PHOTO ESSAY NO. 1

The World According to Garpa

   Garpa’s life work is carved on untold thousands of mani stones, the stones sculpted with the mantras in Tibetan script. His workshop at the Tashiding Monastery in Sikkim is in a quiet corner behind the stupas, where the land drops off into pine trees. That is where I found him, cross-legged on an old burlap sack, raising small puffs of rock dust by pounding on the surface of a flat stone with a well-used, though sharp, chisel, allowing the mantra Om Mani Padme Hung to manifest. Garpa also sculpts reliefs of Buddhas and the Tibetan deities.

   The first time I met him, Garpa’s engaging smile assured me that my presence was not an intrusion. He indicated a block of wood beside him for me to sit on. I asked him how long he’d been carving stones at Tashiding. He asked to see my malar, or Tibetan rosary, which was hung around my neck. He proceeded to turn the wooden beads between his thumb and forefinger one by one. I thought he was praying. Then he stopped. He handed the malar back to me, careful that I put my finger between the two beads he had reached. “That many,” he said, and continued chiseling stone. I counted the beads. Garpa had been carving stones at Tashiding for forty-five years, since he fled with the Dalai Lama when the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1959.
   Garpa’s clothes are simple. His manner is direct, and he is at ease. And though his work requires his fullest concentration—carving stone is clearly his form of meditation—being interrupted seems part of his daily round. For his studio, really a corrugated tin roof backed up by a stone wall, is on the kora, or circle, around which pilgrims circumambulate the Tashiding Monastery.
   The circling of sacred sites is one of the main forms of worship in the Tibetan Buddhist world. Whether it is a simple mountain temple, a stupa, or Mount Kailash itself, you’ll find a well-worn trail around it and pilgrims circling, sometimes for hours, malars in their hands, chanting the holy mantras or speaking softly to each other.

   Tashiding is a quiet place, and many of those doing the kora are Garpa’s neighbors and have been circling the monastery for an hour or two or more every day for decades. Garpa greets them like the old friends that they are and offers them a block of wood to sit on, pauses his work for some moments to exchange news, then continues coaxing Tibetan letters out of stone.
   I found it soothing to become a forgotten presence next to Garpa, the hammer falling on the chisel with the regularity of the beating of a drum, the chisel carving the stone, the letters appearing. And though Garpa’s hands are bent with age, he wields his tools with the precision and artistry of a violinist drawing his bow.

   Sikkim—in India’s eastern Himalayas tucked between Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan—is dominated by Mount Kanchenjunga, the planet’s third highest peak, which is so sacred that though it has been scaled, no one has actually set foot on its very summit. To put one’s feet on the summit of Kanchenjunga would be as offensive as putting one's feet on an altar.

   Sikkim was known in ancient times as Beyul Demojong, the “Hidden Fruitful Valley.” The Tashiding Monastery sits atop a mountain that Guru Padmasambhava, the 8th Century founder of Tibetan Buddhism, declared to be the sacred heart or navel of this Himalayan kingdom. In fact, ‘Tashiding’ means ‘Auspicious Center.’ From Tashiding, one looks out over the surrounding green mountains and the snow-capped peaks beyond, and one feels one is at the very heart of Sikkim, a land of unsurpassed beauty and spiritual legacy.

   In the four cardinal directions from Tashiding are the four caves sacred to Padmasambhava, where he hid innumerable texts and treasures to be unearthed in future times. To the east is the Great Secret Cave. To the south is the Cave of the Celestial Goddess’s Womb. To the west is the Cave of Great Happiness. And to the North is the Cave of God’s Precious Heart. And in their center lies Tashiding, also known as Drakar Tashiding, the White Rock of the Auspicious Center.

   The white rock of Tashiding’s name is a rough rock face not twenty paces from where Garpa has spent the last half century carving stones. In it one can make out the faint outline of a doorway. It is said this is a doorway to the kingdom of Shambhala, and at least one monk is known to have passed through that door in a trance and to have returned clutching the flowering branches of a plant that is reputed to grow in that hidden kingdom and nowhere else. The story goes that he then went to the river to wash himself. He put the branches down. The river rose and swept them away.

   The fruit of Garpa’s spiritual endeavors are not so fleeting. His life work surrounds him. Even once you realize that almost half a century of patient work has gone into carving the mani stones at Tashiding, it is still difficult to believe they are the product of one man. Tashiding abounds with walls built entirely of his carved stones. He has carved so many mani stones that there are walls constructed of stones stacked together edgewise so the lettering isn’t even visible. Yet even that which is carved in stone is impermanent. While his more recent works are still brightly painted, his earlier works are weathering with time.

   Garpa is neither a lama nor a monk. He has a wife and a grown daughter, who, together with his son-in-law, live with him in a house just outside the monastery grounds.

   I asked Garpa how it felt, knowing that his stones would far outlast him.
   “How should it feel?” he responded. “The beauty of the mani is not coming from me. The mani itself has the beauty in it. I only bring it out. This is what I do.”
   I asked Garpa whether he has sponsors, people who pay for his work. “Occasionally,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter whether I have a sponsor or not. My work is stone cutting. This is my form of meditation, to get rid of all bad karma.”
   “I’ve had two main sponsors in my life,” he told me. “They were my root gurus, Dilgo Khyentse Rimpoche and Chatrul Rimpoche. Chatrul Rimpoche is still alive. He is 94 years old. Every year he goes to the mouths of the Ganges below Calcutta and releases thousands of fish bound for market into the sea. I started carving stones in Tibet before I fled the Chinese invasion. When I first arrived at Tashiding, I wasn’t very good. Chatrul Rimpoche saw my work and invited me to his monastery outside Darjeeling for six or seven months. He taught me to carve stones correctly. Since then I’ve also carved stones at his monastery, at the Pemayangsi Monastery here in Sikkim, and in Nepal.”

   Garpa told me that one time the Dalai Lama came to Tashiding. He, too, was surprised to hear that all those mani stones were carved by one man, and asked to see the man who had carved them. Garpa was brought before the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama looked mirthfully into Garpa’s eyes and pulled his beard. He held Garpa’s face between his two hands and laughed. He told him to continue his good works, which Garpa intends to do, though he confided in me that in the end he intends to go to Bodh Gaya, the place of Buddhist pilgrimage where the Buddha reached enlightenment. “If I go to Bodh Gaya,” Garpa said, picking up his chisel, “I don’t think I’ll come back. I will go there and meditate.”