Eclectic Coalescence: February 2007

I recently got to visit India for 18 days. I was supposed to be there for 19 days, but delays in Atlanta, Paris and Dubai added almost a full day to my journey to get there.

I got to see a couple of old (~1000 yr) Hindu temples, and a Jain temple (with the worlds tallest monolith -- a very tall naked guy). I also got to visit a Buddhist monastery in a Tibetan refugee settlement in the hills in Southwest Karnataka; that was the most relaxing part of the trip. I wanted to visit a Benedictine monastery on the outskirts of Bangalore, but I never could figure out how to get there (I emailed the monastery and heard back from them more than a month later that I was welcome to stay with them. I emailed again to find out how to get there and still have not heard back). In India, places don't have addresses like 230 W. Broadway. The address for the monastery was "about 10 km from Bangalore on the road to Mysore." I drove on that road, all the way from Bangalore to Mysore and saw no evidence of a Benedictine monastery. Mysore was nice, though.

Anyway, I'll put some pictures below. The first is with some Tibetan monks. It was only their third day at Namdroling monastery when I met them. They had just moved down from a major monastery in Himalaya (can't remember which one). They are past their first stage of training (in the Tibetan music and other preliminary things) and are now beginning ten years of studying Tibetan philosophy at Namdroling.