I suffer no apprehension as morning comes. Blue sky, a bumpy ride - I'm free. The high water upon the wide Tsangpo river is like an estuary. It's only twenty kilometres to the dock for Samye. Below a steep mountain, the levy is wet and water rises to a restaurant and shops. The ferry is ready to go. The boatman beckons me aboard. A man with big black sunglasses and a PSB badge asks me if I have a permit. I say, "No, I don't." He shows no reaction but instructs me to pay ten yuan to the boatman. So, I'm lucky today.

The old flat-bottom boat carries twelve of us. All of them but me are Chinese tourists and local Tibetans. A few villagers accompany us: an elderly fellow in possession of a new hand scythe, silver in the sun. The distance over the huge Tsangpo River is three kilometres, but the boat chops slowly against the current, and three become ten kilometres. The Brahmaputra flows quickly upon us. The river is swollen wide with monsoons. At an altitude of nearly 4000 metres, this great stream is the highest large river in the whole world. After cascading over 3000 metres, the Brahmaputra finally emerges into Bangladesh. Up here in Tibet there's no one. Below, millions of folk depend on the alluvial richness of this river for their prosperity.

Landing on the far shore, trucks await to carry people to town. I ride, snailing along sandy flats beneath sharp, bald hills. I rap on the shutters of a small village shop, rousing the old lady to sell me some instant noodles and a bottle of beer. The villagers thresh the barley crop.

Samye Monastery appears amid a lovely forest between the mountains and some golden sand dunes swelling toward the river. The space around the monastery feels open, yet it seems enclosed in an invisibly huge sphere removed from everything I would call familiar. What's here? There's nothing here but trees, grass and a huge monastery with a big oval wall built round it. Such remote corners of civilization feel unearthly. I look back, wishing to forget the familiar routines and spending needs that have always hurried me past looking carefully at things...

I'm certainly in no rush to find the monastery. Instead, I ride over a path into the trees until I reach a stream. By the water, on some blankets by a tiny tent, rest three young nuns and an old monk. They are travelling on a pilgrimage. I sit with them in silence and share their milk tea. The old guy smiles and the girls are shy. They're curious about my presence here. So, I explain as best I can that I'm travelling. I like having nowhere to go. I smile and find a camping spot hidden in the willowy trees, on the soft grass.

It's lovely. Absolute quiet, as I haven't had in a while. I do nothing but rest, read and listen to the news. I eat noodles. No mosquitoes anywhere around. I shouldn't have bought the radio in Lhasa: a terrible earthquake in Turkey has killed thousands.

Walking along, I discover a perimeter wall circling the monastery: it's a vast oval made of bricks and plaster, topped with miniature stupas. I set foot into a gate and enter a small outer temple. The place is attended by a watchful resident monk. Then I retreat through the drizzly dusk to sleep.

Rain through the morning and by noon my tiny blue and yellow tent is afloat in a puddle. What can I do? Pack up. The monks have built a modest hotel inside the monastery grounds. I see a few foreigners, German and American visitors. I want some sun but won't get any. The hotel seems nearly empty and a well-formed German lady teases me about my hermetic ways. They haven't a chance, keeping such close tail to their hubbies.

I'm content to be alone and do nothing but watch the world silently. In the hotel shop I attempt to cheer up a rotund and aging American who has waited for, but did not receive his restaurant dinner after a whole hour. I encourage him to try once more, but suggest that he visit the restaurant earlier before the other tourists arrive. He goes away with instant noodles. I figure he can afford to lose a few ounces anyway.

Night closes in and leads me to bed, but not before I pass a door open on one of the hotel rooms... Inside is a startling sight. An aging woman sits across the room from two young monks. The two bald fellows stare straight at her, and she returns their stare with something of a fixed and helpless shock - as if she doesn't believe her eyes. The monks hold her look. They are amused - without seeing the same expression on each other's faces. They look like brothers. Everyone is silent. She's their mother. Maybe they're twins. All three Tibetans are very still, silently watching each other. I feel like a painter, portraying this door-framed glimpse. They are unaware of me.

