Tibet Travel Quotes

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

Sure, the Leaning Tower of Pisa leaned like everyone else said it would, the mountains of Tibet were more beautiful than you had ever expected, and the Pyramids of Egypt stood mysteriously in the sea of sand like in the pictures; yet is it the environment or rather the openness in mindset, that makes up the elusive essence of happiness that we experience when we travel?

There were only three names on the map of the region we had brought with us, but we now filled in more than two hundred.

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

For modern people the pursuit of wisdom sounds like something you'd have to travel to Tibet for. To us, wisdom is mystical and esoteric. It conjures up images of cave-dwelling hermits, saffron-robed monks, and, well, Yoda.

...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart.

An Afternoon in the Stacks Closing the book, I find I have left my head inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound, words adjusting themselves to their meaning. Long passages open at successive pages. An echo, continuous from the title onward, hums behind me. From in here the world looms, a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences carved out when an author traveled and a reader kept the way open. When this book ends I will pull it inside-out like a sock and throw it back in the library. But the rumor of it will haunt all that follows in my life. A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.

In my constant travels, from the highland meadows of Tibet to the tropical rain forest of Brazil to the busy streets of Hong Kong, I’ve learned that you have to be content wherever you are. Otherwise, traveling is exhausting, because you’re always thinking that the next place will be better.

The country through which we had been travelling for days has an original beauty. Wide plains were diversified by stretches of hilly country with low passes. We often had to wade through swift running ice-cold brooks. It has long since we had seen a glacier, but as we were approaching the tasam at Barka, a chain of glaciers gleaming in the sunshine came into view. The landscape was dominated by the 25,000-foot peak of Gurla Mandhata; less striking, but far more famous, was the sacred Mount Kailash, 3,000 feet lower, which stands in majestic isolation apart from the Himalayan range.

What happened to me? I asked myself. Morris's high, smoky voice took me back to my university years, when I thought rich people were evil, a shirt and tie were prison clothes, and life without freedom to get up and go - motorcycle beneath you, breeze in your face, down the streets of Paris, into the mountains of Tibet - was not a good life at all. What happened to me?

The name Kyirong means “the village of happiness,” and it really deserves the name. I shall never cease thinking of this place with yearning, and if I can choose where to pass the evening of my life, it will be in Kyirong. There I would build myself a house of red cedar wood and have one of the rushing mountain streams running through my garden, in which every kind of fruit would grow, for though its altitude is over 9,000 feet, Kyirong lies on the twenty-eighth parallel. When we arrived in January the temperature was just below freezing it seldom falls below -10 degrees Centigrade. The seasons correspond to the Alps, but the vegetation is subtropical. Once can go skiing the whole year round, and in the summer there is a row of 20,000-footers to climb.

Our minds have no real or absolute boundaries; on the contrary, we are part of an infinite field of intelligence that extends beyond space and time into realities we have yet to comprehend. The beyul and their dakini emissaries are traces of the original world, inviting us to open to the abiding mystery at the heart of all experience, the inseparability that infuses every action, thought, and intention.

In the country where I'm traveling - Tibet - people believe if they walk long distances to holy places, it purifies the bad deeds they've committed. They believe the more difficult the journey, the greater the depth of purification.

A man opposite me shifted his feet, accidentally brushing his foot against mine. It was a gentle touch, barely noticeable, but the man immediately reached out to touch my knee and then his own chest with the fingertips of his right hand, in the Indian gesture of apology for an unintended offence. In the carriage and the corridor beyond, the other passengers were similarly respectful, sharing, and solicitous with one another. At first, on that first journey out of the city into India, I found such sudden politeness infuriating after the violent scramble to board the train. It seemed hypocritical for them to show such deferential concern over a nudge with a foot when, minutes before, they'd all but pushed one another out of the windows. Now, long years and many journeys after that first ride on a crowded rural train, I know that the scrambled fighting and courteous deference were both expressions of the one philosophy: the doctrine of necessity. The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example, was no less and no more than the amount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary! That was the unspoken but implied and unavoidable question everywhere in India. When I understood that, a great many of the characteristically perplexing aspects of public life became comprehensible: from the acceptance of sprawling slums by city authorities, to the freedom that cows had to roam at random in the midst of traffic; from the toleration of beggars on the streets, to the concatenate complexity of the bureaucracies; and from the gorgeous, unashamed escapism of Bollywood movies, to the accommodation of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tibet, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and Bangladesh, in a country that was already too crowded with sorrows and needs of its own. The real hypocrisy, I came to realise, was in the eyes and minds and criticisms of those who came from lands of plenty, where none had to fight for a seat on a train. Even on that first train ride, I knew in my heart that Didier had been right when he'd compared India and its billion souls to France. I had an intuition, echoing his thought, that if there were a billion Frenchmen or Australians or Americans living in such a small space, the fighting to board the train would be much more, and the courtesy afterwards much less. And in truth, the politeness and consideration shown by the peasant farmers, travelling salesmen, itinerant workers, and returning sons and fathers and husbands did make for an agreeable journey, despite the cramped conditions and relentlessly increasing heat. Every available centimetre of seating space was occupied, even to the sturdy metal luggage racks over our heads. The men in the corridor took turns to sit or squat on a section of floor that had been set aside and cleaned for the purpose. Every man felt the press of at least two other bodies against his own. Yet there wasn't a single display of grouchiness or bad temper

I am travelling with this mystique myself, I know. It has grown out of childhood, and adolescent reading. This looking-glass Tibet is a realm of ancient learning lost to the rest of the world, ruled by a lineage of monks who are reincarnations of divinity. Recessed beyond the greatest mountain barrier on earth, in plateaux of cold purity, it floats in its own time. It is a land forbidden to intruders not by human agency but by some mystical interdiction. So it resonates like the memory of something lost, a survival from a purer time, less a country than a region in the mind. Perhaps it holds the keys to the afterlife

The solidity of the building, its quite interiors, the monumental presence of its white facade in the middle of the city- in all its deliberate order and calm, the hotel underlined its separateness from its setting. Its effect was felt most keenly by the menial staff, who traveled each day from their homes in the flood-threatened outskirts of Allahabad and approached their place of work with something like awe. They looked very ill at ease in their green uniforms and were obsequiously polite with guests, calling to mind the Indians who had come to serve in the new city of Allahabad built by the British after the rude shock of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the city whose simple colonial geography was plain from my sixth-floor hostel room, the railway tracks partitioning the congested "black town," with its minarets and temple domes, from the tree-lined grid of "white town," where for a long period no Indians, apart from servants, could appear in native dress.

The general kind and soft customs of Mustang were soon to strike me as exceptional. Apart from occasional disputes between husband and wife, which like family rows all around the world bring raised voices, I never heard a person scream or shout; Even the children had very civilised manners. In fact the only person I knew to consistently angry in Lo Mantang was myself, and Tibetans consider bd temper a Western characteristic. Take for example the reactions of European to missing his train; he will invariably swear under his breath. Who in our can stand frustration without giving vent to anger? I soon had to master my own temper, having raised my voice against one of the innumerable people who stopped to stare at me and my smal party, I was told by a peasant: ‘’I cannot understand; you are a great man, how is it that small things like myself deserve your wrath?’’ After that I learned to be tolerant, realising that by getting mad I was only debasing myself, and that it was stupid to be bothered by trivialities.

Curious Oriental imagery was employed in these documents. In one of his earlier letters the thum asked why the British strayed thus into his country 'like camels without nose rings'. In another letter he declared that he cared nothing for the womanly English, as he hung upon the skirts of the manly Russians, and he warned Colonel Durand that he had given orders to his followers to bring him the Gilgit Agent's head on a platter. The thum was, indeed an excellent correspondent about this time. He used to dictate his letters to the Court Munshi, the only literary man, I believe, in the whole of his dominions, who wrote forcible, if unclassical, Persian. In one letter the thum somewhat shifted his ground, and spoke of other friends. 'I have been tributary to China for hundreds of years. Trespass into China if you dare,' he wrote to Colonel Durand. 'I will withstand you, if I have to use bullets of gold. If you venture here, be prepared to fight three nations - Hunza, China, and Russia. We will cut your head off, Colonel Durand, and then report you to the Indian Government.

