Only one of many at Beijing's
Tibetan Buddhist Lama Temple
called "Yonghegong" in Chinese

Streetside snacking options:

I'd been told it was only a half hour's walk to the Tibetan Buddhist Lama Temple, but then that didn't take into consideration the fact that I would become wonderfully lost, wandering busy boulevards and packed-dirt hutongs for miles in northeast Beijing. At every turn I'd verify the general direction by pointing to the "Yonghegong" characters on my tourist map. Some people would simply nod and point. Others would launch into several minutes of complicated instructions, of which I understood nothing but the body language. It was enough.

After three hours of asking "yong-szchee-gong?" a word I finally mastered, I arrived at the temple already with a full day's worth of experiences. The marketplace near the bus station on Dongzhimenwai Xiejie street is full of life, with produce stands selling Asian pears, strawberries, something that looks like mulberries, apples, oranges, bananas, and donburi, that vile-smelling fruit that some people love, some people hate.

You can also buy sunglasses for about $2.00 and backpacks and everything else that you've ever seen with the label "Made in China." Everything here is seconds. The "firsts" they send for export.

Further down the road is a group of repair shops, from cars (The Automobile Beauty Shop) to mopeds (Japanese and Chinese) to bicycles.I stopped to watch an old man at his bicycle repair shop. I wanted to ask if I could look inside, but he was so intent on his task that he never noticed as I took photos and even stepped inside the dark shack to inspect the biggest organized mess of used bicycle parts I've ever seen.

I snacked on little Chinese steamed dumplings stuffed full of lamb and bok choy, pancakes cooked with scallions, a fruit drink of unidentified species and a mango ice pop. By the time I got to an outdoor noodle shop I was too full to try a bowl. There, a young man was shaving noodles from a huge lump of dough with a special notched cleaver into a wok of boiling water. Another man chopped scallions, and a woman stirred broth with chunks of meat in it. Customers were served the mixture and proceeded to slurp it up so loudly that I thought they might just be putting it on for me, but they weren't.

"Yong-szche-gong?"

I was pointed down a quiet hutong so untouristed that people stopped to stare as I walked by. The street was lined with stucco houses with roofs in the traditional style; terra-cotta tiles curved over the top of the house in a graceful sideways parenthesis turned up at each end. Life was nice, here. Peaceful. I looked up to the blue sky, rare in Beijing, to the bright yellow cranes looming above. Today they were being used to put up replacement high-rise apartments over the remains of the leveled hutongs a street over. In a few months they might be here.

I bought pineapple from a woman carving the peel off in neat spirals, following the eyes round and round until the bottom. "Yong-szche-gong?"

Yes. I was still headed in the right direction and in fact in only a few minutes I was confronted with the temple gates. I wasn't quite ready, having been so happily lost, and wondered if I ought to simply taxi home and save the experience for another day.

The temple gates

Lamaism is the principal religion of Tibet and Mongolia, not a Chinese form of Buddhism. There were some interesting customs practiced here: devil dances being the most famous. H.Y. Lowe in the Adventures of Wu: The Life Cycle of a Peking Man, describes the scene:

In the center of the courtyard the attendant priests with the help of the police manage to make a clearing with the help of long whips and the tossing of handfuls of lime powder, and within the cordon thus thrown are seen the various characters of this colorful paganistic show, all clad in conventional garbs of rich embroideries though shabby from age and wearing big top-heavy masks of various kinds, some representing the various Lamaist deities and others the devilish members with ugly faces, some with their hats decorated with fascimiles of human skulls and other brandish short religious weapons and other wearing the heads of cows and deer.

In the center is the figure of buttered dough painted red and carried ceremoniously on a small wooden stand--the embodiment of the devil. Chanting of Tibetan scriptures and playing of religious music, echoing drums and horns, accompany the mimikry subduing process. A few minutes later the entire group form into a procession and make for the gate of the temple where the dough figure is cut into pieces and burned, thus ending the Devil Dance.

Inside is the first hall is a larger than life Buddha, fat and gold with sparkling eyes and scarlet lips. The sculptor seemed to have caught him on the backswing of a rocking motion just before he raises his hand up to slap his knee, punctuating his mirth. His expression is garish and slightly shocking and after first being taken aback at the unexpected mood of him I catch his mood and smile in spite of myself. I read in my guidebook that he is an incarnation of the Buddha of the future, Maitreya.

This is only the first of many halls, and I wish I'd come in the morning, before too many tourist busses arrived. There is a group of young German men who are not terribly discreet about rating pretty girls. Perhaps they think the language gap disguises their conversation. The Chinese girls avoid their gaze and the foreign girls either glare or toss their hair. Inside the second building a Chinese tour group leader speaks loudly, often drawing guffaws from her flock.Inappropriate behavior, I think, for a church or temple, however much a tourist attraction it be, but I am unwilling to leave without at least an overview, and so dutifully tromp through the Palace of Peace and Harmony, the The Hall of Eternal Divine Protection, the Hall of the Wheel of the Law, the Pavilion of Ten Thousand Happinesses (with its overwhelming 26 meter/85 foot high Buddha, huge though a third is underground to keep it from falling in an earthquake), the Chamber of the Reflected Buddha, the Yamantaka Hall, the Hall of the Altar of Ordination, the Hall of the Law, the Panchen hall, the Hall of Mathematics, the Hall of Explicating the Scriptures, the Hall of Tantra and the Medicine Hall.There are moments of peace.

This Lama Temple is the most famous Tibetan Buddhist temple in eastern China. It escaped the ravages of the Cultural Revolution thanks to the protection of a high-level official though it was left in a terrible state of disrepair until rennovations in 1979. It's full of novice monks from Inner Mongolia who study the Tibetan language and the secret practices of the Yellow Sect of Tibetan Buddhism. Between making sure you don't take photos inside the buildings they busy themselves with offerings - flowers, fruits, little cakes. On some of the walls I saw beautiful intricate paintings which I later realized were tapestries woven with scenes of worship and rural life, incredibly detailed. Ceilings were painted in bright squares with gold leaf, in some rooms are shelves stacked with monk's robes in saffron and maroon, hundreds of them. Every sound echoes, the air inside each dim room feels fresh as if filtered by the shelter. Surrounding the Buddha's are protector warriors, bodhisattvas (awakened beings who teach the spirit of the Buddha), offerings of food, candles, and brocades. A peaceful and sumptuous atmosphere protected from the reality outside.