The Protector of the East

The most important room in a Tibetan-Buddhist monastery is the lha khang (lit. house of god), which is the main hall or shrine room. This is where puja celebration takes place. The main hall is closed with imposing doors and the lha khang is usually only open for celebrations, which can be as often as three or four times daily.

New Dabzang Gompa, Boudhanath, Nepal, 2018

The entrance hall is situated before the main hall. This is where people take their shoes off before entering the main hall. The front and sometimes the sides of the entrance hall are open to the outside, so the entrance hall is always open to the public. The walls are for the most part covered with murals depicting scenes and symbols from Buddhist mythology.

In Buddhist religion Mount Meru is the axis of the world. Meru is located  beyond the physical plane of reality, in a place of perfection and transcendence.
Sometimes one can see a representation of Mount Meru among the murals in the entrance hall.

Jokhang Temple, Lhasa, Tibet, 1996.

Four guardian deities protect the four cardinal points of the compass around Mount Meru. They have fiery haloes and are shown against a background of clouds. The North has an orange colored face and carries an umbrella, the East has a white or pale face and holds a musical instrument, the South has a blue face and carries a sword, while the West has a red face and carries either a stupa or a snake. Their Tibetan names are Chenmizang, Yulkhorsung, Namtöse and Phagyepo. They have different names in other languages.

The Four Protectors of the Cardinal Directions are always present in an entrance hall of a Tibetan-Buddhist monastery. They protect the monastery from harm. The protector of the East and the protector of the South are on the left of the entrance doors, and the protector of the West and the protector of the North are on the right.  Often a huge prayer wheel is also found in or adjacent to the entrance hall.

If a monastery is small and an entrance hall is lacking, the protectors are found on the walls of the main hall.

Kopan Gompa, Boudhanath, Nepal, at corner of stupa, 2018.

As a musicologist I am naturally drawn to music, musicians, and musical instruments. So from the day in 1996 I entered the Jokhang Monastery in Lhasa, Tibet, and first met Yulkhorsung (Wylie: Yul-‘khor-srung), the Protector of the East, I was hooked. I've been photographing Yulkhorsung ever since and I now know that Yulkhorsung and his fellow protectors are not only found on murals in the entrance halls to monasteries. They are also found on the four square corners of stupas as three-dimensional figurines. When an imaginary line is drawn from the center of the stupa to a protector at its corner, it should coincide with that protector's cardinal direction. The four protectors are also found in Chinese Buddhist temples and monasteries as larger-than-life statues. They are found as small statues in artisan's workshops in copper or clay for later acquisition by worshippers to give a place in their own house altars. And they are found

Giant rock painting beside road S203 Xining to Repkong, Qinghai, China, 2016.

in and on numerous other Hindu and Buddhist places: temples, fortresses, royal palaces, monasteries, rock paintings, thangkas.

Yulkhorsung holds a stringed plucked lute. In Tibetan-Buddhist monasteries the lute is sometimes a dranyen. In India it is often a vina. In China it can be a pipa.

Bod brgyud nang bstan brnyan ris kun btus, loosely translated as "Compendium of Buddhist patterns and images of the Tibetan people" is an image book with black-and-white drawings with examples for thangka and mural painters. It was published by Gansu Province Nationalities Languages Press, 2008.

For a Westerner like me, this book is handy to use as an iconographic aid. It has thousands of example images, from clouds and dragons to the six symbols of long life and the protectors of the cardinal directions. Each page is subtitled in Tibetan and English. Here I find an archetypal Yulkhorsung, that oddly is named Dhritashtra (which is the Indian name for the protector of the East, actually the correct spelling is Dhṛtarāṣṭra), although in the Tibetan spelling the name is written correctly. I'm showing here also the page with lute variations. Compare these lutes with the photos, you will see remarkable similarities.

The Yulkhorsung from the drawing book is facing to his right. There are variations in posture, where he is facing to his left, or straight forward.

East and South Protectors (with red face!), Aidao Nunnery, Chengdu, Sichuan, China, a Chinese Buddhist Monastery, 2016.

 

East and South Protectors, Tharlam Gompa, Boudhanath, Nepal, 2018.

All photos taken by me © 1996, 2016, 2018 Pan Records.
 

