August 13, 2025 • 20 mins
Shop like a Buddhist! Majnu Ka Tilla is the wellspring of Buddhist art for the Tibetan world.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:07):
Hello, dear listeners.
Thank you for the fact that you've obviously clicked or tapped the play button.
I hope you'll feel welcome, and I do want to offer a special thanks to those who are brave enough
to be returning.
This is the Double Dorje Podcast, series two, episode five.
I'm Alex Wilding, and this episode is not profound.
(00:31):
It's just a little travel tale about somewhere I had never heard of until a few weeks before I was
plunged into it.
The place is Majnu Ka Tilla.
First, the inevitable mention.
If you like the Double Dorje Podcast, please take a few seconds out to share, like, follow, subscribe,
(00:51):
tell your friends, or whatever.
Thank you for that.
Majnu Ka Tilla sounds to me like a song that George Harrison might have written if he was still alive, and
if he had been there.
As far as I know, neither of those things are true on this timeline or in this universe, so now
that I have not just heard of it, but have actually been there, I would like to share a bit
(01:16):
about it.
It does deserve to be better known.
I'll get to the bit about shopping later.
Perhaps the best single word to describe Majnu Ka Tilla is that it is a colony, created something like 70
years ago, in Old Delhi, next to the bank of the Yamuna River.
(01:39):
The name comes from a mound or hillock, that's the Tilla part of the name, where a Sufi mystic whose
nickname was Majnu first met Guru Nanak in 1505.
If you don't know anything at all about Guru Nanak, then search engines are your friend!
(02:01):
Proper search engines, of course, that is, not some AI bot that's liable to make up whatever rubbish it
thinks you want to hear.
Ever since the Tibetan uprising against the Chinese occupation in 1959, the Indian government has in fact
been rather kind to the Tibetans, and in 1960 it allotted land here to the Tibetan refugees.
(02:28):
If any of you are interested in the detailed history, you can, unsurprisingly, find quite a lot on
Wikipedia.
On my own arrival there, I knew nothing about it, beyond the fact that where I was to meet the
other travellers on the trip was in some kind of Tibetan quarter in Old Delhi.
(03:00):
I arrived in Delhi late at night.
This was my first time in India.
I had been to China and Tibet once, Nepal, principally the Kathmandu Valley, three times, but India had
never been more than an airport transit.
In view of how late it was, I spent that night in a hotel not far from the airport.
(03:24):
Rather posh it was as it happens, and also, I have to admit, rather far from cheap.
To my surprise, India is now classed as one of the most equal countries in the world, but inequality is
indeed very visible.
Perhaps that's just that because with the kind of policies increasingly being followed in other countries,
(03:47):
policies that are flowering in Donny Trump's felonious looting of America bill, the tiny proportion of
ultra-rich people are becoming even more ultra-rich, if that is a word.
Hyper-rich?
I don't know, but the dreadful billionaires may be skewing the equality indexes in Western countries.
(04:09):
Plus the fact that India, like quite a few other Asian countries, does not hide sickness, garbage, poverty,
inequality, and the unpleasant sides of life as much as these things are hidden away in our tidy Western
countries.
The point here is that the hotel was very obviously upmarket, a bit of a contrast with what was to
(04:34):
follow, but I don't mean to imply that what was to follow was grimy, dirty, or unacceptable in any other
way.
The next morning I needed to get a taxi to Majnu Ka Tilla.
I checked the prices of Uber taxis.
The hotel, of course, had taxis on offer, so I asked their price, telling them I was interested to compare
(04:57):
it with Uber.
The the staff, who were decent enough to laugh a bit kindly, tell me that the hotel taxis would cost
10 times the price of a less upmarket ride, and offered to call me a regular taxi.
I had a JPG file of a business card for the hotel, Rabsel House, Majnu Ka Tilla, together with some numbers
(05:21):
that looked very much like an address.
Shouldn't be a problem.
I had printed the whole address out at a very large scale, and showed it to the taxi driver.
Off we went into the fabled real India.
(05:41):
Noise, dust, bullock carts, heat, traffic that looks like chaos, but somehow has a way of flowing around the
other vehicles and around the cows.
And vehicle horns.
Most trucks have a sign on the back saying, "horn please", as well as, "use dipper at night".
To many of us, the endless honking seems chaotic, but an Indian trucker might be quite annoyed at you if
(06:07):
you don't beep your horn to provide a proper warning that you are in the process of overtaking.
Anyway, as I pointed out, this wasn't my first time in Asia, so although these impressions were vivid, they
weren't really that much of a shock.
In due course, I was dropped, or you might want to say dumped, at the side of the road.
(06:29):
Cows, people, tuk-tuks, dust, noise, a barely walkable pavement, people everywhere, most of them friendly
although you never know, here and there a smell of incense, tiny shops selling, well actually I don't know
what (06:44):
snacks, groceries, mobile phones, travel agents, cheap bling, cheap shoes, banks, couriers, chemists,
dental surgeries, sweet shops, but nothing that looked like the fabled Rabsel house.
I looked for the equally promising house number 47, but that was also a complete waste of effort and time.
(07:07):
I did my best to ask, English is, after all, one of India's official languages, and I still had my
hotel address printed out in a very large font, but mostly I only got shrugs and "sorry, don't know"s.
The one thing that turned out to be useful was that somebody mentioned a gate.
(07:28):
I was looking for number 47, and at the same time I scanned the buildings for some kind of gate
between them, perhaps something like a garden gate, expecting perhaps a narrow entry to Rabsel house, but
at last, and actually quite close to where I had originally been dumped, so here is a genuine thank you
(07:48):
to the taxi driver, I found a gate.
It was a large sheet steel item, giving more the impression of a factory gate, and there were one or
two casual guards standing by.
That was it.
I would have found it a lot quicker if I had only thought to look for the prayer flags strung
across the lane.
(08:11):
No attempt was made to check who I was, I think the guards are only there to keep out the
most obviously undesirable people, of whom there are no doubt plenty outside, but once I was through the
gate it was quite a change.
Yeah, it was still hot, it was still dusty, it certainly wasn't exactly quiet, but the whole atmosphere was
(08:32):
something much calmer.
I later came to understand that Majnu Ka Tilla is in fact officially and deliberately an elongated bubble,
separate, at least to some extent, from the outside.
It's not just a Tibetan quarter in the way that you might say some parts of Birmingham make up a
(08:55):
Chinese quarter. It has in some way been designated by the authorities as a Tibetan zone.
Unfortunately my quest for Rabsel house still looked a bit like the quest for El Dorado.
I pressed forward, suitcase in hand, looking for any sign of numbering and for the name of the hotel,
(09:18):
asking here and there if anybody knew it.
One informant told me that the reason I was having difficulty is that it wasn't any longer called Rabsel
House or Rabsel Hotel, but it was now known as Ama's Hotel.
Ama is a word for mother, but it's used quite widely in Tibetan settings for a respected woman.
(09:40):
This change of name may have occurred, at least for a while, what do I know?
But it hadn't gone as far as causing the sign over the hotel door to be changed.
Once I'd been up and down the main drag a couple of times, eventually spotting the hotel at the bottom
of one of these by-lanes, it was in fact perfectly clear, Rabsel House.
(10:02):
The two dogs on semi-permanent guard on either side of the main door paid me no attention at all.
I had arrived.
Most of my fellow travellers had shown up that morning.
I want to thank them all here for freely allowing me to use any of their photographs, some of which
you will be able to see if you watch the video version of this podcast.
(10:28):
Rabsel house is small by many standards, as any establishment in Majnu Ka Tilla would have to be.
Is its reputation good?
Internet searches had given different opinions, and as I understand it, it had indeed changed hands, and
the standards may well have gone up and down.
(10:50):
However, it is one of the regular destinations for visiting Tibetan teachers.
My experience was that while it wasn't exactly polished, there was nothing really to complain about.
Some fellow travellers had difficulty getting a warm shower, but that was only because the switch for
heating up the water was on the wall outside the room.
(11:13):
Go figure, as I think Americans say, but it's simple enough once you know.
And so, out into the extraordinary labyrinth known as Majnu Ka Tilla itself.
There had just been a bit of rain, which meant that reflections of the illuminated shop signs on the ground
(11:34):
of the narrow glistening laneways created a scene a bit like Blade Runner reimagined with a Tibetan market,
but narrower and smellier.
I came to know that for its size, Majnu Ka Tilla does have quite a large population.
As a remnant of Old Delhi, the buildings are built close to one another, several floors high, partly
(11:59):
crisscrossed by narrow by-lanes.
That said, the atmosphere was very agreeable.
There are plenty of young people hanging out on the street, boys and girls dressed casually, but I saw no
sign of any over-excitement or threatening behaviour between themselves or to others.
The lanes are narrow, the side alleys narrower still.
(12:21):
Look up to the ribbon of sky above you, and you will see that there is only just about room
for the air-conditioning units fitted to the outer walls of the buildings.
If you venture down these alleyways, you may think it has started to rain, but you would be wrong.
It's the condensate from these units dripping on your head.
(12:43):
Generally, however, you don't have to squeeze into those particularly small spaces.
Majnu Ka Tilla has not much more than one main artery, typically wide enough that I, as an average-sized
European, can fling my arms wide and still not quite touch the shop fronts on either side.
(13:03):
At some points it is narrow enough that a bicycle, admittedly one fitted with a basket for some kind of
merchandise, has to manoeuvre carefully to get round the corner.
Somewhere in the middle, but please don't expect me to remember the way, there is a wider space that we
might call a square.
Maybe that's too grand a word, but it is the site of one of MKT's temples, and is a place
(13:29):
where people gather in the evening to eat and gossip.
Notice how I'm casually surrounding like a pro-traveller here, talking about MKT.
The main attractions of MKT either have frontages onto this artery, or onto one of the side alleys.
There are bookshops, curio shops, metalsmiths, beauty stalls, internet cafes, travel agencies, and a couple
(13:57):
of temples that all survive here.
But why would we take the trouble to enter this tangle of prayer flags, dogs, people, carts, scooters,
bicycles, and the rest?
It's the shopping, don't you know!
There are of course restaurants and street food outlets, and many of them are very good.
(14:17):
Not having a particularly high profile as a tourist destination, the prices are also quite sensible.
Momos of course are a staple, but there are many other largely traditional dishes well worth trying.
The group I was with was under the care of an excellent and experienced guide, and I would suggest that
(14:41):
if you should ever go, you first somehow do enough research and get guidance, rather than blundering around
hoping for the best.
But I'm not a food writer, and while the food will make you happy, it's unlikely to be what draws
you to Majnu Ka Tilla.
It's time I told you something about the shopping.
(15:02):
Scattered here and there, and lining some of the pathways, you will find stalls selling all the trinkets
your heart might desire, and you will find upmarket versions of the same in jewellers and jewellery suppliers.
But at the heart of the attraction are the statues, the paintings, and the Buddhist religious objects.
(15:36):
Shakyamuni Buddhas sit in row after row on the shelves, ready for shipping.
There are Taras, there are Vajrayoginis, Guru Rinpoches, and more Guru Rinpoches in all sizes.
Ritual items include dorjes and bells, the indispensable implements of Tibetan ritual.
(15:57):
There are phurbus, the three-bladed dagger for piercing the three mental poisons.
Skullcups of white metal or silver, ritual spoons for sampling the contents of the skullcups.
Conches, jewellery, rings, necklaces, sets of seven offering bowls.
Statues varying in size from half of a thumb up to figures two or three times life-size.
(16:23):
I did ask the price of one of those, purely out of curiosity, but I'm afraid I forgot the number.
It was large, but not as much as I had guessed.
This kind of statue, of course, is only made for special order for major centres.
It's not going in your checked luggage or your cabin bag!
(16:45):
When planning for this trip, more than one of our group had the thought that we might ourselves come back
with some item of beauty, worthy of being consecrated and venerated on our shrines, and we had been keeping
an eye on baggage allowances for that very reason.
We had rather expected to shop for these in Dharamshala.
(17:07):
The Dalai Lama himself lives in Dharamshala, or to be more precise in McLeod Ganj, which makes it one of the
most important focal points for Tibetan Buddhism outside of Tibet.
It has long been a destination, popular amongst Buddhist-leaning hippies in earlier years, but is
increasingly a target for general tourists, including a lot of Indians taking the chance to get away from
(17:32):
the heat and the somewhat problematic air of Delhi itself.