I stepped somewhat apprehensively into 2020, unaware of what was to happen, of course, thinking little about the newly-emerged coronavirus, but knowing myself to be at a tipping point in my life. I had come so very far over the years, the decades, from my birthplace in the United Kingdom, to Thailand, Japan and then back to Thailand to arrive at an age—how had I clocked up so many turns under the sun?—at which most people ask for nothing more than comfort, security and love, or at least loving kindness. Instead, I was slowly extricating myself, physically and emotionally, from a marriage that had, over the course of more than a decade, slowly, almost imperceptibly, deteriorated from complacency to conflict, from apathy to antagonism, from diversity to divergence as our respective outlooks on life first shifted and then conflicted. Instrumental in exacerbating this had been my decision to travel as and where I could after witnessing my mother’s devastating and terminal descent into dementia. For reasons which even now I cannot recall with any accuracy, the first destination for this reborn, more daring me was Tibet, thus initiating a new love affair, this time with the culture and majesty of the Himalayan swathe, and the awakening within me of a quest for the spiritual. I had, over the years, been a teacher, a lecturer, a consultant and an advisor, but I now wanted to inspire and release my verbal and photographic creativity, to capture the places I visited and the experiences I had in words and images—and if possible to have the wherewithal of sharing them with like-minded people.

What happened next was an amazing testament to the ongoing power that the Dalai Lama exercises in Tibet. The travelers returned to Tibet, and many of them immediately burned their tiger skins, even though they were worth approximately two years’ wages apiece. By this act, they honored the Dalai Lama’s edict to end the exploitation of Asia’s tigers.

China’s Koreans enjoy advantages denied to other minorities, which only reinforces the sense that Yanbian is more like a mini-state than just another autonomous area. The most notable of these is the right to education in their own language at school as well as college. Unlike in Xinjiang, where the government has closed down Uighur-only schools, or Xishuangbanna and Tibet, where the only way to study Dai or Tibetan is to become a monk, the Yanbian government actually funds schools that teach in Korean.

Nothing illustrates the CCP’s success in rewriting history more than the irony that all Han will acknowledge how the people and landscapes of Tibet and Xinjiang are so unlike them and anywhere else in China. But they will never admit that those regions have ever been anything but part of the Chinese empire.

Separating Tibetans from the propaganda that smothers them, whether western or Chinese, was one of my aspirations. But pushing aside the heavy, patterned blankets decorated with Buddhist symbols that shield the entrances to Lhasa’s teahouses did not admit me into a secret world where Tibetans spoke unguardedly. Instead, I was confronted with a passiveness completely at odds with the belligerence of the nomads of Kham and the people of Amdo. Resolving the contradiction between those two extremes was something I never managed to achieve during my time in Tibet.

All China’s minorities lack outlets of expression. Even in the multi-cultural UK, the views of the ethnic British are heard less frequently than everyone else’s. In China, it is far worse. The minorities are absent from TV shows, movies, literature, popular discourse and are mostly excluded from politics. Now what little dialogue that takes place in Tibet between the locals and the Han is being replaced by death. And despite my ambivalence towards Tibetans, that left me both depressed and unsure of what I was really doing here.

The whole Happy Valley, indeed, lay beneath me, and I could trace my former journeys, and those yet to come, march after march. There lay the broad expanse of the Wular Lake, with its little island in the middle, where is the ruined temple of the Serpent God, its winding bays and far-stretching promontories; and I could follow for league and leagues the sinuous reaches of the Jhelum, and the other rivers that bring fertility to this fat land from the surrounding mountain snows. No wonder the old conquerors from over the desert northern highlands waxed enthusiastic when they looked down first upon the fair, well-watered vale, and hailed it as the earthly paradise.

I was happier than I had been since starting this trop on The Iron Rooster. I was driving. I was in charge. I was taking my time; and Tibet was empty. The weather was dramatic-snow on the hills, a high wind, and black clouds piled up on the mountains ahead. I also thought: I didn't die the other day.

Checkpoints proliferated. It had always been a challenge for Tibetans to obtain passports to leave the country, but now they had trouble simply traveling inside China. It was a throwback to the day when you weren’t allowed to leave your commune. The rules varied from place to place and month to month, but you could never be assured of the ability to get where you wanted to go.

