So Close to Heaven (11 page)

The Buddha Shakyamuni had a practical streak, or so we gather from stories told of his common sense, tales perhaps invented to humanize him. He had clever ways of putting down the egocentric or self-righteously pious. In one story, he turned on a disciple pushing for a clear statement on vegetarianism with the remark that he was more concerned with what came out of someone’s mouth than what went into it. On another occasion, he was approached near a river by a puffed-up monk who said he had spent years learning to walk on water. Why do that, the Buddha asked, when there is a ferry nearby?

By the time Lord Buddha died, possibly of food poisoning or dysentery, he had urged his followers to form communities for meditation and study of the
dharma
, the laws and practices of the Buddhist universe. These communities became the
sangha.
Those who want to call themselves Buddhist make only one initial promise: to take refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. These are the Three Jewels. Though in some countries “sangha” is now a term applied almost entirely to monastic orders, the Buddha Shakyamuni intended it to mean the whole community of believers, which he divided into four groups of equal importance: monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen. It is interesting to note that over the centuries, the role of nuns has never met the high expectations of Lord Buddha. In the Himalayas, the importance of nuns seems to have declined, in fact, despite the equality women often enjoy in secular life.

Since Lord Buddha’s death, the religion that came to be known as Buddhism has developed numerous sects and schools. But the first major divisions of Asian Buddhism were two: the Hinayana, the “lesser wheel” or “smaller vehicle,” and the Mahayana, or “greater wheel” (or vehicle). Tantric Buddhism—also called Vajrayana, the “diamond vehicle”—evolved from the Mahayana sometime between the third and the seventh centuries
A.D.
, and there is a division of opinion over whether it is a separate school or simply an extension of the Mahayana tradition.

Hinayana Buddhism, known as Theravada by the Thais, Sri Lankans, Burmese, and others who follow it, consolidated the first of Buddhism’s great theological systems, codifying the basic teachings. The Mahayana school followed a few centuries later. With considerable oversimplification, one may say that Mahayana gives greater emphasis to service to humanity and less to the self-centered search for individual perfection. The bodhisattvas, compassionate could-be buddhas who chose to stay
and serve in the imperfect world rather than enter heaven, became important figures to be emulated and worshipped. Coincidental or not, this underlying social-service philosophy seems to be reflected in the absence in Himalayan towns of begging monks making their formal early-morning rounds through poor villages, as they do in Thailand or in other Theravada communities. Ordained Tantric Buddhist monks or lamas (masters who are not necessarily in holy orders) are always on hand to teach, counsel, cure, and pray over important milestones in a person’s life. Traffic in and out of the monasteries by monks and laypeople is constant, not limited to ritual occasions. Some families with money and large homes may maintain a resident monk. That lamas and monks are often paid, sometimes lavishly, for their services does not, ideally, diminish their sense of vocation. (“The best wheel is the Greater Wheel,” says a Bhutanese dashboard sticker.)

Alone in the Himalayas, the Buddhist Bhutanese government feels free to press monks into public service projects, and is urging state-supported monastic communities to take a more active part in health or sanitation drives and other village development. One of these projects, backed by UNICEF, would also help monks improve their own living quarters as a way of setting an example. They might well start at Punakha, the ancient capital and seat for half the year of Bhutan’s chief abbot, the je khenpo. There the stench of latrines nearly made my aristocratic Bhutanese traveling companion vomit as we searched for an exit in a little-trafficked corner of the monastery. The three-sided cloister of monks’ quarters was teeming with unkempt novices, who tossed refuse, spat, and generally sullied the piece of muddy ground below them, over which hung the pungent smell of urine and feces that emanated from an unseen corner. We had also encountered human waste in a dark corner of the dzong itself, along a passageway to the grandest of monastic assembly halls. Chaucer would have enjoyed this.

Himalayan Buddhism developed a complex theology of birth and rebirth to govern the fate of ordinary believers as well as the reincarnations of great lamas and monastic abbots. The rebirth of religious leaders as infant reincarnates known as
tulkus
became entrenched as a system by the fourteenth or fifteenth century and persists into the present day, modified only by the fact that some reincarnates are now born abroad, as far afield as Europe or the Americas. A lot of politics and fund-raising considerations have crept into the otherwise miraculous appearance of incarnates,
as monasteries look for well-connected tulkus as insurance against powerlessness or penury.

Sometimes, international geopolitics complicates the issue. Years of wrangling between rival claimants to the leadership of the Kagyupa Karmapa, a sect of the Kagyupa order based at Sikkim’s Rumtek monastery, aroused such passion that Indian troops were called in at one point to break up rioting. The schism, during which charges of Chinese influence were traded liberally, led to the investitures of two Karmapa abbots, one in Tibet and one in India. At the latter ceremony, in 1994, uniformed police carrying automatic weapons stood between the little tulku on his throne of peace and the unpredictable congregation, which everyone assumed was laced with spies and agents provocateurs and armed with rocks and bottles. Of course, scholars remind us that Buddhism is the religion that has proved it can be rendered schismatic over the drape of a robe, or whether it covers one shoulder or two.

