A Busy Weekend. Day Two.

by sjsonnenbergmd
The road from the homestay impassible, we started down a forest path toward the beginning of a paved road.
Almost out of the woods with our fellow homestay guests, three execs from Chicago with their guide, on a religious pilgrimage, and a young couple from Delhi, all very good sports.
Autumn Colors. The terraced rice paddies starting to turn golden.
Off to our next adventure
https://www.drukasia.com/bhutan/punakha/khamsum-yulley-namgyal-chorten/
Starting the journey. Rafting tour operators were stationed at the road side of the bridge.
As stunningly beautiful as the rice paddies we started through were visually, it was the sounds that were most enchanting. The pitch of the irrigating water changed with the volume of flow most proximate; from smooth and quiet, to a barely perceptible trickle, to quickly flowing gurgles, to rushing and forceful, changing often and at times surrounding you with variations on each from multiple directions. If the rice wasn’t growing submerged and the paths muddy, it would have been wonderful to just sit for hours and listen.
The entrance courtyard
A couple of backwoods yokels from the mountains of northern New York.

The temple in Khamsum Yelley Namgyel Chorten was unlike any we’ve seen so far, overwhelming and almost frightening with what seemed innumerable manifestions of Vajrakilaya, the most wrathful of protective deities, all in consort, reflecting the union of the male and the female forces of the universe.

Here’s a description of a visit to the Chorten. Search as much as I can, I cannot find any interior photos. You’ll have to come and see for yourselves.

https://www.drukasia.com/bhutan/punakha/khamsum-yulley-namgyal-chorten/

Punaka Valley from the top level of the Chorten. Steve got in a bit of trouble here, a close call really. No photos inside the temple of course. Recessed however in the spire of the chorten was a beautiful Buddha. I snapped a few photos and, instantly, a security guard appeared, very sternly demanding to see my guide (he was waiting at the bridge). I managed to negotiate and delete my photos but it could have been cause to force me to leave the country. The Bhutanese take the protection of religious sites very seriously. Vandalism or theft is punishable by life in prison.
Next stop: Chimi Lhakhang,
The Temple of Fertility, dedicated to Lam Drukpa Kuenley, the Divine Madman

The Divine Madman was an enlightened master from the 15th century. Following the course of an arrow he shot from Paro, he arrived at the site where a temple was later built in his honor. He was apparently quite a carouser, known for his humor, singing and outrageous, unconventional sexual behavior, with the intent of shaking up Buddhist establishment and making Buddhism more accessible to common people. Couples make pilgrimages to the temple in hopes of conceiving a child, the wife sleeping for days under the eaves of the temple as the monks perform prayers and blessings. This may be why so many children in Bhutan are named Chimi.

A powerful demoness from Punaka,in the form of a dog, followed the Divine Madman to this location, changing colors for disguise as she pursued him. The Divine Madman subdued the demoness with a divine thunderbolt and interred her in a rock under the multicolored chorten in the foreground. Chimi, the name of the village, translates as “no dog.”

Yes, those are what you think the are. Even the toy airplane is a phallus. The Divine Madman introduced the phallus as a “divine thunderbolt,” believed to drive away evil and advocated for painting phalluses on the walls of homes and placing carved flying phalluses under the eaves at the four corners of a home.
In the temple, we were blessed by a monk blessing us by tapping our heads with a wooden phallus and the bow and arrow symbolic of the Divine Madman
Yep. No need to leave home for sex ed.
Rice harvest in Chimi

Caveat: As with all our posts, we are describing our Bhutanese experience as best we understand it, with the additional understanding that we are new here and may be inaccurate in our accounts of this ancient culture and profound religious heritage.

We hope you are enjoying our posts. We certainly are enjoying life in Bhutan. By the way, we are working too.

4 Comments

  1. Great stories! Be careful Steve or we will all have to make a pilgrimage to bring bowls of rice to you in prison 🥺

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