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Tea Plantation & Buddhist Precepts
I visited India and Nepal for the first time on a Buddhist pilgrimage led by Shantum Seth in 2007. The following — which I wrote in a travel journal in Dharamshala, India — is from my 2008 trip.
In the late afternoon to early evening, we visited a tea plantation, or more specifically the tea plantation owner’s guesthouse, to admire the view and watch the sunset. The guesthouse included two charming white bungalows. We walked through the main building while admiring the décor and went through glass doors at the back of the house to step out into the back yard. There we had a view not of tea plants as I had expected, but of a fence and what looked like a forest touching the borders of the yard, and best of all we saw the Himalayas in the distance. Maybe the plants below the Himalayas were tea plants; I didn’t know what they look like.
[Later I learned that British colonialist tea plantations were based on U. S. slave plantations. This plantation likely began in colonialist days.]
We met a friendly older man, whom I at first thought was the owner of the plantation, but he was more like the butler; he wore a business suit and a blue Sikh turban and spoke fluent English with more or less a British accent. He told us all about the plantation and the guesthouse. We saw Western guests sit out on the patio at some point in the evening.