Pilgrimage to India

HOLY PLACE: Rachel Rose (left) and room mate Kelsey Burghoffer at Vulture's Peak, Rajgir, Bihar, India. The mountain is, by tradition, one of several sites used by the Buddha and his disciples for training and retreat. PICTURE / SUPPLIED

Whanganui resident Rachel Rose is back from an "intense, whirlwind" trip to India and says she's glad she went - and very glad to be home.
She was one of 200,000 people from 96 countries who travelled to Bodhgaya to listen to the Dalai Lama, who over 13 days gave teachings and offered Kalachakra empowerment.
Kalachakra is an esoteric class of teachings preserved within the Tibetan Buddhist lineage, traditionally kept secret. But Kalachakra has been offered to large audiences, says Rachel. "It also has a strong connection with individual and world peace, which may be why His Holiness has offered it so often and why so many people attend."
This was the 34th time the Dalai Lama has conferred Kalachakra empowerment and was all the more special, Rachel says, for being in Bodhgaya.
"Bodhgaya is the holiest of sites for Buddhists of all types. It was here that the historical Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment."
She visited the Mahabodhi temple, erected on that spot, and also travelled to the ruins of Nalanda Monastery and Vulture's Peak, a mountaintop where the Buddha gave one of his most important teachings. "These are such special pilgrimage sites, and it was brilliant to actually stand in these places I'd heard so much about," says Rachel.
But she describes the logistics as gruelling.
Security was very tight. Every morning participants had to queue to get into the ground, passing through a metal detector, being body searched and having their bags searched.
"The weather was cold and very damp, there was a persistent fog and the air felt very polluted. I wore a face mask whenever I was out of doors. I would head to the ground at dawn, across the rice fields. That way I would get through security before long queues formed - and also miss some of the bedlam on the main road, where there was a flood of people, cycles and auto rickshaws and motorbikes.
"Inside it would get steadily more crowded over the course of the morning as people flooded in. You marked your place on the ground by taping down a piece of plastic or a cushion. At the end of the teaching each day, everyone tried to leave at once. I got caught in a crush more than once. It was unnerving but the mood of the crowd was very relaxed and happy."
This was Rachel's third trip to India and she says she had some idea of what to expect, "but nothing could really prepare me for being among a crowd of that size".
"You also had so many different nationalities squished up against each other. It made me reflect on how ideas like personal space and what behaviour is appropriate are really culturally relative."
With the crowd, proximity and very basic sanitation (inside the ground were a "few squat toilet versions of portaloos"), people inevitably got sick. "There was a nasty cold/cough doing the rounds. Just about everyone got sick," Rachel reports.
Rachel stayed at a guesthouse run by a Frenchwoman and her Indian husband. The income from the business supports a school for poor children who wouldn't otherwise receive an education.
Today Bodhgaya is little more than a village, in one of the poorest states in India.
"The poverty was starkly obvious. People lived without running water, sanitation or electricity. Cows were tethered outside the front door, goats and chickens roamed at will, picking through the rubbish.
"When I first got home, the quiet seemed unnatural, although such a relief. I'd been going to sleep to the sound of Tibetan pop concerts and being woken at 4.30am by the 'wake-up' gong at the monastery next door.
"It's so great to be home. I've very glad I made the trip. I've been waiting years for this opportunity. And although Bodhgaya was logistically very gruelling, nowhere else would the ceremony have happened on this scale. Many tens of thousands of Tibetan monks were chanting the Heart Sutra before the teachings. The heads of three of the four Tibetan Buddhist lineages were present, as were a great many significant teachers, scholars and practitioners. The Namgyal monks, ritual masters of Kalachakra, carried out extraordinary preparation and painstakingly created the Kalachakra sand mandala and constructed exquisite altars and offers. The event finished with deeply moving prayers for His Holiness' long life. The devotion the Tibetan people feel for him was evident."
Rachel became interested in Buddhism in the early 2000s while living in Melbourne and says she was fortunate to find highly qualified Tibetan teachers to study with. She returned to New Zealand in 2010 after five years at the Chenrezig Institute in Queensland.