You don’t have to visit India or Tibet to know that their inhabitants are obsessed with tea. At the monastery, most monks drink nothing else. No juice, no soda, no water. One monk even asked me why I was always drinking from a bottle of water. When I said, “A body needs a lot of water,” he shook his head and said, “A body needs a lot of tea. Drink tea instead. You will be happier.”*
Tibetan Butter Tea (image stolen from flickr because it's better than the one I have)
Monks take a lot of pride in the customary tea of their homeland. Whenever I sit to drink tea with a monk, he pours me a cup and says, “This is the famous tea from my fatherland.” Then he sits and watches, waiting for me to express my enjoyment. Here are the teas I’ve been served:
- Chai – The most popular Indian tea, peddled by chaiwallahs in all trains, by the roads, everywhere. Made from mixed spices, sometimes black tea leaves, water, and condensed milk. My favorite chai is at Chanakya in Solan, but there is good chai available in the monastery guesthouse, too.
- Tibetan Tea – Sometimes known as “butter tea,” this is what the nuns across the valley drink all the time, and is often served in the temple, the monastic mess hall, and on special occasions. Black tea leaves, water (sometimes), butter, and salt. Not usually a delight to the tastebuds, it does a body good in cold, high altitude conditions.
- Black Tea - Nothing unusual here, the standard when nothing else is available. Loose tea leaves and hot water. Some monks will add milk or salt or both.
- Amdo Tea (can’t remember the region within Amdo that it’s from) – A monk from Amdo who broke his hip when he fell off a wall served this to me along with tsampa (barley flour mixed with butter, tea, and sugar) as we sat in his makeshift recovery room and talked about the book of poetry he published. Hot milk, water, and small brown floating things that he explained to me twice and I still didn’t understand. Something like birch bark.
- Northern Kham Tea - The tea from Geshé A Trang‘s homeland. Hot milk and water. When I pointed out that this wasn’t exactly what I’d call “tea” — more like hot diluted milk — he looked at me with fire in his eyes and said, “It’s tea!” I assured him that I liked it, and drank what must have been two liters of the stuff in one sitting.
- Kashmiri Tea - I had this herbal tea in a Kashmiri man’s shop in Delhi. Cinnamon, cardamom, a tiny pinch of saffron, a few grains of sugar, and hot water. Tasty!
Dondup and Geshé at Chanakya restaurant in Solan, drinking chai.
The only other thing they drink is coffee, which they consider a real luxury. One geshé makes me coffee whenever I visit him and it is delicious, partly because he uses condensed milk instead of milk and sugar. When I enter his room, he jumps up and says, “I will make us coffee!” Then we have lively conversation as he buzzes back and forth from cupboard to stove to refrigerator and back. He is the one who receives the shipments of coffee that come for the Rinpochés — the most elite and respected individuals in the community, including the abbot — and thus always takes a few beans for his trouble.
* When I asked His Holiness why monks are always getting gall stones — and it’s true, an amazing number of them do — he said it’s because they don’t drink enough water. Apparently even the Dalai Lama isn’t hydrating as much as he should.
