![]() ![]() My parents hid under the floorboards because the Maoists were coming for them as well. ![]() This was the single biggest battle, and it was fought right here. When the Nepal army retaliated, there were several hundred dead-casualties from the Maoist and Nepali armies, as well as police officers. One night, the Maoist rebels shot 36 government officials-including the chief district officer-and killed them. The biggest battle between the Maoist and Nepali armied happened in Salleri, which is only a 15-minute walk from the Happy House. But he was part of the Congress Party-which is the non-Communist party now-so when the Maoists started invading, my family was everything that the Maoist were against. My father, following his parents at the time, was the mayor of the region and starting his political career. The house was named the Happy House and my family had been living here until the late 1990s when the Civil War started in Nepal. So, Monzino built this house and started living there, and it was much later, in the 1970s, when Sir Edmund Hillary was starting to be involved with the local hospital, that he came to Phaplu and saw the house and started living here as well. The gambling table and the leather sofas were part of his furniture set that made it up to Everest Base Camp. He added the rooms, and more or less funded the whole thing. When he came here to visit, he fell in love with Phaplu and told my father: “When I finish my expedition, I’m going to come back here and build a house.”īut he didn’t want just any house-he said to my grandfather, “You’re getting a serious upgrade.” And so, that’s what he did. Monzino had 6,000 people on his team of porters and guides, and my father was one of them. The Italian Count Guido Monzino was leading an Everest expedition and, during one of his rest days in Junbesi, he walked up to Phaplu. How did this magnificent structure come to be?īefore it became known as the Happy House-or this kind of grander structure-we had a family home here in Phaplu. And that's how their ethnic group came to be: They started living here and slowly started dispersing around the mountains of Nepal-mainly Eastern Nepal.Īng Tshering Beyulux Experiences Your family home, The Happy House, has an equally impressive legacy in Nepal-built by one Everest explorer (Count Guide Monzino) and lived in by another (Sir Edmund Hillary). And that’s how the Sherpa started living here-and the reason I said Sherpa was because when the first Tibetans came to Nepal they identified themselves as Sherpa people of the East. So, Nyingma people, being followers of the Guru Rinpoche, came and identified Junbesi as one of the beyu and settled there. If you look at the term’s description, it means sacred places that would identify themselves when the world got too corrupt for spiritual practice. They came to Junbesi because Guru Rinpoche traveled from Swat Valley to Tibet and identified several locations as ‘beyu’, which means Shangri-La on earth. The Nyingma people were mainly from Eastern Tibet-an area called Kham-and many of them escaped to this side of the Himalayas, settling in a village called Junbesi. Obviously, the Gelugs won because they had Mongol support. The Dalai Lama is a Mongol title, and Dalai is a Mongol world which means ‘ocean of wisdom.’ But before they could install the Dalai Lama as the political and the spiritual head of Tibet, there was a big war between the Nyingma and the Gelug. But they also wanted to be part of Tibetan Buddhism. Nyingma was the very first school but then, much later, when the Mongols in the nearby region of High Asia were coming into power and becoming interested in Buddhism, they invaded and attacked Tibet. And now, in Tibet, there are four main Buddhist sects: Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug (of which the Dalai Lama is the head). So, let's go back to the 16th century, or even earlier-to the 8th century, when Guru Rinpoche (also known as Padmasambhava) brought Buddhism into Tibet and formed a school called Nyingma. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |