The Pigeons of the Stupa

The great stupa of Boudanath is the largest stupa in the world. Boudanath lies to the east of Kathmandu. It is a sacred site for Buddhists, and circling it in a clockwise direction—kora—is good for one's karma. It is optional to bring in motion the circa 300 prayer wheels that are found in the outer wall of the stupa, hidden by curtains. In Boudanath lives a large community of exile Tibetans.

The immediate environment of the stupa houses a large colony of pigeons, they number in the tens of thousands. All day long people will come and feed the pigeons. Some entrepreneurs have chosen position immediately next to the feeding place with large stocks of grain, that they sell by the cup. Sometimes the pigeons are startled by something and then half of them exit the feeding frenzy and fly up as on command, to be replaced at once by the same number of fresh pigeons.

Pigeons sit on the roofs and windows of adjacent houses, they sit on anything that gives a foothold, they sit on the stupa, but they don't sit on the nearby Tibetan-Buddhist Ghyanghuti monastery.

Why do people feed the pigeons. Aside from the few tourist with selfiesticks who picture themselves with the pigeons in the background and who by the way don't feed, the feeding population mainly consists of young and middle-aged Tibetan women.

No pigeons on Ghyanghuti monastery

For Buddhists life is sacred, they ordinarily don't kill animals and they leave it to the Newari butchers to provide them with meat for their dinners, as not all Tibetans are vegetarians.

So feeding the pigeons must have something to with the reverence Tibetans feel for life. And since Tibetans as Buddhists also believe in reincarnation, they could very well be thinking to feed a relative, or their parents, or maybe themselves in a next or previous incarnation.

Popular belief learns that reincarnation is linear in time, but I'm not so sure of that. I haven't gotten very deep into the Buddhist concept of time, but I've read sources which suggest that reincarnation can be circular, so that a next reincarnation may happen backwards in time. To me this sounds very plausible, because bardo, the intermediate stage between two lives, is timeless.

So what would these Tibetans ladies be thinking when they feed the pigeons. I guess they won't have very deep philosophical thoughts about afterlife and reincarantion.  They may be just doing it out of habit, with a hidden thought of gaining some karma.