Tibetan Truths

The floor was packed dirt; the white-washed walls and ceiling were earthen, but a shiny blackboard stood up front with chalk that resembled chunks of pumice. A troop of five- to twenty-year-old monks with neatly shaved heads soon filed in. They were rambunctious in their violet-red robes, but stopped short the moment they saw me. I greeted them in English, which they found hilarious. Their teacher snapped them to a quick attention. Motioning for them to open their workbooks, he conducted a lesson on colors.

“Red, green, yellow, orange, blue. Red, green, yellow, orange, blue,” he recited as a chant.
   
“Red, grin, yell-o, arnge, bloo,” the students rocked back and forth, murmuring as one.

I started wondering whether the students even knew what the words meant beyond some bizarre, foreign mantra when the teacher began a new color scheme: “Pink, purple, black, white, brown.” He pronounced the last word hesitantly as “brune” and glanced my way for help. When I corrected his pronunciation, the littlest monk giggled and—when I looked at him—turned his head away shyly, stealing my heart in the process. The teacher posed a question in Tibetan and the class once again erupted in laughter. He looked at me, smiled, and handed over his workbook. “Will you lead our class?” he asked.

I walked to the front of the room and pointed at my shirt. “Black!” I enunciated carefully. The monks looked surprised. “Black!” I repeated.
     
Whispers. A cough. Silence.
         
Then, from the corner, a monk whose years were half my own took the lead. “Blllek,” he mouthed.
       
“Good!” I clapped.
         
Confidence was won. “Blllek!” the other monks chimed in.

After our guided tour of the color wheel, the class ended and the monk escorted me to my bike. It was nearly dusk: the golden Dharma wheel that crested the monastery’s roof glowed in the sunlight. We exchanged addresses, but he warned that it might be a while before he wrote. “I can only mail letters through Western tourists, and they don’t come by so often.”

That’s when I remembered the reason I had set out on my bicycle journey in the first place: to draw some conclusions after a year of traveling in the People’s Republic of China. “I feel so confused,” I confessed. “I don’t know who or what to believe in all of this, and how can I be a journalist if I cannot … ”

He placed his hand on my shoulder. “There are many ways to look. Trust what you see,” he said quietly. Then he turned and walked away, his red robe flowing behind him.

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