Romantic retrospect aside, the night spent in the truck is distinctly unpleasant. We are cramped and cold. The much-vaunted heating of the truck is ineffectual. The wind prises through the cracks in the sides of the windows, and penetrates us to the bone. My feet are moist in my shoes, yet to take my socks off is to chill my feet even further. We take every warm item of clothing out of our bags and swaddle ourselves into immobility. The sheepskin on the seat cuts out a bit of the cold rising from below. We share a blanket and Sui, before he goes off to sleep, makes sure I get a generous part of this. He then drops off to sleep, and tugs it away. He jockeys for space, and I am forced to lean forward. He begins to snore. To make it all worse, both he and Gyanseng sleeptalk. They have told me before tat I do, too, but I've never noticed it. What I do notice, however, late at night, with my two territorially acquisitive companions wedging me forwards, is that I have started talking to myself: naming the constellations I can see move across the mud-stained windscreen, interviewing myself, reciting odd snatches of poetry. I also notice that I am hungry, which is curious, because during the day I was not; and itchy, which is to be expected after so much unwashed travel; and sleepy, though I cannot sleep for cold and headache and discomfort; and alas, bored out of my mind. When things get really bad, I imagine myself in a darkened room, up to my shoulders in a tub of hot water, with a glass of Grand Marnier beside me and the second movement of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet sounding gently in my ears. This voluptuous vision, rather than making my present condition seem even more insupportable, actually enables me to escape for a while from the complaints of my suffering body.

...though the jokers around the table be sneaking Whoopee Cushions into the Siege Perilous, under the very descending arse of the grailseeker, and though the grails themselves come in plastic these years, a dime a dozen, penny a gross, still he, at times self-conned as any Christian, praises and prophecies that era of innocence he just missed living in, one of the last pockets of Pre-Christian Oneness left on the planet: "Tibet is a special case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where there is no extradition, and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate...Switzerland and Tibet are linked along one of the true meridians of the Earth...true as the Chinese have drawn meridians of the body...We will have to learn such new maps of Earth: and as travel in the Interior becomes more common, as the maps grow another dimension, so must we....

The first time I met Kunsang, I asked him the meaning of his father’s name. Kunsang told me that to understand the name Tulshuk Lingpa we had to go right back to Padmasambhava, the eighth-century visionary and mystic wizard often credited with bringing the dharma, or Buddhist teachings, to Tibet. Padmasambhava established the teachings by travelling through the high central Asian plateau, subduing the local deities belonging to the Bonpo (the indigenous religion of Tibet with strong shamanic elements), and turning them into protectors of the dharma.

Nice. In his case, Mr. Wave traveled to Tibet and explored the great mysteries of the cosmos. Did Mr. Wave create the world when he was born, or was the world made for Mr. Wave? Is it possible that the only gravity is the one produced by Mr. Wave’s charisma?

We have seen, ladies and gentlemen, how selfhood has grown and gained a foothold, become increasingly distinct and affecting. Previously barely marked, prone to being blurred, subjugated to the collective. Imprisoned in the stays of roles, conventions, flattened in the press of traditions, subjugated to demands. Now it swells and annexes the world. ‘Once the gods were external, unavailable, from another world, and their apparent emissaries were angels and demons. But the human ego burst forth and swept the gods up and inside, furnished them a place somewhere between the hippocampus and the brain stem, between the pineal gland and Broca’s area. Only in this way can the gods survive – in the dark, quiet nooks of the human body, in the crevices of the brain, in the empty space between the synapses. This fascinating phenomenon is beginning to be studied by the fledgling discipline of travel psychotheology. ‘This growing process is more and more powerful – influencing reality is equally what we have invented and what we have not. Who else moves in the real? We know people who travel to Morocco through Bertolucci’s film, to Dublin through Joyce, to Tibet through a film about the Dalai Lama. ‘There is a certain well-known syndrome named after Stendhal in which one arrives in a place known from literature or art and experiences it so intensely that one grows weak or faints. There are those who boast they have discovered places totally unknown, and then we envy them for experiencing the truest reality even very fleetingly before that place, like all the rest, is absorbed by our minds. ‘Which is why we must ask, once more, insistently, the same question: where are they going, to what countries, to what places? Other countries have become an external complex, a knot of significations that a good topographical psychologist can unravel just like that, interpret on the spot.