Lama Wangdu

Gelung Wangdu Monastery in Boudanath was located in a side street of Boudha Main Road, opposite the wall surrounding the garden of the Hyatt Hotel. Its official name was Pal Gyi Langkor Jangsem Kunga Ling, but it was generally known as Lama Wangdu Gompa. Gompa is Tibetan for monastery. It was founded in 2000 and abandoned in about 2016.

During my 2012 summer school course in colloquial Tibetan I used to go there regularly. My landlord Sonam Dorjee Choepa was a regular and he introduced me.

Sonam is an adherent of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Nyingma is the oldest school and dates from the eighth or ninth century. Nying is Tibetan for "old". Lama Wangdu Gompa, a nyingma monastery, was a few hundred meters down the road from where he lived, and Sonam used to attend the 6:30 pm chod (pronounced "chö") meditation.

I went to chod with him regularly. I could follow the order of the meditation quite easily, as it was noted down in a handy booklet with Tibetan text and English translations, that I was allowed to copy in the nearby copyshop. But mostly I didn't meditate. I would bring a list of Tibetan words to memorise for next day's class at summer school. Nobody cared from which paper I'd recite. Besides, the younger monks apparently considered the evening chod as routine and an occasion for tomfoolery. Allright, they would recite the words from their books, but they would also throw doughballs at each other.

Young monks playing damaru in the main hall -- 2012

During particular parts of chod recitation, bells and a damaru drum are used. A damaru is a double-sided hourglass-shaped drum with two balls on ropes that are tied to the center. When the drum is turned back and forth, centrifugal force makes the balls move horizontally from one drumside to the other, causing drum beats. The young monks thought it a sport to push each other into their neighbour's centrifugal balls' orbit. Auch.

Chod is a form of tantric meditation, in which the practitioner visualises his body to be stripped layer by layer and devoured by spirits, after which the body is built up in layers again. When the cycle is complete, peace has been made with the spirits. The visualizations are accompanied by recitation, prayer, and ritual percussion instruments.

Sonam Dorjee Choepa meditates not only in the monastery, but also in his prayer room at home or at a burial site. He does so preferably in the evening or at night, because then there's no distraction and the spirits are stronger. "Spirits are present at the sites where bodies are buried. There the  force is strongest." Sonam tells that often mosquitoes are present at burial sites. I ask him if that doesn't bother his meditation. "No", he says, "that helps with the visualisations."

Lama Wangdu giving audience -- 2012

I returned to Boudanath in the summer of 2018. High on my to do list was visiting the Lama Wangdu Gompa again to see if the monks that I befriended were still living there. And I was curious to attend another of Lama Wangdu's audiences and be blessed. At a 2012 audience oil was sprinkled on my head and I received a good luck charm that I was supposed to keep in my wallet, so as to always have money in it. It's still in my wallet and the charm apparently is working. Lama Wangdu also had the reputation of being a strong spiritual healer and teacher.

Closed doors to Lama Wangdu Gompa -- 2018

But when I went there in early July 2018 the monastery doors were closed, and peeking through the slit between the doors, I could not see any activity. I wondered what was going on. Later that day I met Sonam Dorjee Choepa, and he told me what had happened. Lama Wangdu had the habit of spending part of each year in Portland, Oregon, USA, teaching and leading retreats, as can be read on his website (https://lamawangdu.org). But in 2016 he left for good on very short notice. Apparently a note was posted on the monastery door that Lama Wangdu was moving to Canada for permanent meditation. He sold the monastery and took the money with him. The regular chod practitioners of the monastery considered it a shame, they thought he should have donated the money to the poor or to charity.

Lama Wangdu's website looks like no new additions have been made since 2016.

Sonam Dorjee Choepa found a new guru, who lives in a cave in the mountains and who has no possessions. He still goes to graveyards to do his chod and I accompanied him one evening, as of old. He recited, chanted, danced, and I got stung by mosquitoes. The crows sang accompaniment.

Tingri song and dance -- 2018

The Lama Wangdu Gompa opened one day late July 2018 while I was still in Boudanath. Tibetans originating from Tingri area in Tibet had rented it for their yearly reunion and celebration with puja inside the main hall of the monastery in the morning, and Tingri dance and song in the yard the afternoon. I was happy to see that the main hall was unchanged from my memory of 2012. I hope some other school of Tibetan-Buddhism will eventually acquire the monastery.