Category Archives for spirituality

Turtle Feet

“In order to understand something clearly, one must first give it up.”

I said something similar to one of my best friends in Dharamsala the week before I left. While I knew I would miss India like crazy – and I was right – I experienced so much that I knew I needed to leave to let it all soak in.

I picked up Turtle Feet at a small bookstore in Majnu ka Tilla, the Tibetan colony in Delhi. It jumped out at me because I had been thinking a lot about my monk friend, his life, and the community’s expectations of monks. The front flap of Turtle Feet included a line about demystifying monks’ lives. Perfect food for thought.

Back in Montreal, when I finally sat down to read it, my first impression was that the author, Nikolai Grozni, was a stupid injie (Westerner) who took his vows to become a monk without fully understanding what it meant. His friends were the epitome of the Western tourists I hated in Dharamsala, oblivious to the culture and community around them and disrespectful without even being aware of it.

But as I read, I discovered that the author was slowly learning lessons that gave him a deeper understanding of the community – many lessons I myself had to learn. In one chapter, Grozni writes about meeting Tsar, a Western monk who smoked and was always hanging out with girls. At first he seemed interested in Tsar because he was a fellow Western monk who wasn’t afraid to still act however he wanted. But by the end of the chapter, Grozni realized that he was being judged by the community for hanging out with someone who had such a bad reputation.

Reading about the difficulties Grozni encountered on his spiritual quest for the truth made me think more about my own struggle to understand the Buddhist ideas of emptiness and impermanence. The more I have read about Buddhism, the more I have felt like a stupid Westerner who has been taught to hang on to people and experiences, be miserable missing them when they were gone, and to deeply fear death. In comparison, my Tibetan friends seem to be able to cope much better with life’s changes. I keep trying to override the worldview that is deeply engrained in me, but the process is making me realize how difficult it is to change my fundamental beliefs when they are the basis of my actions and reactions on a daily basis. I have also realized that until now, I have not chosen those fundamental beliefs, I have merely soaked them in from my surroundings. I took some comfort in knowing that I am not alone in my struggle; even as a monk who was studying Buddhist texts with learned teachers, Grozni also seemed to be grappling to understand Buddhism through the worldview from his childhood.

Grozni’s descriptions of Dharamsala are so vivid. He describes the bustle of the town, the packs of dogs and beggars, and being surrounded by the Himalayas so precisely that I felt again what it was like to be there. It made me miss the fresh air and the night sky and the million sounds I could hear from my bed in the morning, and even the damn monkeys.

At a time when I was painfully missing India, Turtle Feet helped me realize that Dharamsala will never be the same as it was during the year I was there. Many of my friends have left, our lives have changed, and our experiences have changed us. At the same time, I know that Dharamsala will always be there and will probably always evoke a sense of awe in those who visit it.

I am all of these: Consumer. Invader. Crusader. Seducer. Self-hating Westerner. Buffoon.

A Traveller’s Response to “There’s No Such Thing As Eco-Tourism” by Anneli Rufus.

I agree: colonialism isn’t dead. The dreaded word has crossed my mind on numerous trips in the past, but never more powerfully than in the last 5 months that I have been living in Asia. My relations to those around me have undeniably been affected by the notions of the consumer, invader, crusader, seducer, self-hating Westerner, and buffoon, all of which play into today’s form of colonialism.

I am a consumer of culture. I pay to see traditional dances and puppet shows, and to enter temples. I search out and relish new places, new experiences, and new foods. I may not buy typical souvenirs, but I avidly consume these new experiences. Similar to the way a fire consumes things, I have also destroyed the cultural essence of interactions by taking photos. As an anthropology student, I became really interested in the duality of photography as an art form and also as an ethnographic technique. While I can’t deny that a picture may be able to capture a ceremony or emotion, I have found that it often removes the human interaction that might have taken place in that moment. When I started being approached by tourists from Java asking to have their pictures taken with me, I understood just how alienating it can be to have a camera pointed in your face. All of a sudden, I was the odd one, the “other,” deemed to be so different and interesting that the mere act of me being there at the same time as them needed to be caught on film. I was really uncomfortable with the cameras pointed my way, openly or covertly. How then, can I turn around and expect people to let me take pictures of them? I can learn so much more about them (and they can learn more about me) by watching and asking the right questions.

I am an invader. This is not my place, and it never will be. Westerners in Bali may be able to speak Bahasa Indonesia, many become Hindu and eat local food, they may even marry a Balinese. But their skin will always be a different colour, and they will always be seen as a tourist once they step outside of their group of friends or the banjar (community) in which they live. I even found myself and my friends making that erroneous judgment. When I saw other white people, I instinctively thought that they were just tourists. It’s as if, because I lived there and hung out with mostly Balinese friends, I didn’t consider myself a tourist anymore. I have found that expats here in Thailand do the same thing. Loud, obnoxious and inconsiderate tourists make the farangs (foreigners) living here sink down in their chairs, and exchange embarrassed glances with one another, as if they are different than the tourists. You can feel this sense of superiority at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok every night, where expats mingle amongst themselves. They seem to think that they have adapted to and joined the local culture, and that this distinguishes them from the tourists, making them less of an invader. A wolf who sincerely considers himself a sheep is indeed an interesting phenomenon.