Ruth, indeed, though she loyally said nothing, thought it positively wrong; she was probably influenced subconsciously by the hope that they would soon be blockaded in Tsingkiangpu, where she could remain happily, Japanese or no, until old enough to be a missionary in Tibet.

By early May 1959, it became clear that the Chinese could not stem the tide of refugees, nor would they passively accept that India was offering sanctuary to the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetan refugees. It was then that Nehru, for the first time as prime minister, candidly asserted that India had to adhere to its basic values and beliefs “even though the Chinese do not like it.”7 With this assertion, and in the face of China’s virulent anti-Indian rhetoric, Nehru assented to providing accommodation and material relief to the Tibetan refugees who had begun to find their way into India. Within the month, the Indian government had begun to issue “Indian Registration Certificates” to the more than 15,000 Tibetans who had entered the country. By the end of 1962, when the Chinese had effectively sealed the Indo-Tibetan border, no fewer than 80,000 Tibetans had traveled by foot from Tibet, with most of them settling as resident refugees in India.8 China regarded India’s actions in providing asylum for the Dalai Lama and the multitude of refugees who flowed into India in the months and years following the March Uprising as prima facie evidence of India promoting Tibetan independence.

Masters are under no cosmic compulsion to limit their residence.” My companion glanced at me quizzically. “The Himalayas in India and Tibet have no monopoly on saints. What one does not trouble to find within will not be discovered by transporting the body hither and yon. As soon as the devotee is willing to go even to the ends of the earth for spiritual enlightenment, his guru appears nearby.” I silently agreed, recalling my prayer in the Benares hermitage, followed by the meeting with Sri Yukteswar in a crowded lane. “Are you able to have a little room where you can close the door and be alone?” “Yes.” I reflected that this saint descended from the general to the particular with disconcerting speed. “That is your cave.” The yogi bestowed on me a gaze of illumination which I have never forgotten. “That is your sacred mountain. That is where you will find the kingdom of God.” His simple words instantaneously banished my life-long obsession for the Himalayas. In a burning paddy field I awoke from the monticolous dreams of eternal snows. “Young sir, your divine thirst is laudable. I feel great love for you.” Ram Gopal took my hand and led me to a quaint hamlet. The adobe houses were covered with coconut leaves and adorned with rustic entrances. The saint seated me on the umbrageous bamboo platform of his small cottage. After giving me sweetened lime juice and a piece of rock candy, he entered his patio and assumed the lotus posture. In about four hours, I opened my meditative eyes and saw that the moonlit figure of the yogi was still motionless. As I was sternly reminding my stomach that man does not live by bread alone, Ram Gopal approached me. “I see you are famished; food will be ready soon.” A fire was kindled under a clay oven on the patio; rice and dal were quickly served on large banana leaves. My host courteously refused my aid in all cooking chores. ‘The guest is God,’ a Hindu proverb, has commanded devout observance from time immemorial. In my later world travels, I was charmed to see that a similar respect for visitors is manifested in rural sections of many countries. The city dweller finds the keen edge of hospitality blunted by superabundance of strange faces.

It was not just the manner of their arrival—traveling in government-assigned trucks instead of stealing across the Himalayan passes on foot—that separated them from their Tibetan Buddhist compatriots. Certainly, both groups shared a desire to extricate themselves from their desperate situation in Tibet, but the manner in which they were received in India quickly divided them. The Tibetan Muslims, by asserting and receiving formal acknowledgment of their Indian ancestry, arrived in India effectively as Indians, not Tibetan refugees. The consequences of this differentiation began to be manifested almost instantly, as they crossed over the mountainous pass into India. Greeted as Indians, not Tibetans, as citizens, not refugees, as Muslims, not Buddhists, the Khache faced a very different set of circumstances, choices, and reception in post-Partition India than did the Buddhist followers of the Dalai Lama.

