Pilgrimage to Kathmandu

In the summer of 2013, I arranged a pilgrimage to a religious monument: the Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal. At the time I was still primarily a Zen Buddhist by training and belief, and had been so for about the prior thirteen years. The stupa is more closely tied to Tibetan Buddhism, but I also had some connections to Shambhala Buddhism, the sect founded by Chögyam Trungpa which sought to merge Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and Western philosophical thought. But even though the stupa wasn’t directly tied to my lineage as a Buddhist, it had a particular calling for me ever since I first saw a picture of it as a child: the great white dome under a clear blue sky, painted eyes looking out at the world in all four directions, prayer flags extending in every direction, tattered and fluttering in the wind.