Surrounded by the bright green and gold of barley fields, the braided channels of the Yarlung Tsangpo River, and mountains rising beyond, Samye is Tibet’s first Buddhist monastery. Founded in 775, the complex of chapels and stupa towers form a vast mandala – a symbolic and spiritual representation of the whole universe.
In the middle is a hall representing Mount Meru, the sacred mountain, the centre of everything. The ground floor of the hall is Tibetan in design, the first floor Chinese, the uppermost is Khotanese (the Silk Road kingdom on the edge of the Taklamakan desert). Walls are painted bright reds, yellows and whites, echoed in the vivid colours of prayer flags and sacred textiles, and gaudy images of demons – Tibetan Buddhism isn’t soft and quiet, it’s visceral and energetic. Pilgrims walk circuits around Samye, a thrum of muttered prayers and meditations hanging in the air.
Samye was a particular target of suppression during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. It languished for decades, but since 2010 it’s been the focus of a careful restoration project. When I visited in 2016 to film a documentary, one of the traditional roofs was being repaired. I was invited to join the work team, an army of 50 or so eclectically dressed Tibetans who’d given some of their holiday time to come and work on the historic buildings.
The flat roofs are made from hard-packed clay, known as aga. It has a deep sheen, created by many hundreds of thin layers of clay paste being stamped and buffed into one another. Once it’s polished and oiled, aga can last for decades in the high, dry air of the plateau. An aga roof can only be made in the traditional way and was, I was told, an act of devotion.
So, always keen for some participant-observation, I joined one of the lines of workers on the roof as the cameras started rolling. I was handed a length of plastic pipe, with a flat weight at the bottom. The leader started an upbeat call-and-response song and off we went, two shuffling steps forward, to stamp the weight on to the aga surface, a step back, stamp, turn, forward, stamp, turn, then shuffle back two, stamp and begin again. I got the hang of it after a minute, although it felt more like line dancing than devotion.
After five minutes my palm was on fire from the friction of the pipe running through my hand with each stamp. After 10 minutes the cameraman stopped rolling (“we have enough,” he mouthed to me). But everyone around me was in complete flow, singing, stamping and breathing together. I breathed it in, too: here I was, on the roof of the world, making a new roof for the oldest monastery in Tibet.
I asked some of the roof stampers if they were giving their time to the monastery because they wanted to keep Tibetan history alive. They shook their heads and smiled – the question was too political to answer. Were they proud of their role in rebuilding this ancient monastery? They frowned at me in puzzlement – to express pride would be to make it about the self, and this work was about emancipation from self. These hours stamping aga were shuffling steps towards Enlightenment. They weren’t proud, they were thankful. As I doused my raw hand with antiseptic, I realised that I was, too.
Mary-Ann Ochota’s books, Secret Britain and Hidden Histories, are available at guardianbookshop.com
