Day 4

Day 4

September 26^th, 2011

We just took pictures on top on this beautiful grassland. One thing about photography is that it can’t always capture the beauty of nature. Throughout the trip, I have taken many many pictures, but they don’t encompass everything that we saw and felt when the pictures were taken. You see the green grasslands and the scenic mountains, but being there was so much more than that. There I was standing on top of a huge hill overlooking mountains, villages, and a perfectly blue skyline. The air circulating through was my veins was as clean and fresh as air gets and the light breeze lighting blowing against my skin. It was a good moment. Truly beautiful. It’s the same thing with how steep the hills and mountains that we’ve climbed are.

Right now, we are on another rocky bus ride through rural Gansu. The houses are made of brick and mud and there are single rows of “houses” from time to time. It’s so beautiful, but the living standards are really low…Regardless- I feel like these people are probally really happy in the lives they live. They most likely enjoy their simple, peaceful, and serene lifestyle-not to mention it’s all they have ever known.  This whole area is wildly underdeveloped. Obviously- their lives would be improved by more modern infrastructure-social and medical advancements, ,but I wonder if more western modern development would be considered an infringement of their culture. I know that minorities in China strive to maintain their culture and differentiate it from Han Chinese culture. Dave made a comment that it’s not like anyone in Gansu wishes they were sitting in a Starbucks in Beijing.We just missed a rock slide on a cliff by about 20 minutes- that would have been bad news bears. We went from the Grasslands to the Bon monastery. We sat down in this classroom-while a living Buddha spoke Chinese and marketus kind of translated.I understood some of it-but  some of the things he said really stuck out. The living Buddha told us that it is the monks mission to have a clear and clean mind without vices and to live tomorrow better than you lived today-that is to constantly be improving yourself. He told us that philosophy students study philosophy for 13 years and then after studying philoshy they study tantra.Tantra (as described by Jeremy) is the physical application of Buddhism. Basically like- controlling your body as a means of controlling your soul. An important aspect of Buddhism is that Buddhism must be learned from someone else. You can read all the Buddhist texts in the world, but until you study under a llama, master, or monk- you are just a Buddhist noob. We walked around and then ate lunch- our bags and bags of snacks-on top on a mountain. There were several occasions where we needed to buy snacks in advance for our lunch on our trip. The mountaintop view was breathtaking.

After lunch, we climbed yet another steep hill. This mountain was the steepest and I was wearing my Chinese knockoff Ugg boots. It was one of the scarier experiences of my life. We were all climbing vertically at one point and I was seriously afraid that I was going to fall off the mountain.