I feel like I experienced multiple lifetimes during my time in India, so I dug through my archives to share more memories with you!

The first photo in my gallery is my second entry to the Asia-Pacific themed B&W Photo Contest hosted by @daveks, sponsored by @papa-pepper, and judged by @boxcarblue. Hope you like my little pickety pic & posty post!

བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས། = Tashi Delek = Hello!

This is my Tibetan friend Kunga rocking his craft. I met him when I lived in Mcleod Ganj/Dharamsala, India.

Kunga is a thangka student at the Norbulingka Institute.

The Norbulingka is a beautiful complex for multi-year immersive study of the Tibetan arts in textiles, woodworking, painting, and statue making.

Kunga trains in the 6 year thangka program. Thangkas are visually gorgeous paintings that are used in meditation practice. While this sketching stage lends itself well to black and white photography, the finished paintings are actually richly colored and finely detailed. 

A thangka painting is highly structured based on exact dimensions given in Buddhist scripture. Every element from pose to color to dress has a symbolic meaning.

Viewing and considering one is said to bring deeper connection between the practitioner and master or Buddhist deity; "thangka painting is thus a two-dimensional medium illustrating a multi-dimensional spiritual reality".  (source)

It takes Kunga 6-12 months to complete just one thangka, depending on who he is painting. 

In the Tibetan Buddhist monasteries I visited, thangkas covered walls, poles, and ceilings. The paints are made of plants and minerals, and some featured gold overlays. 

The level of detail is incredible.

The outside of the monasteries are just as rich and colorful, with fancy woodwork.

The preservation of culture is a big deal to displaced refugees, and Tibetans have established some incredible infrastructure in India in the decades since Chinese invasion of their homeland in 1950, but they are still foreigners in another country.

Do you know what's going down?? 

"Tibet today is one of the most repressed and closed societies in the world."

- Senator Robert Menendez, Chair of US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 2012

• 1 million Tibetans dead as a result of Chinese occupation
• 99% of monasteries not only closed, but destroyed...and thousands of years of art and Buddhist literature annihilated
• The country of Tibet wiped off the map
• Tibetans tortured, raped, and murdered for resisting Chinese occupation

I don't believe that my home the US of A is truly free either, but I do believe that we are one global family and 

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. 

I don't know what to do about the situation as a whole, but you can support my friend Kunga directly by commissioning a thangka from him--contact me for details. Tu che je = thank you!

May all beings everywhere be happy and free! 

💛 Sara!