Kathmandu
Making a kora: "May the Vajrā of the heart be realized in this lifetime."
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Field Notes
During my first visit to Kathmandu I stayed at the guesthouse of the Shechen Monastery in Boudhanath. There I met a couple from Hawaii who had been spending the past ten summers studying with a teacher of the Nyingma Order of Tibetan Buddhism. Elizabeth and Sean had different teachers and studied at different times of the day. In the company of each other while on their separate paths. One morning at breakfast I was looking over my 6x9 camera preparing for a day of photography. Sean approached and introduced himself. A bit of a photographer himself he was curious about my camera. After the technical stuff was out of the way, and knowing of his experiences there, I asked about how to approach people around the stupa, most of whom were Tibetan, about photographing them. He warned that most of them do not like to be photographed. We then discussed my own Buddhist practices in Zen which he was not so familiar with. He returned to my question about photographing people and the places here, and said to me, “Fred, you have to ask yourself, ‘Why did I come so far? What am I doing here?’” It is a question I have been asking myself ever since, everywhere I go.
After years of dreaming since I was a boy, of what I thought to be exotic places whose names ended in a ‘u’ sound - Timbuktu, Machu Picchu, Uluru, Kathmandu - I was finally there. And yet all I could think about at the time was photographing. Oh sure, on my mind were the Minor White teachings (a guru of sorts himself) about letting subjects generate their own composition, being still with yourself and other Zen-derived aphorisms. Photography as Zazen. But that camera, and the 8x10” I was also hauling around Asia that year, had to be used. Until I realized when I had to put them away. I am pleased with the results of my photography that year. After several years of Zen practice, however, it took a single question in Kathmandu to make me understand. Mindfulness means paying the kind of attention that develops greater awareness and clarity, not of subject, nor of object.
After years of dreaming since I was a boy, of what I thought to be exotic places whose names ended in a ‘u’ sound - Timbuktu, Machu Picchu, Uluru, Kathmandu - I was finally there. And yet all I could think about at the time was photographing. Oh sure, on my mind were the Minor White teachings (a guru of sorts himself) about letting subjects generate their own composition, being still with yourself and other Zen-derived aphorisms. Photography as Zazen. But that camera, and the 8x10” I was also hauling around Asia that year, had to be used. Until I realized when I had to put them away. I am pleased with the results of my photography that year. After several years of Zen practice, however, it took a single question in Kathmandu to make me understand. Mindfulness means paying the kind of attention that develops greater awareness and clarity, not of subject, nor of object.