Written to Seda Returns

It has been nine months since Seda came back when I wrote this diary.

Seda is a place I have wanted to visit for a long time. After the Spring Festival, I have almost taken care of all the cumbersome matters in the studio. I said to Fatty Lan and Naowu: Come with me for a walk in Seda. The two of them are undoubtedly my good friends on the road. It happened that my sister also returned to Chengdu, and the four of us went straight to Seda early the next morning.

The road was quite bumpy. It was around 8pm when we arrived in Seda County. The altitude was close to 4000. The temperature was more than ten degrees below zero and there was frost. Fatty Lan and my sister had serious fever, but Naowu and I were relatively calm. When I got off the car, the whole city was pitch black. I learned from the driver that there are frequent power outages here. I saw a girl with a backpack and I intentionally invited her to go with me. She looked at me and left, as if telling me that the four people traveling with me didn’t know you. What am I afraid of? In fact, I am worried that she will not be safe alone in Tibetan areas.

The blue fat man pulled me towards the Golden Horse Hotel, the only lighted place in the direction of the crowd. The generator buzzed at the door. I was so hungry that I wanted to buy some midnight snacks in such a dark night and sparsely populated city. It's impossible. The hotel we stayed in has relatively good local facilities and still doesn't even have buckets of instant noodles. I don't like to talk much, so Fatty Lan made acquaintance with a "dining friend" to solve the dinner problem. They always left more food for me, and while eating, they teased me about the big bowl that might not be able to fill it. The power was cut off at twelve o'clock, so we fully charged our mobile phones and slowly fell asleep while chatting about some irrelevant topics. I stayed up all night because I was in bed.

I chartered a car early in the morning and went to Larung Gar Buddhist College in Sedar, the largest Buddhist college in the world. I saw a wooden house being built on the road, several square meters in size, built between the two houses with every detail. There are many paths connecting the buildings on the hillside. From a distance, they look like a dense network spreading out on the hillside. On the way, I was shocked by the red monks' houses all over the mountain in front of me.

I was jumping up and down in front, and Naowu asked me to move smaller. I still couldn’t suppress my joy when I suffered from altitude sickness. I have been fascinated by Seda since I saw Seda in a university teacher’s circle of friends three years ago. I have always wanted to come and see it. What I find incredible is that there are 20,000 long-term practitioners gathered in the desolate and sparsely populated plateau of western Sichuan. They all live an extremely difficult life, just to study Buddhism, not just for a day, a year, but a lifetime. . There is probably no force in the world that is more persevering than faith.

The monks all wore red clothes and yellow hats. They passed by the prayer turning corridor and followed the monks to turn the prayer wheels. They chanted Buddhist scriptures and had peace written on their faces.

Most lamas are not willing to take pictures. When you pick up your phone and see him waving his hands, you should stop.

I walked to the observation deck and found the best angle to take a panoramic shot. I stood on a high place and looked down for a long time. Then I turned around and said to Fatty Lan: I hope this place will never be disturbed. She smiled at me and I understood what she wanted to tell me.

Everyone has heard of sky burials, which are mysterious and scary in the eyes of Han people. Tibetans admire sky burial, not because the body can follow the eagles to heaven, but because they believe that taking out the "skin bag" that has lost its soul and feeding it to the eagles is the most noble donation. As long as it is not poisoned or died suddenly, Deaths from infectious diseases are generally eligible for sky burial.

If you want to see the sky burial, you have to walk up the steps to a higher place and approach Tianzang Terrace. Fatty Lan Naowu and his sister vomited. The wind carried the smell of rotting corpses, and the roadside was chopped up. Soak the flesh and blood in some blood. At two o'clock in the afternoon, the sky burial master was in position to dissect the body. The area was surrounded by a cloth. The wind blew the cloth and I squatted down to get a clear look. Fatty Lan and Nao Wu picked him up and said, "You are so brave. I am heartless." He smiled and said: Dust will return to dust, dust will return to dust, what are you afraid of?

The sky was filled with black vultures ready to move like a trained army waiting for the Sky Burial Master’s order to prepare for food. The internal organs were being fought over by the two vultures in the air, and the corpse also gave off a pungent smell. .

We walked back the way we came and passed by the bones piled on the roadside. The three of them felt like half of their lives were gone. They said this was heaven and hell, and I said you want to eat what I cooked." Are you making lion head, "roasted cowpeas" or making dumplings? The high-reverse blue fat man ordered me to shut up while dragging half his life. The driver was a Tibetan. He said to me: It’s rare for a girl to be so calm after seeing a sky burial. Will you still eat meat when you go back? I said, "I'll eat it when I get back to the county town." They begged me not to mention meat again, and ordered me to eat vegetarian food again. I laughed, and everyone in the car laughed too.

At night, there was still a power outage in the county town. Fatty Lan’s cold was getting worse and worse. My sister had been trapped in the nightmare of Tianzangtai for a long time and could not recover. My brain was in pretty good condition. I still slept in bed and had insomnia. Back in Chengdu, before leaving, Wu told me that he was reluctant to leave the Tibetans here. I said: "They are kinder and cuter than expected, right?" We are getting farther and farther away from this pure land. I don’t think my friends and I will come here again. This kind of experience is enough once. It is heaven and hell!

At this moment, I feel that life is not joyful, and death is not sad. Two or three close friends in life are enough.