LOST

I started out from Leh in a dilapidated truck with a group of other backpackers. Our destination was the Lamayuru monastery, 125kms to the west, where the ‘Yuru Kangya’ festival was to be held.

The festival is a two days ritual meant to bring abundance and to avert natural and super natural disasters.

Monks are dressed in colourful garments topped with enormous masks, some depicting ferocious animals with teeth like sharp spikes in their open mouths; some with ears adorned with horns; or with human faces expressing paroxysms of emotions. Even more masks are piled on top of the original ones, creating towers of formidable impact.

With this attire the monks dance accompanied by drums, flutes and trumpets whose eerie sounds would wake the dead; other monks, seated on the ground, intone sacred texts in Tibetan and Sanskrit.
The whole spectacle has a hypnotic, otherworldly effect. Time seems to stop, and space loses its familiar coordinates.

However, the masks, the dancing, the Ladakhi spectators sitting on the warm earth watching mesmerized this feast for senses and imagination…. all of this came later.

First I got lost.

During a short stop the truck left without me and I found myself alone in a stony desert with no other vehicle in sight and the road ahead dividing in two. Should I go to the right or to the left?

The year was 1981. The airport in Leh had only just opened so tourists traveling by air were few.
Most visitors were hippies with no money, arriving in Ladakh from Srinagar by bus, after a three-day journey over the highest mountain pass in the world, open only during the four summer months of the year. I too had arrived in Leh by bus after spending weeks on a houseboat in Srinagar.
During the bus journey I managed to secure the front seat next to the driver, enjoying thus an unobstructed view of the unfolding landscape of the stone desert. The whimsically formed rocks in dazzling hues of crimson, coral red, lemon, lime green, lavender, plum, tan, amber and purple were a never ending delight to watch. Who have thought that rocks can be so spellbindingly beautiful?
But all of this was earlier.
Now I was lost among these unpredictably shaped and colored stones.
What to do? To start with, I cried.

1981 there were no passing tourist coaches, no fancy hostels along the way, no refreshment stalls, no shops. Only the desert and sparsely scattered oases. So I cried.
The sun was burning. Luckily I had a big straw hat. To my increasing distress, I did not have water.
After a while, I dozed off.
The Lamayuru monastery was created in the eleventh century by a saint known as the venerable Nimagung. For this endeavor he was helped by the mythical Nagas, serpent spirits of a lake. The Nagas agreed to empty the lake and thus establish the site for the monastery which the venerable Nimagung wanted to build.

I dreamed about the Nagas, the snakes. They were gliding in my imagination across the ground and some through the air with unblinking eyes, forked tongues, sloughing skin and deadly venom.
These were the guardians of the entrances to holy places. They were nature spirits symbolizing wisdom and renewal. Indians, Tibetans and Ladakhis alike attributed them healing powers.

I was in the land of Buddha, the land of spiritual wisdom and power capable to deliver the soul from wandering aimlessly through countless births and deaths; wandering, not in the desert of Ladakh, but in the existential desert where sorrow accompanies every joy, and the only permanently available drink are tears.
Perhaps to die then and there would be auspicious for my next birth?
This thought brought little solace but was nevertheless interesting to consider.

As was another question: why was I roaming for months through India and now Ladakh?

I had fled my own country. I did not like the new country I had settled in. I did not know what to do with my life. My home country which I had fled, Romania, together with the rest of the Eastern half of Europe, was under totalitarian Soviet occupation. The other, Western half of Europe, particularly Germany where I had settled down, as I discovered, was in the grip of a mentality which conceived everything as only matter. I liked neither the one nor the other.
Better to dream about the Nagas.
The great king Prajapati Daksha married two of his beautiful daughters, Kadru and Vinata, to sage Kasyapa.

Kadru laid thousand eggs which soon hatched the Naga race. Vinata laid only two eggs, which hatched after thousand years. One of them became Garuda, the king of the birds. His light was so intense that when he appeared he was mistaken for Agni himself, the Fire.
The Nagas captured Vinata, their aunt, and forced her to be their servant. However, Garuda pleaded with them to free his mother, to which they agreed on condition that Garuda brings them the divine liqueur Amrita.
So Garuda flew to the celestial mountain, surrounded by flames and winds, where Amrita was kept. He overcame many obstacles and brought Amrita to Patala, the abode of the Nagas.
The Nagas kept their promise and released Vinata. Yet when they were ready to drink the cup of Amrita, jealous Indra burst into Patala and snatched away the cup. The Nagas could drink only a drop, which proved sufficient to split their tongues and render them immortal.
Such is the power of Amrita, the elixir of eternal life.

Who wrote the line: ‘Where is here the exit?’
I badly needed an exit, from the desert, from thirst, from power politics, from obsessive questions, from……well, various things.

‘The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…

But there was no wind on my face.

Was the answer in Buddha’s teachings? In Rabbi Jeshua ben Joseph’s teachings? Lao Tse’s teachings? In the ever-changing rock formations? In Runes, Tarot cards, I Ching……..

David Wagonar’s poem, ‘Lost’ comes now to my mind:

“Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
where you are. You must let it find you.”

David Wagoner wrote this poem in 1999, and I was stranded in the desert of Ladakh in 1981. Perhaps if I had known the poem then, it would have helped me.
As it was not yet written, I could not know it.
Perhaps, if I had had the inspiration to be still and to let the rocks find me they would have done so. But I was not still…..

I was thinking of the Nagas of the earth, guarding buried precious metals; of the Nagas of the water, living in palaces of gold and emeralds at the bottom of oceans and lakes; and of the Nagas of the sky, forming clouds and creating rain for crops or, if they were in a bad mood, floods.

I was thinking of the long row of saints teaching about non-violence.

I was thinking of the war which had caused the division of the world between two super powers, which had made me homeless and lost in more ways than only sitting there on a pink rock and not knowing if I should walk to the right or to the left, not knowing where the monastery was.
I was thinking of the monastery. Before leaving for India, I had bought a book with pictures of its ancient wall paintings showing Avalokiteshavara with his eleven heads and one thousand arms, looking down with compassion;
Padmasambhava, whose father was Intrinsic Awareness, ‘Samantabadhra, whose mother was the Ultimate Sphere of Reality, ‘Samanthabadhri, by which ancestry he himself belonged to the ultimate sphere of non-duality, of all unborn phenomena, of the consciousness of the quantum world, where there are no material phenomena yet, only fields of force; its magnificent statues of Bodhisattvas………
Murals and sculptures suffused with eternity and peace. Made by generations of artisans who were studying devotedly the ancient sacred texts kept with great care in carved wooden chests.

Those sacred texts showing the way to the existence with no beginning and no end, to the consciousness without an object and to never ceasing bliss.

I remembered the trance like dance of the monks in their mythical costumes which I had seen on a video taken by a hippie whom I had met in Dharamsala.
And the recitations I listened to in a Tibetan temple in Cologne, Germany. And the flutes and cymbals and trumpets I heard in a documentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead – telling the story of the journey the soul takes on leaving the body.
And that which lies beyond. The peace of Padmasambhava, the emanation of Infinite Light.
So far away, only a dim memory.
All this time, I was talking to myself, as we all do, yet seldom listening to what we are saying.

“I find myself lost, alone in a desert, at a road bifurcation, hundred kilometers away from the inhabited world, without a vehicle, with no idea in which direction to proceed” – and, for once, I listened to what I was saying, and stopped: “Wait a moment, I find myself???”
This was the end of me being lost, of being homeless, of not knowing what to do with my life..……of dreaming at cross roads.

And a truck appeared.