Indeed, there are plenty of sources of good quality statues and so forth in that general zone.
However, it turns out that those dealers mainly get their stuff from the shops and the workshops of
Majnu Ka Tilla.
(17:53):
The obvious consequence of this is that it's in MKT that you get the best qualities at the lowest price,
not Mcleod Ganj.
The statues, metalwork, paintings and other artwork here is made by Tibetans, giving it a slightly
different style from the same sort of items from Nepal.
(18:16):
The Nepali statues are often indeed of very high quality, and as I understand it, Nepal was one of the
main suppliers of that kind of artwork to Tibet itself.
I should just mention in passing that in Kathmandu, you do have to be particularly careful.
In amongst the high-quality statuary, there is a lot of tat, and a lot of student exercises passed off
(18:42):
as authentic.
I have heard that the high number of painting schools, as they are called in Kathmandu, is largely because
the students churn out relatively low-quality paintings as exercises, and these then are sold to
unsuspecting Western collectors in the many art shops, as they are known.
(19:04):
This kind of sharp practise of course can happen anywhere, in any field, but it is a particular feature of
the Buddhist markets in Kathmandu.
It was therefore a surprise to learn that McLeod Ganj was actually not the best place to indulge the
Dharma Object Acquisition Syndrome.
(19:26):
Of course there are good statues there, lots of great Dharma merchandise, but it is Majnu Ka Tilla that is
the fountainhead of the best items.
All good things come to an end, as any fool knows, not just the Buddhists, on some grey morning you
will have to pack up your purchases and leave, perhaps to return to the West, or perhaps to head up
(19:52):
towards the Himalayan mountains.
If the hour is early enough, you will pick your way along the misty lane between the still-sleeping dogs
in the middle of what is best called a road, out through the gate where India will hit you again
with full force.
(20:16):
OK, we've made it to the end of the street, the end of the Double Dorje Podcast, Series 2,
Episode 5.
I hope you leave with at least a tiny sense of what Majnu Ka Tilla is like.
Maybe you would like to visit one day.
As ever, please remember, if you do like this, then like, follow, subscribe, and tell your friends.
(20:36):
And remember, there can be a surprise around almost any corner.
Bye!
Hello, dear listeners.
Thank you for the fact that you've obviously clicked or tapped the play button.
I hope you'll feel welcome, and I do want to offer a special thanks to those who are brave enough
to be returning.
This is the Double Dorje Podcast, series two, episode five.
I'm Alex Wilding, and this episode is not profound.
(00:31):
It's just a little travel tale about somewhere I had never heard of until a few weeks before I was
plunged into it.
The place is Majnu Ka Tilla.
First, the inevitable mention.
If you like the Double Dorje Podcast, please take a few seconds out to share, like, follow, subscribe,
(00:51):
tell your friends, or whatever.
Thank you for that.
Majnu Ka Tilla sounds to me like a song that George Harrison might have written if he was still alive, and
if he had been there.
As far as I know, neither of those things are true on this timeline or in this universe, so now
that I have not just heard of it, but have actually been there, I would like to share a bit
(01:16):
about it.
It does deserve to be better known.
I'll get to the bit about shopping later.
Perhaps the best single word to describe Majnu Ka Tilla is that it is a colony, created something like 70
years ago, in Old Delhi, next to the bank of the Yamuna River.
(01:39):
The name comes from a mound or hillock, that's the Tilla part of the name, where a Sufi mystic whose
nickname was Majnu first met Guru Nanak in 1505.
If you don't know anything at all about Guru Nanak, then search engines are your friend!
(02:01):
Proper search engines, of course, that is, not some AI bot that's liable to make up whatever rubbish it
thinks you want to hear.
Ever since the Tibetan uprising against the Chinese occupation in 1959, the Indian government has in fact
been rather kind to the Tibetans, and in 1960 it allotted land here to the Tibetan refugees.
(02:28):
If any of you are interested in the detailed history, you can, unsurprisingly, find quite a lot on
Wikipedia.
On my own arrival there, I knew nothing about it, beyond the fact that where I was to meet the
other travellers on the trip was in some kind of Tibetan quarter in Old Delhi.
(03:00):
I arrived in Delhi late at night.
This was my first time in India.
I had been to China and Tibet once, Nepal, principally the Kathmandu Valley, three times, but India had
never been more than an airport transit.
In view of how late it was, I spent that night in a hotel not far from the airport.
(03:24):
Rather posh it was as it happens, and also, I have to admit, rather far from cheap.
To my surprise, India is now classed as one of the most equal countries in the world, but inequality is
indeed very visible.
Perhaps that's just that because with the kind of policies increasingly being followed in other countries,
(03:47):
policies that are flowering in Donny Trump's felonious looting of America bill, the tiny proportion of
ultra-rich people are becoming even more ultra-rich, if that is a word.
Hyper-rich?
I don't know, but the dreadful billionaires may be skewing the equality indexes in Western countries.
(04:09):
Plus the fact that India, like quite a few other Asian countries, does not hide sickness, garbage, poverty,
inequality, and the unpleasant sides of life as much as these things are hidden away in our tidy Western
countries.
The point here is that the hotel was very obviously upmarket, a bit of a contrast with what was to
(04:34):
follow, but I don't mean to imply that what was to follow was grimy, dirty, or unacceptable in any other
way.
The next morning I needed to get a taxi to Majnu Ka Tilla.
I checked the prices of Uber taxis.
The hotel, of course, had taxis on offer, so I asked their price, telling them I was interested to compare
(04:57):
it with Uber.
The the staff, who were decent enough to laugh a bit kindly, tell me that the hotel taxis would cost
10 times the price of a less upmarket ride, and offered to call me a regular taxi.
I had a JPG file of a business card for the hotel, Rabsel House, Majnu Ka Tilla, together with some numbers
(05:21):
that looked very much like an address.
Shouldn't be a problem.
I had printed the whole address out at a very large scale, and showed it to the taxi driver.
Off we went into the fabled real India.
(05:41):
Noise, dust, bullock carts, heat, traffic that looks like chaos, but somehow has a way of flowing around the
other vehicles and around the cows.
And vehicle horns.
Most trucks have a sign on the back saying, "horn please", as well as, "use dipper at night".
To many of us, the endless honking seems chaotic, but an Indian trucker might be quite annoyed at you if
(06:07):
you don't beep your horn to provide a proper warning that you are in the process of overtaking.
Anyway, as I pointed out, this wasn't my first time in Asia, so although these impressions were vivid, they
weren't really that much of a shock.
In due course, I was dropped, or you might want to say dumped, at the side of the road.
(06:29):
Cows, people, tuk-tuks, dust, noise, a barely walkable pavement, people everywhere, most of them friendly
although you never know, here and there a smell of incense, tiny shops selling, well actually I don't know
what (06:44):
snacks, groceries, mobile phones, travel agents, cheap bling, cheap shoes, banks, couriers, chemists,
dental surgeries, sweet shops, but nothing that looked like the fabled Rabsel house.
I looked for the equally promising house number 47, but that was also a complete waste of effort and time.
(07:07):
I did my best to ask, English is, after all, one of India's official languages, and I still had my
hotel address printed out in a very large font, but mostly I only got shrugs and "sorry, don't know"s.
The one thing that turned out to be useful was that somebody mentioned a gate.
(07:28):
I was looking for number 47, and at the same time I scanned the buildings for some kind of gate
between them, perhaps something like a garden gate, expecting perhaps a narrow entry to Rabsel house, but
at last, and actually quite close to where I had originally been dumped, so here is a genuine thank you
(07:48):
to the taxi driver, I found a gate.
It was a large sheet steel item, giving more the impression of a factory gate, and there were one or
two casual guards standing by.
That was it.
I would have found it a lot quicker if I had only thought to look for the prayer flags strung
across the lane.
(08:11):
No attempt was made to check who I was, I think the guards are only there to keep out the
most obviously undesirable people, of whom there are no doubt plenty outside, but once I was through the
gate it was quite a change.
Yeah, it was still hot, it was still dusty, it certainly wasn't exactly quiet, but the whole atmosphere was
(08:32):
something much calmer.
I later came to understand that Majnu Ka Tilla is in fact officially and deliberately an elongated bubble,
separate, at least to some extent, from the outside.
