June 3rd, 2010 part II Gozi Along and the salt

Yushu, September 1987.
It is difficult to explain why I was able to convince Gozi Along --himself a very dark-skinned Khampa Tibetan-- to grant me a travel permit to go to Surmang without going back to the last day I spent in the previous May at Karme Choling Meditation Center in Vermont. I was there for about a month to photograph the cremation of my Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. He passed from this mortal coil the preceding April.

The 6 or so weeks between his passing and the cremation were a huge pause in my plans to go back to China, for a second try at going to Surmang. I made an unsuccessful attempt in 1986 from Lhasa. This time I would be going from the east, from Chengdu, Sichuan, by way of a detour though Beijing. In a way the cremation became the reason why I was able to go to Surmang at all.

The day before I was to leave Karme Choling I was standing in the living room, right in front of the big rock. At some point David Rome and Marty Janowitz came up to me with a 2 quart styrofoam container, the kind they put wonton soup in for Chinese take out. This one was sealed with duct tape. David said it was some of the kosher rock salt that they had packed around Trungpa Rinpoche's body to preserve it between his death and his cremation. One of them, maybe Marty said they wanted to make sure this got to Surmang.

For Tibetans this is what they call a "salt relic" and its presence is as sacred as that of the lama himself.

When they handed it to me, I could feel heat coming out of it -- it was noticeably warm to the touch. I mentioned this and passed it around. Everyone could feel it.

I wrapped it in a khata (white ceremonial cloth denoting respect). and took it to China. Three months later I found myself in Gozi Along's (head of the Yushu Prefecture Religious Affairs Bureau) office complete with peeling plaster, open window and an electric kettle heater burning bright red to heat the frigid air -- apparently it didn't matter whether the air stayed in or went out. Gozi Along was smoking cigarettes, a lot of cigarettes, in a very rumpled suit. I think I was too nervous to notice the hard-wired expression of bemused irony that over the years I came to appreciate, and sort of love.

With the help of a very intoxicated translator and my driver from Lhasa, with whom I communicated in my then-pigeon Chinese, I learned that I was to present my case the next day: why I should be allowed to continue my journey and not be given the bum's rush back to Chengdu.

Back in my room at the Yushu Binguan, I decided that basically this was a sale and I had just come from spending the last 6 years of my life selling Hondas, something I was pretty good at. At that point I started to feel that it had nothing to do with politics and it had nothing to do with religion. It had to do with selling.

So the next day I went back to Gozi Along's office, and he was sitting in the same place, with the same rumpled suit, with the same window open and the same tea kettle stove coils buring bright red. There were about 6 people around a big table, including my driver and the drunken translator. I took out a map of the world and put the 2 quart wonton soup container of the salts on it, still wrapped in the khata. I pointed to New York. I said, "this is where I've come from" and then pointing to Surmang on a map of Yushu Prefecture, I said, "and this is where I want to go.

Gozi Along gave me the permit to go to Surmang. He also became a good friend over the years. About 10 years later he said to me, "we didn't understand your driver's Tibetan, and we didn't understand your Chinese. But we understood that salt."