So Close to Heaven (10 page)

A nervous civil servant was leading me to Changgangkha Lhakhang under orders from King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who was eager to demonstrate to a world lukewarm about monarchy that Bhutan had an extraordinary culture to save and that he was willing to wager his throne on preserving it.

“His Majesty wants you to know our culture, which is very dear to us,” was the explanation I got from the young protocol officer as we reached the top of the path and walked into a panorama of medieval life still being lived around the monastic walls. To the right, just outside the monastery’s narrow gate, a householder had erected an elaborate
doe
, a pre-Buddhist construction of wood, straw, and twigs that I would later learn was a home for malevolent spirits, designed to draw them away from the temptation of invading a human habitation. Or maybe it was an anticurse device, or a lure to attract the gods of wealth; one could never be sure of the exact function of one of these fanciful objects unless all the facts were available from the owner of the house and the holy man who designed the custom-made talisman. Sometimes these spindly inventions are tossed by the roadside amid the remains of flower and food offerings; these have been used to exorcise something evil pestering a household.

This particular doe at Changgangkha Lhakhang was perhaps five or six feet high, resting on four sloping stick legs, which nonetheless managed to prop up a sturdy pole that rose from their conjunction. At odd angles around the pole from its top to where it met the slanted legs, colored strings had been crisscrossed over thin sticks into cat’s-cradle and geodesic patterns and festooned around small rimless wheels whose spokes gave them the look of eight-pointed Christmas-tree stars. Small cloth flags and straw braids hung here and there, in no apparent order—though
a rinpoche (in Himalayan Buddhism, a guru/scholar) told me later that there is never anything casual about these constructions.

Not far away from this elaborate doe was a small altar of murky spiritual origins set into a niche in the monastery wall. Someone had placed fresh cuttings of an aromatic plant in vases on a narrow shelf beside the ubiquitous brass bowls. To the left of the altar was a whitewashed stone fireplace for burning offerings to a local deity who seemed to guard the monastery gate. Fat gaudy chickens pecked the ground around this ecumenical collection of shrines. Add to the picture the woman mending clothes in the sun, two strolling men in conversation, and a boy and girl with a tin washbucket clowning by the water tap near the center of the courtyard, and the scene became a perfect illustration of Himalayan Buddhism’s relaxed approach to religious sites. The fullness of life continued inside the walls, where a white-haired man with a wispy beard, who had just made the rounds of dozens of prayer wheels, sat on the warm stones and with arthritic hands spread out to dry what seemed to be lengths of coarse handwoven cloth.

Though there is activity around Buddhist temples and monasteries everywhere in the Himalayas, the difference in Bhutan—and to a large extent in Ladakh and Sikkim also—is the complete lack of the kind of frenzied commercialization that engulfs the great shrines of Bodhnath and Swayambhunath in Nepal or pilgrimage sites in northern India, where all kinds of trinkets and garments are laid out in colorful profusion, and touts nag at you to serve as guides. At Thimphu’s Changgangkha monastery, all workaday activity dwindled as we moved around walls with dozens of niches for prayer wheels and along a walkway to the temple door, which was no more than an unprotected stone ledge atop a dizzying slope. Down the steep hillside, the copses of prayer flags flapped in frenzy, sending their block-printed petitions to the gods. Father William Mackey, a Canadian Jesuit who spent much of his adult life teaching in Bhutan, says he has idled away many hours watching prayer flags and has never seen one flap in a downward motion. “Always up, up, up to heaven!” he says. He’s right. Of course, there has to be a scientific explanation, but in Bhutan you usually don’t feel much of a compulsion to know what it is.

And then, after the last prayer wheel on the last wall is spun, the low, dull cacophony of monkish chants—old men and novices reciting or reading from the sacred books—takes over the senses. We lean forward
to enter another small wooden door and plunge into darkness, an eerie void filled with a hundred voices and a hundred simultaneous but unorchestrated recitations. There is no other sound quite like this hum of a Himalayan Buddhist monastery as its inhabitants do their daily chores. The chanting of monks has both an unearthly pitch and intonation and a breathtaking hypnotic cadence. A lama told me that while the basic beliefs of Tibetan Buddhism were the same across the Himalayas, the Bhutanese had “different ways of playing the instruments and different tunes to chant the mantras.” To an untutored ear, however, the effect of chanting monks can be the same in a monastery in the Nepali hills, Sikkim, or Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s exile headquarters in northern India. Whether in the orderly recitations of an organized prayer service or the disorder of ritual or educative readings, the droning produces an unlikely clarity that seems to empty the atmosphere of distractions and expose the soul.