It's not just a Tibetan quarter in the way that you might say some parts of Birmingham make up a
(08:55):
Chinese quarter. It has in some way been designated by the authorities as a Tibetan zone.
Unfortunately my quest for Rabsel house still looked a bit like the quest for El Dorado.
I pressed forward, suitcase in hand, looking for any sign of numbering and for the name of the hotel,
(09:18):
asking here and there if anybody knew it.
One informant told me that the reason I was having difficulty is that it wasn't any longer called Rabsel
House or Rabsel Hotel, but it was now known as Ama's Hotel.
Ama is a word for mother, but it's used quite widely in Tibetan settings for a respected woman.
(09:40):
This change of name may have occurred, at least for a while, what do I know?
But it hadn't gone as far as causing the sign over the hotel door to be changed.
Once I'd been up and down the main drag a couple of times, eventually spotting the hotel at the bottom
of one of these by-lanes, it was in fact perfectly clear, Rabsel House.
(10:02):
The two dogs on semi-permanent guard on either side of the main door paid me no attention at all.
I had arrived.
Most of my fellow travellers had shown up that morning.
I want to thank them all here for freely allowing me to use any of their photographs, some of which
you will be able to see if you watch the video version of this podcast.
(10:28):
Rabsel house is small by many standards, as any establishment in Majnu Ka Tilla would have to be.
Is its reputation good?
Internet searches had given different opinions, and as I understand it, it had indeed changed hands, and
the standards may well have gone up and down.
(10:50):
However, it is one of the regular destinations for visiting Tibetan teachers.
My experience was that while it wasn't exactly polished, there was nothing really to complain about.
Some fellow travellers had difficulty getting a warm shower, but that was only because the switch for
heating up the water was on the wall outside the room.
(11:13):
Go figure, as I think Americans say, but it's simple enough once you know.
And so, out into the extraordinary labyrinth known as Majnu Ka Tilla itself.
There had just been a bit of rain, which meant that reflections of the illuminated shop signs on the ground
(11:34):
of the narrow glistening laneways created a scene a bit like Blade Runner reimagined with a Tibetan market,
but narrower and smellier.
I came to know that for its size, Majnu Ka Tilla does have quite a large population.
As a remnant of Old Delhi, the buildings are built close to one another, several floors high, partly
(11:59):
crisscrossed by narrow by-lanes.
That said, the atmosphere was very agreeable.
There are plenty of young people hanging out on the street, boys and girls dressed casually, but I saw no
sign of any over-excitement or threatening behaviour between themselves or to others.
The lanes are narrow, the side alleys narrower still.
(12:21):
Look up to the ribbon of sky above you, and you will see that there is only just about room
for the air-conditioning units fitted to the outer walls of the buildings.
If you venture down these alleyways, you may think it has started to rain, but you would be wrong.
It's the condensate from these units dripping on your head.
(12:43):
Generally, however, you don't have to squeeze into those particularly small spaces.
Majnu Ka Tilla has not much more than one main artery, typically wide enough that I, as an average-sized
European, can fling my arms wide and still not quite touch the shop fronts on either side.
(13:03):
At some points it is narrow enough that a bicycle, admittedly one fitted with a basket for some kind of
merchandise, has to manoeuvre carefully to get round the corner.
Somewhere in the middle, but please don't expect me to remember the way, there is a wider space that we
might call a square.
Maybe that's too grand a word, but it is the site of one of MKT's temples, and is a place
(13:29):
where people gather in the evening to eat and gossip.
Notice how I'm casually surrounding like a pro-traveller here, talking about MKT.
The main attractions of MKT either have frontages onto this artery, or onto one of the side alleys.
There are bookshops, curio shops, metalsmiths, beauty stalls, internet cafes, travel agencies, and a couple
(13:57):
of temples that all survive here.
But why would we take the trouble to enter this tangle of prayer flags, dogs, people, carts, scooters,
bicycles, and the rest?
It's the shopping, don't you know!
There are of course restaurants and street food outlets, and many of them are very good.
(14:17):
Not having a particularly high profile as a tourist destination, the prices are also quite sensible.
Momos of course are a staple, but there are many other largely traditional dishes well worth trying.
The group I was with was under the care of an excellent and experienced guide, and I would suggest that
(14:41):
if you should ever go, you first somehow do enough research and get guidance, rather than blundering around
hoping for the best.