I am a crusader and a seducer, even if indirectly. My way of life and fundamental beliefs about society and relationships come through very differently in another country. In Bali, I got the distinct impression that people my age are extremely envious of what they see as the Western lifestyle and the values that entails. They want it for themselves at the expense of their traditional way of life. They want to be free and independent and travel the world, rather than having the responsibility of taking care of their families and contributing to the banjar. So while I haven’t directly and vehemently promoted my beliefs, they are being adopted by the younger generations. I haven’t tried to seduce locals to my way of life, but I can see it happening.

I am a self-hating Westerner. In the face of my Balinese friends’ deeply rooted religious beliefs, I felt spiritually confused and almost envious that their spirituality was intertwined with their daily lives. An argument with a guy named Wayan at the local drinking hole makes an excellent case in point for my own spiritual uncertainty. One night, Wayan said that Rastafari was a fashion style and not a religion. Amongst a bunch of self-proclaimed Rastas who weren’t rising to the defense of their beliefs, I felt compelled to argue the opposite: Rastafari has a strong biblical and historical basis like any other religion, with deep beliefs that influence how people live their lives. Some Rasta beliefs, such as dreadlocks, have been adopted by some people who may not know the deeper meaning of the symbols that they wear. My main argument was that religion cannot be reduced to what a person looks like on the outside, but is more fundamentally about what is in his or her heart. I told Wayan that to me, he didn’t especially look like a Hindu, sitting there in jeans and a t-shirt. At this point, he got really mad and started accusing me of being a stupid white person who knew nothing about religion, and especially nothing about Hinduism. He said that I didn’t believe in any god and the more I learned about other religions, the more confused I got. I was taken aback by the anger in his voice when he said this, but I totally agreed with Wayan. Despite that, there was no way for me to convince him that trying to understand and learn from different religions was acceptable position for me to be in. I may have finally won over Wayan and everyone listening when I said that I believed god was in everything, but his point had been made: a lot of Westerners are spiritually confused and I don’t think that any of us really like to admit it.

I am a also a buffoon. From the moment I stepped into Thailand, I have felt like a stupid white person – and nowhere nearly as much as in taxis. Most taxi drivers here do not speak English, so when I go out on my own, I carry along a little map my coworkers had made with my address and all the street names written in Thai. Since I cannot speak Thai, I thought this would solve the problem of communicating with taxi drivers. On my first time going home alone from a market which I had already been to several times with coworkers, I got into a taxi and showed the driver my map. He nodded and smiled so I thought he understood and knew where he was going. After our first wrong turn, I told him he should have gone the other way. He said something that seemed like “this is a better way,” so I gave him the benefit of my doubt. After 10 minutes and passing several large overpasses, I knew that this was not a better way and after a similar experience in Kuala Lumpur, I assumed that he was taking me the wrong way to make me pay more money. I held my cool as long as I could because I had been warned that Thais think it’s funny when Westerners get upset. But eventually I told him that I knew this way was more expensive and that this was a bad thing to do to farangs. He said something in Thai and kept driving. After an hour on what should have been a 5-minute trip, I realized that he wasn’t trying to scam me and that we were lost because neither of us could understand one another. I must have mispronounced my street name – there are 5 different tones on vowels in Thai! – and on top of that he couldn’t even read the Thai on the map I showed him. This has taught me that it is totally unrealistic to think I could live here for the next 9 months without having to learn such a hard language. However, people here who are learning Thai have pointed out the catch-22: while I want to learn so that I’m not such a stupid buffoon, my undoubtedly horrible pronunciation will only make me more of a buffoon as I learn!

All of this begs the question: why do we have this quest to travel and to go on so-called “adventure” trips? I think that we, as a society, have become bored. And I don’t just mean Westerners. In my experience teaching English online, I met hundreds of Asians who loved traveling just as much as Westerners. I think that we are not happy with our lives at home so we feel that we need to leave in order to get our heart beating again. In a world that so highly values commodities and personal accomplishments, traveling also gives us more bragging rights.

The more I’ve traveled, the more I’ve realized how lucky I am and how great I have it back home. I am privileged to have grown up in a society that allows me to study as much and whatever I want at school and that doesn’t limit the importance of my life as a woman to the house I keep, how happy my husband is and how many healthy children I have.

Does that mean that I will never travel again? Probably not. But these ideas definitely change how I travel. Being in another country, I am aware every day that I am a part of a new form of colonialism that makes me a consumer, invader, crusader, seducer, self-hating Westerner, and buffoon, all in one. It’s all part of the humbling experience of trying to understand another culture, whether you are passing through as a traveler or are trying to settle in.