollies may be enjoyed and enjoyed best if they are not hankered after whether before or after one should be fortunate to find oneself enjoying one. Eating an ice lolly is pleasurable (although the pleasurable sensation will decay) but desiring an ice lolly or another ice lolly will result in suffering.



They might have been looking at this from their elevated position.



This was my last day in Nepal. It wasn't the longest visit given that I had spent six weeks in Turkey and more than two months in India. I had been in Nepal just under three weeks and they had been, looking back, quite varied and eventful. I really liked Nepal. I had missed the chaotic nature of India but Nepal was its own experience and one that I would recommend.

Pashupatinath

Tuesday 9 January 1991. The entry is "Pashupatinath". This is a little distance from Thamel, about 3 miles. I don't know where I hired the Rickshaw but that was how I got there. Mind you I didn't ride as a passenger all the time. It was quite a hilly journey and the driver and I had to get off and push a couple of times. The Rickshaw is much heavier than you might expect. Although the driver is smiling he really wants me to get behind the Rickshaw and push (whilst paying for the privilege!).



I don't know for sure but it could be that this temple is the Jayabageshwori Temple. It might not be but I think it is.



This close up might give someone who knows a clue and they could confirm whether I am right or wrong. I still think I am correct, but what is this? It looks to me like a peacock on a stone pillar. I can't for the life of me find another image on the internet to identify it. It has to be somewhere near Pahupatinath if only because of where the photograph appears on the negative strip.



You see, Pashupatinath is a sacred site. Furthermore the Bagmati river is a tributary to the Ganges and therefore this is a popular place to be cremated. Cremations are going on all the time. It is the way it is. It is a matter of fact and a fact of life.

"It is the ultimate wish of a Hindu to die and be cremated along a riverbank; the holier the river the better for the departed soul. Many Hindu holy shrines are built along famous riverbanks. Banaras, situated along the holy river Ganges, is the holiest of them all, considered so holy that every Hindu wishes to be anointed by the Ganges river's water at his death's door. Indeed, the desire to die on the bank of the Ganges river is so irrepressible that even today there are pious Hindus in India who make provisions to move to Baneras at an old age for the sole purpose of waiting to die on the bank.". So it says in an article by Mr Uday Lama entitled "Funeral Rites of the Hindus and the Buddhists" at Webhealing.com. I do recommend you visit the site.

I like the photograph below. I think it evokes both the spiritual and somehow at the same time the commonplace aspects of the process. Here the corpse has gone and I am assuming that the man having his head shaved is the deceased's eldest son. It is the eldest son who is responsible for observing the last rites. I read somewhere that the head shaving is done because he is held to be a highly "polluted" state for the 11 days mourning period after the cremation. This mourning period may in fact be longer because in this interesting article by Kalyan on Welcome to New Nepal the mourning period could be 13 days.

I cannot say exactly how soon after the cremation this may be taking place. References I have seen say "soon after" the cremation. I expect this has to be the case because there are a great number of cremations every day and it doesn't seem likely that you could have the use of the platform for the whole 11 to 13 day period. The young man sitting on the platform is wearing and playing with his Brahmin string (at least that is what I suppose).



I found this reference to Hindu rituals associated with death on the web at a website called Indian Mirror. There (for balance) you can also read similar short paragraphs concerning the rituals of all the world's major religions. I can't say whether the information is correct but it seems consistent with what I saw.

"When a person dies, a lamp is lit and placed near the dead body. The body is placed in the north-south direction with the head towards the north. The eyes are closed and the feet are tied together. The eldest son is supposed to do the last rites. The body is bathed and is covered with new clothes. Then the members of the family apply oil on the forehead of the deceased. Then the body is decorated with flower garlands and is taken to the cremation ground. Usually the sons and other male members carry the dead. Women are not allowed to go to the ground. They bid farewell to the deceased at the home itself.