Phía Đông của cao nguyên Tây Tạng là chỗ xuất phát của nhiều con sông lớn nữa, trong đó có Hoàng Hà, Trường Giang và Cửu Long. Hoàng Hà và Trường Giang là hai con sông trọng yếu nhất của Trung Quốc, dòng chảy của chúng là quê hương của một nền văn hóa thâm hậu nhất của loài người mà về sau tôi sẽ đi thăm. Còn Cửu Long là nguồn sống của nhiều nước Đông Nam Á, trong đó có Việt Nam. Nếu lấy cao nguyên Tây Tạng làm tâm điểm, vẽ một vòng tròn bán kính chưa đến ngàn cây số thì vòng tròn đó bao gồm tất cả nguồn cội của những con sông nói ở trên. Chỉ điều đó thôi đã gây cho tôi một lòng kính sợ đối với cao nguyên Tây Tạng, "nóc nhà của thế giới". Đúng, không phải là sự ngẫu nhiên khi ánh sáng của minh triết loài người xuất phát từ vùng đất lạ lùng này. Tôi đã đến Cửu Long giang miền Tây Nam Bộ và từng thấy con nước mãnh liệt của nó. Nguồn của nó không phải tầm thường, dòng sông đó là anh em với Hằng hà, Trường Giang, nó mang khí lạnh của Hy Mã, sức sáng của tuyết trắng, sự uy nghi của non cao, cái bí ẩn của các Man-đa-la vô hình. Nếu nó có bị ô nhiễm thì cũng vì con người bạc nghĩa, thế nhưng dù thế nó vẫn nhân hậu sống theo người. Nó vẫn không hế mất tính thiêng liêng của nguồn cội và vì tâm người ô nhiễm nên cảm nhận chúng nhiễm ô. Về sau, tôi còn đến Hằng hà nhiều lần trên bước lữ hành tại Ấn Độ cũng như sẽ có dịp đi dọc Trường Giang qua những vùng linh địa của Trung Quốc. Rồi lại có ngày tôi đã tôi đã đến cao nguyên Tây Tạng, đi dọc sông Tsangpo chảy từ hàm ngựa và thở hít không khí loãng trên miền đất cao 4000m trong Man-đa-la vĩ đại của địa cầu. Một ngày nào đó hy vọng tôi sẽ có dịp đến thượng nguồn Cửu Long, sẽ thấy một màu nước xanh lục như màu nước Hằng hà và sẽ nhớ về miền Tây Nam Bộ của mình.

Whether this mysterious sanctuary hidden amid Pemako’s mist-shrouded mountains can ever be located geographically is of secondary importance to the journey itself. In the Buddhist tradition, the goal of pilgrimage is not so much to reach a particular destination as to awaken within oneself the qualities and energies of the sacred site, which ultimately lie within our own minds.

The Falls of the Tsangpo had offered turn-of-the-century explorers a geographical quest to rival the search for the headwaters of the Nile. But the Tibetans—who knew of it already—did not view the falls as a topographical trophy but as a sacrament, a threshold between the physical universe and the world of the spirit.

As I followed the accounts of Tibetan pilgrims, as well as those of Victorian and Edwardian explorers, Pemako became for me a realm of unbounded possibility, a place where geographical exploration merged with discoveries of the spirit.

Our own master, Tsara Dharmakirti Rinpoche, also lived by this advice. He took the Way of a Bodhisattva as one of his heart practices, taking this text with him everywhere he traveled. There are many stories of him living by the words of Patrul Rinpoche and the other lojong masters. One story recounts how, after the Communist restructuring of Tibet, he was placed in charge of the tent where food for the local village was collected and distributed. At that time, the villagers could only eat their quota of food, and the distribution of food was highly regulated. Because our master was respected and revered by others, the women who oversaw the milk collection offered in secret to let him have as much milk as he wanted. Tsara Dharmakirti Rinpoche loved milk, and one day he went into the tent and lifted the lid on a large vat of milk, thinking of scooping up a ladleful. But before he did so, he thought about the suffering caused by focusing on personal wishes and desires. He put the lid back on the vat of milk and resolved to drink only black tea from then on.

Imagine that such a flood could emerge from a socialist revolution, my dear comrades. However, to Imagine that these unkempt, uncivilized types arriving from Mongolia, the plateaus of tibet or the depths of Siberia, could bring us any culture, civilization, or revival is pure madness! For if the Soviets break through Europe, the capital class is fucked! but you too, labor is fucked! I have decided to travel to all the factories today because it is not possible that capitalism wins! That the un-noble capital class remains united! For by the end of the war, we must be united! For united, we are strong and will destroy them!