I go to bed, reading about the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism. I am not a Buddhist by any means; actually, I don't really believe in any one religion, and it would be pretty hard to convince me that your "soul" is anything more than a poetic metaphor. On the other hand, I am fascinated with the philosophical implications of religion... The yearning for truth is common to all of us. We all want to know what is most unknowable - the absolute nature of the universe and whether or not we are made of chance or divine intent... Conceiving of truth, as the ideal end, obviously beckons us to try to learn more about it. We often sense that the human moral condition depends on "enlightenment" and everything we learn would lead us to desire pure understanding. Well, perhaps not for modern philosophers: we suffer from collective skepticism... But the condition of our ability to conceive and so create "the truth" is something that philosophers have been concerned about for some time: the problem of absolutes and dividing the subjective perception from substantial realities has obsessed us since the great Greeks... Yet, we poor philosophers have also developed a collective blind spot to the tendency we have to nay-say as we pronounce judgements over ideas, and all this without realizing that the biggest cause of our skepticism is actually the large amount of knowledge that we already possess about the world - knowledge insufficient, apparently, to understand everything completely... Science has helped us believe and disbelieve in many things. Science knows so much more than we can absorb. So nowadays - for those of us who need to belong and to believe - religion helps us overcome the fear of everything we hope to know, yet never can understand. Modernity, science and its technologies have inspired skeptics and fanatical believers of many stripes. Optimists, pessimists, the happily blessed, the carefree damned - we populate the world with curious ideas for many things - truth, the convictions we share, and the wish for reprieve from helpless doom. Sometimes we thrill at the pure joy of being alive - and so many of our "truths" lay far beyond the wildest possibilities of solemn certainty and laughable credulity...

Let me suggest that the way unto poetry is the instinct of imagination. But these words convey little of the main idea: the advance of civilization does not really depend on the redundant pronouncement of absolutes, but on the advance of profound and novel reflections... We speak the same tongues. But my mind cannot be yours. You feel because you are an individual. You know the truth by looking at it: the truth cannot be given to you. To seek is your answer.

My wish? To believe is my wish. But perhaps I never shall - believe... Maybe you believe in some "truths" already. Some men appear to be in advance of their time, but in fact, are only born with a talent for voicing what many have already realized - without being able to find words to express it...

"...none by travelling known lands can find out the unknown..."

It goes on and on doesn't it? I hope the sun will summon courage and show me her short skirts tomorrow, wherever she lurks...

Surrounding the Utse, the central temple, stand four large stupas: the red, the green, the white and the black... The stupa is a statuary edifice symbolizing a compact model of the Buddhist universe. In fact, the whole layout of the Samye Monastery actually represents a large emblem for the whole universal metaphysical structure of divine reality, and so, the perfect shape of human spiritual community. One sees its design repeated in the paintings that adorn the inner walls of the Utse temple.

A middle-aged Tibetan man pops out of a little cottage to unlock the Red Stupa. It's a reconstruction, I think. The Tibetan word for stupa is chorten. This chorten retains the original ideas of its Indian precursors. It resembles a big onion with a stem growing out of the top. Tibetan Buddhism deepened some of the symbolic value of this shrine: the pediments represent the Earth, the half-cone above is water, the ascending sphere is fire, the triangular spire is air and the very top, space... It signifies the dimensions and components of the sensible universe. Originally, the stupa was intended as a sanctified repository of religious offerings to the memory of important elders. It's also a place to consecrate the memory of the first Buddha, Shakyamuni. The stupa represents the "Buddha-mind" and symbolizes the actual reality - the supposed emptiness - underlying all impermanent and sensible phenomena.

Samye is a great place to stroll. Wander up the nearby hillside to overlook the whole fantastical place, or lazily explore the huge space of trees all around. Study the temples. Even with tourists and Tibetan pilgrims, the monastery never seems too busy. Few monks live here. Most temples are quite empty, except for their caretakers...

The Utse temple is something like a layer-cake: imagine three boxes set one within the other. Each box represents one of the perimeter walls encircling the innermost shrine. The Samye complex was the first monastery ever built in Tibet, and it was very much intended to serve as an eternal cornerstone for faith. This old temple was built solidly and its internal pediments are a couple of metres thick: multiple floors rise above the ground and on the top is a great view from a rooftop temple reminiscent of Japanese architectural forms, merely a coincidence. Upstairs, a modest apartment waits to welcome the Dalai Lama, should he chance to drop in for a visit. In this room, several relics, like the "skull" of Padmasambhava, are housed inside a glass case. The sunlight illumines a pretty thing made of embroidered fabric...

On the third floor I meet a young monk with nothing to do. Gladly, he helps me to identify some of the many deities and meditational incarnations of Buddha. Each special incarnation faces one of the four cardinal directions. The novice studies the iconographic diagrams I've prepared to help sort out the deities: there are so many Buddhas of the Five Families, various Vairocanas and Vilmalamitras and several Padmasambhavas... The young monk mixes them up at first, but then the pictures in the guidebook help him to remember who is who. The monk gives me his notebook and asks me to draw a picture and write some English names.