At the cremation ground, the son applies ghee at seven important places in the body and also places coins on the forehead. Grains of rice and til are put into the mouth of the body. Wooden logs are placed over the body and ghee is sprinkled all over. The son goes round the body seven times with a pot of water and at last the pot is broken near the feet of the dead. Then as the priest chants the mantra, the son takes the Agni or fire and places it on the heart of the body.

Then on the 3rd or 5th day day after cremation, the relatives visit the crematorium and pour milk over the place , so as to pacify the dead soul. Then a simple lunch is arranged for the members."



The photograph above and the one below rank among my favourite photographs. The size of the Buddha Image is not easy to gauge from the first photograph but the little children (with their cheeky smiles) put it into perspective. The Lonely Planet Guide refers to it thus: "Just outside the [Bachhareshwari] temple entrance right at the end of the western embankment, is a half buried, but quite beautiful, 7th Century Standing Buddha image." Try as I might I cannot find much more information about it anywhere. The Rough Guide to Nepal (on Google books) says "A small eleventh-century (some say fifth-century)Buddha statue, looking rather out of place in this Hindu Lourdes, sticks out of the embankment in front of the next to last building."

The thing that amazes me is that the statue is half buried. There is a good portion of it under the ground. Shouldn't someone excavate it and preserve it or is it doomed to disappear from sight gradually?



Below is a Linga or Lingam in a brick battlement also believed to date from the fifth-century. This brings me on to what I have learned about Pashupatinath's origins. It is one of the most important sites on the Indian Subcontinent for Hindus and particularly for devotees of Shiva. Shiva is also called the Destroyer and in another incarnation is Pashupati, Lord of the Animals.

If anyone does ever read this I would refer you back to my posting about Pushkar in Rajasthan. The origin of the lakes there and the appearance of Vishnu in the form of a deer (was it?) have similarities to the origins of this place.

Again in order to allow oneself to accept what is said as if it were a fact you must have complete faith. This history comes from the www.nepal-kathmandu.com website:

"One of the legend about Lord Shiva is that once Shiva took the form of an antelope being weary of throngs of worshipping demigods and wandered in the Mrigasthali Forest on the Bagmati river's east bank. The Gods were looking for him and finally found him as an antelope and they grabbed him by horn and forced him to come back to his divine form. The broken horn was worshipped as a linga, and it was buried and lost. Centuries later an astonished farmer found him cows showering the milk on the earth. Digging deep in the site, the farmer is believed to uncover the divine linga of Pashupati."

Another version in slightly better English goes as follows:

"According to a legend recorded in local texts, especially the Nepalamahatmya and the Himavatkhanda, the Hindu god Shiva once fled from the other gods in Varanasi to Mrigasthali, the forest on the opposite bank of the Bagmati River from the temple. There, in the form of a gazelle, he slept with his consort Parvati. When the gods discovered him there and tried to bring him back to Varanasi, he leapt across the river to the opposite bank, where one of his horns broke into four pieces. After this, Shiva became manifest as Pashupati (Lord of Animals) in a four-face (chaturmukha) linga."



Let's be clear about this. The linga mentioned above is not this particular linga, I don't think. This one is supposed to be fifth-century and the Pashupatinath Temple now there is said to date from about that time too. However it seems that the first temple on the site could have been 1000 to 1400 years before that.



To be honest, although my photographs are probably unlikely to withstand critical appraisal by a proper photographer, I do like this little sequence. It has something to do with the texture of the photographs and the fact that I felt less constrained to ration use of the film. This allowed pictures of people like this lady washing a metal vessel, perhaps an urn. People in Nepal did not seem to mind having their photographs taken and they didn't throw themselves in front of the camera the way they tended to in India.



Above a view from further downstream. Below ... I am not sure. It is a stone sculpture of a Goddess set flat on the ground and seems to be deliberately filled with of water (there are pipes). It could be Parvati, Shiva's consort. There is a temple, the Guheshwari (several other spellings are also used) Temple which is dedicated to Kali too so it might be Kali.

Once more things get a little difficult. The Rough Guide has it in a nutshell when it says: "The legend behind this temple is one of the all time masterpieces of Hindu surrealism"



Says Spiritual Guides: "When Lord Siva was carrying away the body of Parvati after she burned herself to death, her yoni, the female sexual symbol, which is the female counterpart of a linga, fell here. It has a kalash in a pit that has liquid in it (RG). The temple name comes from guhya (vagina) and ishwari (goddess)." The word "kalash" means vessel and the Rough Guide says the liquid is "odiferous" which is to say it emits an odour.

We'll come to exactly what lingas or lingams may represent a little later.



Above, a landscape view upstream. I think I was walking along the western bank of the Bagmati river in order cross a bridge to the other side. This is because it is not possible to enter the Pashupatinath Temple unless you are a Hindu. Apparently that means unless you are obviously Nepali or from the Indian subcontinent/South Asia you cannot go in. This excludes Tibetans too, it's not just Europeans that are excluded. This picture could have been taken from the bridge.

Although you may not go into the Temple you can see into it from across the river on the eastern bank.



On the eastern bank I met this man and his daughters. He was very friendly indeed and this picture is another good one. If anyone knows who this chap is please let me know.



I was almost hijacked by this very hospitable man who insisted that I meet his wife, pictured here stringing blossom onto a garland. I am not sure what these people were doing. They may have been staying in the area because they had an aged relative in the "hospice" across the river.



This seems to be a sort of graveyard. Not everyone is cremated. Not everyone is a Hindu.

A little earlier I quoted the Rough Guide when it referred to the place as a "Hindu Lourdes". This comparison is wrong, I think. I think people come to Pashupatinath when they are close to death because a little earlier the Rough Guide explains that to die here and be cremated here is to be released from the cycle of rebirths. Perhaps people do come to bathe in the river to purify themselves too and perhaps seek cures for ailments but I don't think that is the main point.



The small statue of Garuda is situated outside the Ram Janaki Mandir. Mandir means Temple and perhaps I should have been using it throughout all of this, never mind. The temple is built at the location of the birth Sita (another name for Janaki). Sita was Ram's wife. Please refer to earlier postings concerning the troubles there were in India while I was there about a Mosque erected on the site of a temple erected on the site of Ram's own birth. Basically if they say that is where Sita was born then who am I to doubt it. All I can say is that it is a jolly good thing that no-one of another faith has decided to build a religious structure on top of the site. I do not seem to have been particularly impressed with the temple because I didn't take a picture.



On the other hand this might be a bell at the Ram Janaki Mandir...



... and this is very probably cow dung patted into cakes being dried out against a wall to be used as fuel. I am not sure the texture is quite captured in the photograph.



So from the eastern side you can observe what is going on around the Pashupatinath Mandir complex. On that side someone being cremated with the male relatives in attendance. At some point the ashes will be collected into a container that must not be placed on the ground and during the mourning period the ashes will be tipped into the river.



On this side are some women doing their laundry in the same water.



These monkeys are on the way up to the Gorakhnath Mandir. That is at the top of the hill on the edge of the forest where Shiva spent time as a stag. The point is the view to the other side into the Pashupatinath Temple.



More monkeys, monkeying around. They could be Hanuman's helpers. They could just be monkeys.



This is just a long shot using the telephoto lens.



One of the comments to this posting referred to quantity as opposed to quality. To be fair to myself the comment was written before there was any text inserted between the photographs. I do however have to accept that I am not exactly sure what the point of this shot is. If you click on it and enlarge it I suppose there may some interesting detail.



There are a few other versions of the photograph below out there, better ones too taken by better photographers. Never mind, I enjoyed trying to take the picture. I hadn't seen any of the others taken before.



What we have here is a line of votive shrines each containing a lingam or linga. A lingam is a representation of Shiva's sex organ. Pashpatinath Mandir, as mentioned before, contains a lingam of Pashupati which is three and a half feet high and has four faces sculpted on it.

