Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dharma

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From Delhi I went to Varanasi. Some time ago I wrote already about my time there.
While in Varanasi I also visited Sarnath, one of the holy places of Buddhism, because the Buddha gave his first sermon there, Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dharma.

Then I continued to Patna and from there to Bodh Gaya to see the Bodhi Tree, where Buddha reached enlightenment.
Unenlightened as I was, I almost punched a guy there who was pestering me, trying to be my guide, telling me all kinds of stuff about Buddha, which I knew already anyway, because I was very interested in Buddhism in those days.
All I wanted was to have some peace and quiet, to have communion with the energy of this holy place, but that´s something pretty hard to come by sometimes in India, where many holy places are also tourist attractions with all the touts and hassles which come with that status.

Gateway to Enlightenment

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After that it was time to cross into Nepal for a month, mostly to get a new visa for India.
It was raining a lot, the roads in Nepal were muddy and slippery and for the first time during my journey, I was afraid being on a bus.
In my three months in Pakistan and my three months in India I had never been afraid on a bus. Those guys drove like hell, but they knew what they were doing and usually everybody got out of their way anyway. But in Nepal I pretty much had the impression that those guys didn´t know how to drive, and it certainly did not help seeing quite a few bus wrecks lying in some ravines and stuff.
But anyway, I made it to Kathmandu without any accident.

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And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Kathmandu
from In the Neolithic Age by Kipling

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One thing I definitely liked about Nepal was that it was generally even cheaper than India, due to the weaker Nepalese Rupee and the people were more relaxed. The big cities of Northern India breed some tough guys, used to fight daily for survival, so the tone can be a bit rough there, the Nepalese were in general much more chilled.

Compared to India there was lots of Western style food available in Kathmandu, like pasta pizza pancake and I heard stories of Westerners stuffing themselves with this stuff and bitterly regretting it, paying with lots of stomach trouble for their indulgence, so I steered clear of this stuff, totally happy with Dal bhat, the Nepalese national dish, for a few rupees, and never had any stomach problems there.

Anyway, starting in Pakistan, I had made it a habit to drink the local water wherever I went, in those days filters where not as widespread in those countries as today, so I was in a state of more or less constant diarrhea for a few months, but then I was battle-hardened, and had no more problems, got kind of used to the bacteria.
My reasoning for this approach was, that in those countries it is the first gesture of hospitality to offer your guests some water, and if you then refuse for hygienic reasons or fear of bacteria or whatever then the encounter with the locals starts already off on the wrong foot. So I drank the water wherever I went, from the jars in the restaurants etc. You pour this water straight into your mouth from the jar without touching the jar with your lips, this way you don´t have to worry about dirty glasses, where other people had their lips at, etc. And another reason for drinking it, I then was not like the other tourists carrying around their plastic bottles with mineral water, where you also didn´t know if it was really any good. Guidebooks in those days advised travellers to crush the empty plastic bottles, so nobody could refill them with tap water and sell them as mineral water to unsuspecting tourists.

And since we are now already at “How to distinguish yourself from freakin´ tourists“ anyway, I also learned very quickly, already in Pakistan, to clean my behind with water instead of toilet paper, pouring water from a small jar into my left hand while squatting over the hole in the ground called toilet in many places.

In the Kathmandu Valley there are some nice towns with nice old wooden temples, a welcome change from the Indian stone temples. Ususally there is a mix of Buddhist and Hindu temples in those towns, in general those two religions seemed to get along well in Nepal.

But then there was this day in October when one Buddhist told me:
“Today is a very sad day for Buddhists, today all Buddhists are crying, the Hindus will kill so many animals.“
It was the climax of some big Hindu festival, where lots of animals get slaughtered and the blood is used to bless cars and planes and bicyles and motorbikes for good fortune.

So on that day I went to some big public square in Kathmandu to witness the slaughtering of water buffaloes, the biggest kind of animals used as sacrifice. The poorer the person, the smaller the animal, so the very poor would just slaughter a chicken to sprinkle the blood over their bicycle.

They had some pole rammed into the ground, the water buffalo was tied with a rope to that pole with its head, so that it could not move anymore and then some very special agent would chop the head off with a big Kukhuri, the traditional Gurkha knife.

The big knife is a Kukhuri

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Trained from months of fighting for a seat in public transport in Pakistan and India, I of course managed to push through the crowd to get into the first row, to see the bloody affair upclose and personal. It usually also helps to be mostly more than one head taller than the other guys.

The master of death was supposed to chop off the head in one blow as an auspicious omen, so he stood there in samurai- like concentration, lifted up his Kukhuri, struck down and severed the head from the trunk in one blow.
That was some very intense moment. Kind of solemn, kind of holy. Since there are no public executions in Germany anymore, no more beheadings, this was as close to a public execution scenario as I ever got.

One second there was this big animal alive, then in the next second it was divided in two, the trunk falling to the ground, trembling in a spasm for a few seconds, the head hanging by the rope from the pole.
Me and the crowd were situated a few meters away from the pole, initially I thought in order to give the guy some space, but now I saw the real reason.

Two helpers grapped the bleeding carcass and dragged it quickly around the pole in a circle, drawing a circle with the blood on the ground, coming pretty close to our feet, and the executioner grapped the buffalo head and drew a circle of blood around the pole with it as well.
All very archaic, all very Apocalypse Now.

I have now combined all my Pakistan travel stories into one chapter, which can be found here.

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For more adventurous stories check out my blog @likedeeler

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