I return to the ground floor. Several monks have gathered in the main temple to make a large sand mandala at the foot of Tibet's great king. The mandala is a large disk representing a model of creation, a symbol for concentrating and purifying one's peaceful meditations. They work patiently: it's midsummer and the moment calls for celebration. Each monk holds a small metal tube filled up with colored sand; he taps lightly upon the file with a brass wand and the sand drops in fine lines upon the flat circle. The monks fill out an elaborate diagram full of concentric shapes and dancing skeletons... It's almost finished now. I get a last photo of an early Tibetan king, or perhaps this one is actually intended to be an incarnation of Padmasambhava, too. He's often given away by those bulging eyes and a pencil-thin moustache...

Outside again. In front of the temple a large truck is loaded with tourists and pilgrims almost ready to go. Everyone clings to the rails as children do to monkey bars. The truck is crowded. They go, finally, grey hair and brown together, bouncing slowly away. Bye bye.

Then it's quiet and I'm alone with some kids in the middle of Samye. A girl cradles and clings to a pale puppy. The animal is wet and trembling. The girl child is accompanied by a younger boy and another girl. The boy complains because he wants the dog for his own. I suggest to the girl that she put the poor creature inside her coat next to her tummy to keep it warm. I leave them for a temple beside the east wall. It's dark and there's nothing to see, except for a tiny deity, a little king, gazing upon the light of a butter wick...

Outside, the children have followed me with their spat. The girl still holds the dog and the little boy starts to cry because he really wants it. At first, she won't give it up: she has placed it inside her coat to warm it, as I told her to. Finally, to make the boy stop weeping, she drops the animal at his feet. The boy just looks down at it. The pup shivers, helpless for something to give warmth. I tell the boy to stop crying. But he won't even pick up the dog. The animal trembles but gets no comfort. I shake my head and wonder why the kid needs to be so selfish. I give up trying and go away.

Epilogue:

I've travelled down along the Tsangpo River from Samye to Tsetang, a big town. But here, I must turn around, since I've met my last and most stubborn Tibetan PSB officer. He has been instructed to turn back everyone travelling alone. He's matter-of-fact and doesn't need to question or berate me at all. He proves once again how mild the Tibetan spirit is, even while enforcing the Chinese decree. So, I'm polite and only ask for enough time in the morning to buy a carpet before I leave for Lhasa. (When I first arrived in Tsetang, I happened upon the local carpet factory by riding directly to it - all the way through town - without even knowing it was there!) So, I return in the morning to buy a colorful striped carpet made of wool, perhaps of goat and lamb both.

Something makes me impatient to go away now. I can't stand all these polite police watching my every breath. In Tsetang, a lot of Chinese soldiers are walking around in their olive uniforms, pretending to look important. I ride my bike along the street and meet five Chinese officers ambling together; so, I pitch an imaginary hardball right at their eager, fatuous grins. Because they win and Tibet loses.

Back in Lhasa, I have to wait a few days for my flight. One morning I wander over to the Johkang market square. The afternoon is giving us some sun - the first warmth after a week of gray rain. As I gaze upon the passersby strolling clockwise about the temple, I noticed a tallish monk standing next to me. That smile of his is pure curiosity. I say hello and ask if he speaks English. He tells me that he has come on a long journey across Tibet from Chamdo monastery. He has come with fellow monks to join in the Yogurt festival and to help make a new Mandala in the temple. I explain that I had visited Chamdo two summers previously, by bike from Yunnan, which I believe is perhaps the most lovely and awe-inspiring route into Tibet. The monk is cordial and invites me to watch the mandala making. This meeting reminds me that Tibetans can be very forward and unafraid of life. Later, I experience one last instance - a young student in a cafe. He shows me a notebook full of scratchy English sentences. So, I help correct his mistakes.

All Tibetans know that everyone who comes from outside must leave. We tourists don't know what they are going through. We can't begin to see through the pleasant, deceptive artifice of tourism. We don't see how free the Tibetans imagine us to be. No matter how silent and resigned they are - Tibetans remain ever hopeful. The local people endure domination by a foreign militaristic technocracy, which they are absolutely powerless to budge. To speak any opinion besides those favored by their Chinese governors can only land a Tibetan in jail. It seems quite unlikely that all Tibetan folk will give up their religion right away. Most still need it to subdue their wearied sense of alienation. Home usurped and heart silenced - the people are inexorable and good: the Tibetans go on - suffering hope for a freedom more real than they can make come true, today, on this Earth.

~ the end ~