So what is a linga or lingam. This explains the legend. Legend of Shiva Linga.:

"Shiva Linga is a wide spread Indian Phallic figure. It consists of a feminine base ‘Yoni’ or ‘vagina’ and a rising masculine portion ‘the Phallus’ or ‘penis.’ The Linga artifacts, dating from the first century BC to the third century AD, are shaped like realistic ‘Phalli’. Thereafter the shape becomes progressively more abstract. By medieval times, its observable portion, rising from the Yoni, forms a round block with domed apex.

Shiva, the lord of erect Phallus (urdhvalinga), is traced to the ithyphallic figure of Indus Valley civilization or to the phallic images found more generally in prehistoric India. The epics and Puranas tell how a great fire appeared from the cosmic waters, and from this flame Linga Shiva emerged to claim supremacy and worship over Brahma and Vishnu, when he was castrated because he seduced sages’ wives in the pine forests of Himalayas. He castrated himself because no one could castrate the Supreme Lord. Thus fallen phallus of the Supreme Lord destroyed all the worlds until it reached the Yoni of Uma/Parvati and cooled down. All procreation of worlds started after the worship of Yoni-Linga was restored and all Gods, including Vishnu and Brahma accepted supremacy of Lord Shiva."

So that's explained that. Does that make everything clear? I read this at lotussculpture.com:

"Shiva saw not sense in the transitory pleasures of life, so he rejected samsara, smeared his body with ash, closed his eyes and performed austerities.

Shiva's tapas generated so much heat that his body transformed into a pillar of fire - a blazing lingam that threatened to destroy the whole world. The gods did not know how to control Shiva's fire.

Suddenly there appeared a yoni - the divine vessel of the mother-goddess. It caught the fiery lingam and contained its heat, thus saving the cosmos from untimely destruction."

That probably hasn't made it any clearer, has it? Tapas is the performing of austerities, by the way.



Above, what I presume to be a party of pilgrims exiting the temple and making their way down to the bathing ghats.



The water at this time was not particularly deep nor very strong in its flow. The monkeys from the nearby forest which Shiva found to be an excellent place for a holiday when he was a stag, seemed to have had no difficulty picking their way across. Mind you, this is a very poor photograph.



Bathing in the holy waters of the Bagmati river is what they come for. adventureitbtravel says:

"Legend also mentions that the Pandavas after the great Mahabharat battle were told that only by sighting Shiva would they be absolved of their sins and it was at this very spot that they saw the Lord. Hence, this most sacred abode of Shiva, who is the God of the gods – Mahadeva – merits a visit by all Hindus, at least once in a lifetime, to be truly blessed and cleansed. It is belived that pilgrimage to the four dhams like Dwarika, Kedar, Rameshwor, and Jaganath of India become meaningful only after a final darshan of Pashupati and by a taking a holy dip in the Bagmati River and conducting a proper puja and circling the 525 Shiva Lingas in the temple premise will free a person from the cycle of births and rebirths."



Below are a few long distance shots of the Pashupatinath Mandir.

"It is a square, two-tiered pagoda temple built on a single-tier plinth, and it stands 23.6 meters above the ground. Richly ornamented gilt and silver-plated doors are on all sides.

On both sides of each door are niches of various sizes containing gold-painted images of guardian deities. Inside the temple itself is a narrow ambulatory around the sanctum. The sanctum contains a one-meter high linga with four faces (chaturmukha) representing Pashupati, as well as images of Vishnu, Surya, Devi and Ganesh."



At least that is what they say at sacred destinations The doors do look quite good even from a distance. It is a shame that you can't go in unless you are a Hindu.







You know, it is hard to say whether some of the people preparing to take a dip here are elderly or ill but some of them certainly are very thin.



This photo of a roof strut may have been taken on my return to the western bank. I think it is part of the Bachhareshwari Mandir dedicated to Parvati. It's all very Tantric. The little Buddha stands just outside.



This is as close as I could get to entering the temple. A huge figure of Nandi, Shiva's bull, is just inside the door. A symbol of fertility and I don't need to elaborate, do I? OK, just in case you can't see from a distance, here's a close up.



On the way back "home" I took a snap of a some men playing what seemed to be a popular board game. I don't know how the game was played. I think there were dice involved.