But I'm not a food writer, and while the food will make you happy, it's unlikely to be what draws
you to Majnu Ka Tilla.
It's time I told you something about the shopping.
(15:02):
Scattered here and there, and lining some of the pathways, you will find stalls selling all the trinkets
your heart might desire, and you will find upmarket versions of the same in jewellers and jewellery suppliers.
But at the heart of the attraction are the statues, the paintings, and the Buddhist religious objects.
(15:36):
Shakyamuni Buddhas sit in row after row on the shelves, ready for shipping.
There are Taras, there are Vajrayoginis, Guru Rinpoches, and more Guru Rinpoches in all sizes.
Ritual items include dorjes and bells, the indispensable implements of Tibetan ritual.
(15:57):
There are phurbus, the three-bladed dagger for piercing the three mental poisons.
Skullcups of white metal or silver, ritual spoons for sampling the contents of the skullcups.
Conches, jewellery, rings, necklaces, sets of seven offering bowls.
Statues varying in size from half of a thumb up to figures two or three times life-size.
(16:23):
I did ask the price of one of those, purely out of curiosity, but I'm afraid I forgot the number.
It was large, but not as much as I had guessed.
This kind of statue, of course, is only made for special order for major centres.
It's not going in your checked luggage or your cabin bag!
(16:45):
When planning for this trip, more than one of our group had the thought that we might ourselves come back
with some item of beauty, worthy of being consecrated and venerated on our shrines, and we had been keeping
an eye on baggage allowances for that very reason.
We had rather expected to shop for these in Dharamshala.
(17:07):
The Dalai Lama himself lives in Dharamshala, or to be more precise in McLeod Ganj, which makes it one of the
most important focal points for Tibetan Buddhism outside of Tibet.
It has long been a destination, popular amongst Buddhist-leaning hippies in earlier years, but is
increasingly a target for general tourists, including a lot of Indians taking the chance to get away from
(17:32):
the heat and the somewhat problematic air of Delhi itself.
Indeed, there are plenty of sources of good quality statues and so forth in that general zone.
However, it turns out that those dealers mainly get their stuff from the shops and the workshops of
Majnu Ka Tilla.
(17:53):
The obvious consequence of this is that it's in MKT that you get the best qualities at the lowest price,
not Mcleod Ganj.
The statues, metalwork, paintings and other artwork here is made by Tibetans, giving it a slightly
different style from the same sort of items from Nepal.
(18:16):
The Nepali statues are often indeed of very high quality, and as I understand it, Nepal was one of the
main suppliers of that kind of artwork to Tibet itself.
I should just mention in passing that in Kathmandu, you do have to be particularly careful.
In amongst the high-quality statuary, there is a lot of tat, and a lot of student exercises passed off
(18:42):
as authentic.
I have heard that the high number of painting schools, as they are called in Kathmandu, is largely because
the students churn out relatively low-quality paintings as exercises, and these then are sold to
unsuspecting Western collectors in the many art shops, as they are known.
(19:04):
This kind of sharp practise of course can happen anywhere, in any field, but it is a particular feature of
the Buddhist markets in Kathmandu.
It was therefore a surprise to learn that McLeod Ganj was actually not the best place to indulge the
Dharma Object Acquisition Syndrome.
(19:26):
Of course there are good statues there, lots of great Dharma merchandise, but it is Majnu Ka Tilla that is
the fountainhead of the best items.
All good things come to an end, as any fool knows, not just the Buddhists, on some grey morning you
will have to pack up your purchases and leave, perhaps to return to the West, or perhaps to head up
(19:52):
towards the Himalayan mountains.
If the hour is early enough, you will pick your way along the misty lane between the still-sleeping dogs
in the middle of what is best called a road, out through the gate where India will hit you again
with full force.
(20:16):
OK, we've made it to the end of the street, the end of the Double Dorje Podcast, Series 2,
Episode 5.
I hope you leave with at least a tiny sense of what Majnu Ka Tilla is like.
Maybe you would like to visit one day.
As ever, please remember, if you do like this, then like, follow, subscribe, and tell your friends.
(20:36):
And remember, there can be a surprise around almost any corner.
Bye!
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