The sound ballooned in intensity as we neared its source: a corner chamber basking in pale yellow morning sunlight where rows of monks and their fidgety novices sat cross-legged on the floor, chanting from their hand-lettered, wood-bound sacred texts, each page a work of calligraphic art. The monks were working their way through a set of books at the request of a royal family member, someone said, explaining that the act of reading them aloud conferred blessings and protection on the patron. The sound filled the monastic hall, surged along stone corridors and into dark, airless, dungeonlike recesses packed with all the ingredients of busy sanctuaries. At each altar, cluttered with offerings and ritual objects, the air was hot and pungent from the flames of butter lamps. Massive images of the Buddha or one of his incarnates sat heavily and solidly in place.

Most sacred statues are hollow receptacles. I learned this in Bumthang, one of Bhutan’s most sacred valleys, where artists were preparing and painting images in one of three temples at Kurjey, a place of great significance to Bhutanese history. A row of Buddhas-in-the-making sat facing a wall in the newest shrine, each with a neat rectangular hole in its back. The statues were waiting for the holy objects to be installed before they could be sealed and consecrated. By wonderful chance during that week, the monk-scholar Lopen Pemala, who was then director of Bhutan’s National Library, was at work in a back room of the second Kurjey temple preparing the stuffings for the waiting Buddhas.

The room was no larger than ten feet wide and twenty feet long, and it was cluttered with the sacred inventory of the important task at hand, along with the worldly possessions of the elderly monks, on one of whose beds I sat. They worked on the floor, surrounded by ceiling-high stacks of boxes full of blessed treasure. Old books were piled on several shelves, one of which also held a decrepit electric clock. The only other modern artifact was a ballpoint pen, with which the monks checked off the items that were ready to be inserted into the waiting Buddhas and the chortens built to hold the remains of famous lamas or holy scriptures and objects often dedicated to their memory. There were forty statues and chortens left to fill in preparation for the funeral of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, the towering figure of Himalayan Buddhism who would be cremated in Paro six months later, after his body had rested at a number of holy places in Bhutan and Nepal.

The ingredients to be placed in each Buddha image or chorten were specifically prescribed. There had to be Tibetan mantras written on sticks in gold ink. There had to be crushed pearls, turquoise, coral, gold, and silver. There had to be holy scriptures in Sanskrit penned on handmade paper rolled “right side up,” Lopen Pemala said. There had to be nine kinds of grains, and “everything else we can think of that we require in this earthly world has to be put in, at least symbolically.” There had to be three types of mystical diagrams called mandalas, on yellow paper. When all was collected, the items had to be blessed and sprinkled with holy water by a high lama.

As he worked with his cheerful elderly monks as helpers, Lopen Pemala, with his impish face, a thin white beard, and accidental but appropriate tonsure of white hair around the edges of a balding head, spoke of the wonders and tragedies of the Tibetan Buddhist world that he had seen and experienced in more than half a century in holy orders. A Bhutanese by birth, he had been sent to Tibet as a boy to train in a harsh monastery, where he had been beaten with sticks by the resident disciplinarians. He laughs as he shows some vestigial scars on the back of his head. Since the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s, the catastrophic military response to an uprising in Lhasa in 1959, and the depredations of the Cultural Revolution, he has made long, frustrating pilgrimages to centers of Western learning to look for Tibetan holy books scattered abroad so that he could write a history of Bhutan and its links to the Tibetan monasteries. He found important Tibetan works in
Britain, France, Switzerland, and the United States, many in private hands and all priced out of the reach of the Bhutanese and thus more or less lost to Himalayan Buddhism. Lopen Pemala had also gone to Mongolia, the outer limit of the old Tantric world. Daydreaming that memory for a few moments, he noted almost as an afterthought that in Mongolia he had seen “texts written on pure silver in gold ink.”

Like Lopen Pemala, other scholars of Tibetan Buddhism in Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh, and Nepal believe that the Tantric school they follow is the highest form of a unique world religion that began in northern India sometime in the sixth century
B.C.
The founder of the faith, Siddhartha Gautama, is believed to have been born in about 560
B.C.
to a king of the Hindu warrior caste in Lumbini, in what is now the Terai region of Nepal. Most Westerners with even a passing knowledge of Asia know the outlines of his life, though very little of the story has been documented. Legend says he had a miraculous birth, entering his mother’s body as a white elephant descended from the Tushita (the highest) Heaven, and exiting through her side in perfect human form. As a boy, he led a sheltered, even hermetic, existence in his father’s palaces, and while still in his teens, married a surpassingly beautiful cousin, Yashodhara. Life couldn’t have been better for this young scion of a princely family belonging to a regional people called Shakyas.

But the young man was restless, eager to see the world from which his father had sequestered him. With his servant Channa, Siddhartha made, according to one account, four possibly secret but certainly fateful forays outside his home; others say the four experiences were combined in one trip. In any case, he saw four disturbing new sights: an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and finally a holy man dressed in rags. If the first three visions shattered the complacency he may have had about his world, the last taught him that it might be possible to find a human goodness and perhaps a sorrow-free existence that bore no relation to a material environment. After his encounter with the beatific
sadhu
, the young man returned home in mental and spiritual torment. He soon made the decision to follow the holy man’s example. He stole away at night to become a wandering ascetic, cutting his long hair and discarding his silk robes and jewelry. He wanted, we are told, to find spiritual solutions for the temporal sorrows he had seen.

Years of preaching and teaching followed. At times the young man lived as a hermit, punishing his body with thorny beds and starvation.
But this extreme asceticism was no more satisfying to his spirit than a life of luxury. Mercifully for millions of Buddhists, he survived harsh deprivation and found the Middle Way. John Snelling conjures up the scene this way in his
Buddhist Handbook
: “At a place nowadays called Bodh Gaya, in the modern Indian state of Bihar, Siddhartha made himself a cushion of grass beneath the spreading branches of the famous bodhi tree, a tree of the species
Ficus religiosa.
He determined to sit in meditation here until he found an answer to the problem of suffering—or died in the attempt.” By most accounts, he sat there for more than a year—some say six years—fighting off his ego and the temptations dangled before him by the evil demon Mara. At dawn one morning in May, he achieved Enlightenment, and became Buddha, the Enlightened One.

For forty more years, the Buddha Shakyamuni—the sage of the Shakyas, or historical Buddha, because there are numerous Buddhas or Buddha manifestations before him and yet to come—lived as a mendicant philosopher, practitioner of meditation, and founder of monastic communities. The earliest scene of his teaching, the Deer Park at Varanasi, is remembered in the pairs of golden deer placed high above the temple doors of many Himalayan monasteries. Buddha Shakyamuni never sought to be a messiah or a god, nor did he claim descent from one. The Buddhist message, simply put, was compelling in the caste-ridden Hindu world inhabited by bloodthirsty deities: salvation and the end of suffering come only through the understanding of one’s own mind. The path to heaven is an individualistic journey from sorrow and suffering to enlightenment. One’s karma, the accumulation of past and present deeds and thoughts, exerts a powerful influence as a believer passes through a recurring process of birth, death, and rebirth. But acts of merit and a life rightly lived may mitigate karmic fate.

The Buddha taught Four Noble Truths: that existence is suffering, that the origin of suffering is desire and attachment to material goods, that suffering ceases when desire ceases, and that desire can be washed away by following the Noble Eightfold Path: right understanding, right thinking, right speech, right (temperate) action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right meditation, leading to bliss. Buddhists learn not to take the life of a living creature and never to appropriate something not freely given them. Ideally, they also strive not to drink intoxicants or take narcotics, not to lie or speak (or act) abusively, and not to be sexually promiscuous or irresponsible.