McLeod Ganj is a bustling town in the Himalayan foothills and has turned out to be one of our most important stops, both expectedly and unexpectedly. In the Delhi airport, we met a nun, Tenzin Lamdon and  a monk named Geshe Lharampa Gyaltsen Tsering.  They had flown into Delhi from Brazil at the same time we flew from California, an occurrence that was part of our karma as they would later explain. Shannon and Carson spoke to them while boarding our plane to Dharamshala and set up an interview for the same day. 

 The interview began at 4pm though we got a little lost. Our new friends welcomed us with smiles and a brief explanation of their new training center which they were just starting to move into. It was being set up to teach monks during their Geshe training and to offer teachings to the larger community. 

Our first question was about the meaning of our trip’s name, Shunyata. This one word had a 45 minute long explanation. In brief. It means emptiness, not in the sense that nihilism says that nothing really matters at all, but an emptiness of independence. An acknowledgement that nothing exists without reference to others. If it were just me, I would have no name, no features, no personality, no senses. But with the presence of other things, I am a full being. They stressed that understanding and reflecting on the fact of Shunyata brings a great deal of “merit” to a person. I understood “merit” to mean good karma that a learning person gets from asking and discussing the right questions. 

During the explanation of shunyata,  Geshe Gyaltsen said something that interested me; that we know the four elements deteriorate and as the body is made of those elements so do our bodies. I find the interplay of religion and science to be extremely interesting so I decided to ask a question concerning entropy and reincarnation. Unfortunately, I misunderstood what Geshe Gyaltsenmeant by the deteriorating elements. The deterioration of the elements implied a reconstitution of them; this follows the first law of thermodynamics but not the third, entropy. The answer I got, regardless of whether it answered what I thought I was asking, was no less interesting. The monk spoke on exactly how “reincarnation” works in Buddhism. Again in short, there are three levels of the body and spirit. The tangible, subtle and, super subtle. As a person is dying their body and spirit deteriorate down to a super subtle state. For the body that is decomposition.  The spirit loses its senses and is left only with “karmic imprints,” markings of actions that carry on to the next life. After both have reached a super subtle state they begin to reconstitute as a baby grows.

 Our trip continues to enlighten me on many ways of thinking. It has only been two days so far. I can’t imagine what I’ll have learned at the end of it all. -Mordecai Coleman