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I don’t think I have mentioned it before but my old college buddy, Craig Meulen, is currently teaching and studying at a renowned Buddhist monastical institute in Himachal Pradesh, India. He has a blog about his experiences there and it is worth checking out.

The ‘real’ Dharamsala is not so high and is very Indian. The place that the world has come to know is actually called McLeod Ganj – a connected town high up on the hill. It was here that the Indian government offered the Tibetans some land and in the last fifty years the Tibetan colony here has grown and grown and taken over the hillside. …I have to say that I was very disappointed with the town itself. It is a real tourist trap. Very crowded and not really a place where you would hope to experience Tibetans being Tibetan – here they just seem to be selling Tibet on T-shirts and every other type of souvenir imaginable. LINK

A little while ago Craig posted a youtube video of a BBC documentary “The Life of Buddha”. This too is worth checking out. What struck me is that whereas for Christians, the literal existence of the Christ and the sequence of events that make-up his lifestory is all important, this is not so true of Buddhism. The traditional tale of Buddha’s life is clearly in large part a fairy-tale deliberately constructed to dramatically illustrate his teachings about the right way to live. Whereas Jesus’s teachings are clearly secondary to the cult surrounding his Christ persona, in Buddhism the teachings are everything. Doesn’t stop it from being a good story though. Watch and enjoy!