My Travel Adventures

With our trip over, I think it would make sense to compile a short index of things I learned to recognise at temples and holy places. This way, I will be able to look darned smart next time I go to a museum. Avalokiteshvara (Tibetan: Chenrezig; Chinese: Guanyin): “Lord who looks down with compassion,” a major bodhisattva. (S)he is often portrayed with four arms, one holding a string of jewels, and another holding a lotus, symbols that refer to the prayer “Om mani padme hum” (translated as “Praise to the jewel in the lotus” or “I in the jewel-lotus”). Another common portrayal of Avalokiteshvara has one thousand arms and eleven faces stacked on top of each other in three rows of three and two rows of one. Bhavachakra: A painting that comprises concentric circles demonstrating Buddhism’s core teachings on samsara, cyclical existence. The hub of the circle displays a pig, a rooster, and a snake, which represent the three poisons of ignorance, attachment, and anger. The second layer exp...

I spent very little time in class before it was time to pack up and start travelling again: CET’s midterm trip to Dali, a city about six hours away from Kunming. Sitting on some very lucrative trade routes, Dali was the capital of the Nanzhao kingdom, a state that successfully repealed several Chinese invasions, resisted Tibetan expansion, and waged wars of its own in modern day Vietnam and Myanmar. After its golden age in the eighth and ninth centuries, Nanzhao fell to dynastic squabbles that led to the establishment of the Dali Kingdom, a somewhat less powerful state that fell to Kublai Khan in 1253. The indomitable spirit of the Yunnanese, however, was not extinguished. During the Panthay Rebellion of 1856-1873, Dali was the capital of a sultanate that for a long time held its own against the Manchu government. Like Nanzhao, it too was defeated, but not until a protracted bloody war that cost perhaps a million lives. (Much of this information comes from websites not blocked by the C...