On the cab drive back from Kangra, Bennett and I succumbed to an inevitable—necessary?—photographic saturation with the colors and landscapes. When you’re out of practice and in an exotic new environment, taking photos can feel like being a kid in a candy store, grabbing everything that looks good until you eventually feel sick. I remember a sense of relief when my camera battery died. For better or worse, Bennett had replacement batteries and memory cards for his camera, so his binge went that much longer. Add to that the dangerous “continuous shutter” feature and our cameras started to sound like machine guns of light-capturing greed.
Of course, once you reign yourself in, it turns out these are just symptoms of a healthy process. If you’re not looking closely, then you can’t see. When used improperly, a camera distances the photographer from the subject. But with some discipline, looking through a dark box attached to a lens can help trigger awareness and deeper observations about the world. I find this to be true about any recording process, but perhaps most in the case of ambient field recordings, where the recordist must remain silent—and thus almost motionless—for long stretches, reaching a state that might be comparable to that of a Buddhist meditator.
Monks I’ve talked to here point out a big difference between modern science and Tibetan Buddhism: science explores only what’s externally observable. If it isn’t measurable, new forms of measurements must be devised (qualitative data and the blossoming branches of so-called “soft sciences”). Otherwise, one must assume that a phenomenon may as well not exist. For several thousand years, Buddhism has gone where science cannot, attempting to dissect mental phenomena that are not directly observable. But there’s a cool overlap: a logical methodology is employed in both science and Buddhist analysis. To find the truth, you have to get beneath the surface by asking questions, not taking things on faith. If Star Trek were invented today, I imagine there would be a Tibetan Buddhist on the crew.
Tibetan Buddhist monks study debate for many years. One Namgyal monk gave me a very basic example from an early childhood class: “What is the difference between color and white color?” “Is color white color? No, so white color is not color, and color is not white color.” The practice of making distinctions. I’m barely scratching the surface here, and I hardly understand it myself. However, I do know that once this is mastered, this practice can be used during analytical mediation with the eventual goal of direct perception (as opposed to conceptualizing things—an indirect form of perception). Interestingly, the Tibetan school system (not just the monastic system) is starting to apply Buddhist analyses in other subjects beyond standalone debate classes. Each evening, the sound of monks and nuns debating echoes across the hill station where we live.
The cab stopped on a quiet stretch of mountain road about ten minutes from McLeod. The taxi driver got out and started speaking to me in Hindi. Chemey said that he needed his shirt from the back seat pocket where I was sitting. These days, cab drivers who are not wearing uniforms face steep fines.
