On the seventh day of my trip through Tibet, I arrived at a small village located on the side of a mountain. A local approached me smiling and asked me to accompany him, leading me to a street in the middle of the village where there were around a dozen of people eating together from a large silver bowl. They offered me food and drink with prodigious cordiality and joviality and, after a while, a Tibetan monk appeared and urged me to accompany him, an invitation I gladly accepted. Since then, every step I took with him towards his house brought me closer to discovering the Lama’s righteous wisdom.
En la casa del Lama
Two other monks were in a tiny living room sitting on the wooden floor, while the lama’s elderly mother alternated two teapots over the fire of her wood stove to ensure that the tea she offered us was at its optimal temperature throughout. moment. After a couple of hours of chatting, the two invited monks left the house guarded by the host, a moment that I took advantage of to start writing sitting on the windowsill of the house’s balcony.
The Tibetan Lama
Dusk was already falling and a few minutes later, without sensing his presence until he was right next to me, the lama placed a bunch of plants and a basin of water without making any comment. I sensed his suggestion, I sat on the floor and undid the string that tied the vegetables together, beginning to submerge them in the icy water of the bucket provided by the lama before his attentive gaze, sitting silently on a wooden chair a little more than a meter from me. . Cleaning each plant one by one with caresses under his silent and unalterable supervision, time passed, turning such a simple and everyday task into a lesson of incalculable value and beauty.
The tea was always hot thanks to the system of two teapots on the fire.
The moment he finished the last floor, he got up and left the room to return a few seconds later with a wooden board and a knife that he would leave next to me before recovering his seat and position on the wooden chair arranged in the center of the room. the small room. Instructions or comments were unnecessary and now cutting the vegetables, once again silence was the ideal mentor to transmit a pinch of such precious wisdom.
Once I had finished my tasks as a culinary assistant to the Tibetan monk who was hosting me, he collected the already washed and cut vegetables and began to cook them, maintaining the climate of silence and respect that had characterized the scene. After about twenty minutes frying the plants and cooking rice, he made a scream with which I suspected he was calling someone and a few seconds later his four-year-old son entered the room.
The monk served both the little one and me and once again sat down to observe us calmly. Every time we finished the food in our bowl, he automatically refilled it while his remained empty, and when we couldn’t eat any more because we were completely full, he finally got up and poured the leftover food into his bowl and started eating.
I have always defended that the most beautiful words in this world are those that do not need to be said, a theory that in this case was raised to its maximum exponent after having the privilege of attending a master class in humility, respect and values courtesy of a lama who shared his righteous wisdom without hesitation.
The Lama's son
The most beautiful words in this world are those that do not need to be said.