The comparison with Glastonbury, the biggest music festival in England, was understandable. It's a dazzling display of spaced-out New Age babes, rock 'n' roll, muddy fields, collapsing tents, bedraggled characters in drug-induced bliss, stalls selling tie-dye hot-pants, hair-beads and inedible vegetarian food. They were major highlights of my student years—bunking-off assignments for a hedonistic week.
In Tashiding, the tents were there, mud an' all, the blissful characters murmuring and spinning prayer-wheels with a wonderful feeling of harmony, as only the Buddhists have mastered. Unfortunately, the only sustenance available was pork momos and chaang (local brew), contradicting my assumptions that all Buddhists were vegetarians and teetotallers. I must have been the only vegetarian—which meant a diet solely of chaang.
I shared a tent with a beautiful old Tibetan lady who awakened me at 1 am on the auspicious full-moon night of Bumchu, in order to collect the sacred water given to all the pilgrims, taken from a container opened only once a year. The recipients are blessed with happiness and prosperity, but at 1 am in the cold mountain air, my body informed me prosperity could wait. At 4 am, I arrived, shivering, at the temple, where crowds were shoving and yelling most un-Buddhist-like, to cram inside.
After three days of chaanged-out bliss, I wandered dreamily down the hill, wondering why all monasteries are on the top of mountains, as the soundtrack of Raja Hindustani wafted unmistakably through the air. Hedonism indeed.
