overwhelming loss

Three days drive east of Shigatse, across wind-scorched plains and over dizzyingly high passes, lies the ancient kingdom of Guge. This kingdom, though now best known as a series remote and ruined monasteries, was instrumental in the revival of Buddhism in Tibet. It was a king of Guge who invited Dipamkara Atisha and hosted him during the first years of Atisha’s history-making stay in Tibetan territory. It was here that Rinchen Zangpo labored so fruitfully to render the Sanskrit canon into Tibetan.

In most of the places we visited in central Tibet, the signs of damage to monasteries are limited to shells of buildings, with the rubble mostly cleared away. The old statues made of bronze and other metals that can be made into bullets and weapons were hauled off to China long ago, and the shards of statues that had been made of brittle clay were long swept away.

At Tholing, an ancient seat of the Guge kings, the entire central room of the main chapel is conceived as a walk-in three-dimensional Vajradhātu mandala, with a huge seat for Vairocana Buddha at the center and other larger than life sized thrones at each of the four gates of the mandala. Normally as we walk through temples in Tibet, members of our group call each other over to share a quiet discussion of some detail they have noticed. Here the group falls utterly silent as most of us scatter on our own to bear witness to the incomprehensible clash between the beauty of what once was and the ugliness of what was then done to it.

None of the figures that had once occupied the walk-in mandala escaped the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution. The thrones stand empty. The temples roof had been removed, letting the rain in to do the remaining work of wiping the paintings off the walls. The only other hints of what was once here are random bits of exquisitely modeled limbs and torsos of the statues of the surrounding deities on the outer walls. A few images, too high to be attacked completely, have had their heads bashed in.

For the first time on this trip, I am reduced to tears. Later I see that I am not alone in this response.