Word: tsurphu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...year, parents' names (Dondrub and Loga) and a location. According to followers of the Kagyu branch of Buddhism, the child persuaded his nomad parents to break camp early in order to be in the right place when the searchers arrived. Within months, he was installed in the Karmapa's Tsurphu Monastery as a near divine bodhisattva--or enlightened being--and, by extension, a player in the perilous world of Sino-Tibetan politics...
...Tsurphu, the capital of the Kagyupa (Black Hat) Tibetan Buddhist sect, is hidden at 4,480 m in the remote and desolate snow-capped peaks of central Tibet. Founded in the 1180s by the first Karmapa, it is a mere 50 km, but a rocky two-and-a-half-hour drive, from the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The road is little more than a path distinguishable from the rest of the moonscape by the occasional tire track. My Lhasa-born Tibetan driver has to stop twice to ask farmers the way. Finally we reach a rickety bridge over a fast...
...Karmapa's escape?eight days by jeep, horse, helicopter, train and car?to Dharamsala and the Dalai Lama's Tibetan government-in-exile was initially viewed as proof that a united fight for Tibetan independence endures. But then came the crackdown. China closed Tsurphu to visitors and arrested the devout. This February, the U.S. State Department reported that since the Karmapa's departure, "a large number of monks and nuns remain detained or imprisoned." The monastery is now open again. (The official Chinese explanation for shutting it: the peeling frescoes needed repair.) But the thousands of visitors who made...
...their retreats, spending days, months and years in dark solitude, sustained only by food slipped into their cold rooms. Unlike the Summer Palace in Lhasa, where you can visit the former private rooms of the Dalai Lama, tourists don't get to see the Karmapa's old bedroom. Tsurphu hasn't become a museum: it is still a working monastery. We have arrived during a brief break in afternoon prayers and are able to walk inside the dim, main meditation hall and, with the aid of a flashlight, inspect the frescoes in the eerie silence. Between the singsong pujas (prayer...
...guides almost anywhere outside Lhasa. A package is the simplest way to handle the bureaucracy, but far cheaper is a three-day trip bought in China or Nepal after which sightseers can go off on their own as long as they take government guides. Hiring one in Lhasa to Tsurphu costs from $50 per day. Without the Karmapa to draw the crowds, these days you'll likely be the only visitors...