Tantric Buddhists view the history of Buddhism as a progression leading upward to the highest, most complex, and most sophisticated form of the faith—theirs. “The Hinayana should be taken as basic knowledge,” said Rigzin Dorji, the Bhutanese scholar. “The Mahayana should be taken as attitude. Tantra means practice. In the Western concept this is called mysticism. Tantra is risky. It’s very difficult also because lamas do not teach immediately. A lama has to judge the student, whether he can uphold the vows or not. Without testing the student, he will not impart any teaching on tantra. He may simply say, why don’t you study the basic Buddhist texts: the Hinayana, the Mahayana? The student, once accepted by a lama, must strictly follow all of his instructions. The student has to find a suitable teacher; the teacher must select a suitable student—but only after a few years, when they know each other very well, like father and son.” Rigzin Dorji, who compared Tantra to “a rocket going to the moon,” added that we must remember “there can be terrible accidents in space.” This religion is not for the timorous or half-hearted. Its monks live, Rigzin Dorji said, by no fewer than 345 rules.

Most simply described, the perfection of Tantric practice is “like building a house,” suggests Chogyam Trungpa, a reincarnation of a leading Tibetan lama who became a monastic abbot at the age of eighteen months. “First you put down the foundation, then you build the first story, then the second. Then you can put a gold roof on if you like.” In other words, first the Hinayana, then the Mahayana, then the Tantra.
“Looked at in this way,” he says in
The Dawn of Tantra
, “the whole of the practice of Buddhism can be regarded as tantra, although all Buddhists outside the historical tradition of tantra might not agree with this.”

“The basic idea of tantra is, like any other teaching of Buddhism, the attainment of enlightenment,” he wrote. “But in tantra, the approach to enlightenment is somewhat different. Rather than aiming at the attainment of the enlightened state, the Tantric approach is to see the continuity of the enlightened mind in all situations, as well as the discontinuity of it.” The achievement of the Tantric ideal, he later says, requires a student to pass through increasingly difficult stages of study. In the end, the student “has related to his body, learned to slow down the speed of muscles, veins, emotions, blood.” With everything in low gear, “the student is able to relate to the ultimate space through his relationship and union with the teacher.” Slowing down or altering the mechanisms of the body probably explains the superhuman abilities of certain great lamas.

Across the Himalayan landscape, stories persist of lamas who have the power to transform themselves into wild creatures. “Some people believe these lamas can assume the forms of animals or birds,” a well-educated government official told me in Tashigang. “As birds, they can fly away and return to caves in the northern mountains where they meditate.” Most modern Buddhists treat such accounts with derision or, to be on the safe side, say that today’s lamas and monks no longer possess these special powers enjoyed by earlier generations of holy men. Himalayan Buddhists have for centuries been asked to explain not only occult practices but also the ability of holy men and women to meditate without food or clothing in bitter winter weather in the shelter of caves or exposed rock formations, sometimes at altitudes high and inaccessible enough to defeat mountaineers.

Alexandra David-Neel, a remarkable French Tibetologist and a recognized lama, noted in her 1931 book
Magic and Mystery in Tibet
that the
lung-gom-pa
lamas—those trained in secret regimens of breathing and body control to move with extraordinary speed—could travel “as if carried on wings.” David-Neel, a scholar but also a popular writer who died peacefully at the age of one hundred in the French Alps in 1969, reported seeing lamas in trancelike states demonstrating
lung-gom
techniques on several occasions during her journeys in Tibet. This was her first encounter:

“I could clearly see his perfectly calm impassive face and wide-open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far-distant object situated somewhere high up in space. The man did not run. He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball, and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground. His steps had the regularity of a pendulum. He wore the usual monastic robe and toga, both rather ragged. His left hand gripped a fold of the toga and was half hidden under the cloth. His right held a
phurba
[magic dagger]. His right arm moved slightly at each step as if leaning on a stick, just as though the
phurba
, whose pointed extremity was far above the ground, had touched it and were actually a support.”

In Kathmandu, Purna Harsha Bajracharya, a Buddhist from the ancient Newar community of Nepal, told me a story about the power of Tantric law that had been passed down through his family. His father, Chitta Harsha Bajracharya, was Nepal’s first recognized Tibetologist; he had catalogued all the Tibetan monasteries in the country for the National Archives. “One of our forefathers, a student of Tantra, was in Lhasa,” Purna Harsha began. “He was respected very much by Tibetan lamas. Some of them invited him to tea in the Potala. When tea was poured, he just took what was in his cup and instead of swallowing it, spat it out the window. The lamas were disturbed. Again they poured the tea; again he spat it out the window. After three times, when he finally took the tea and did not spit it, then the lamas asked him: ’Was there something wrong with the tea? Why should you suspect it, when it was the same tea served to us?’ Our forebear then told them: ‘You see, I saw in my mind my house in Nepal and it was on fire. The people there were trying their level best to put it out, but not succeeding. Then, with the help of a mantra from Tantric law, I took the tea and spat it out of the window, willing it to put out that fire.’

“After two or three months he was informed that on that very day all of a sudden his house had caught fire. After many hours, clouds suddenly came and there was a very heavy rainfall. It doused the blaze. The Tibetan lamas, hearing this, went to him and wanted to keep him there in Lhasa. But with some difficulty he left and returned to his home in Nepal. People told the story everywhere afterward, believing how it proved the power of Tantric law.”

Sangay Wangchuck—then the undersecretary of Bhutan’s Central Monastic Secretariat and later director of the National Library—told me
that there always had been and probably still are lamas whose mastery of higher disciplines had given them extrahuman powers. There are also plenty of Himalayan magicians and charlatans who appear to perform abnormal feats. The difference, he said, was that the lamas who had developed extraordinary powers were not in show business and would be very reluctant to make themselves known in any public way.

“A magician is not an enlightened person, though he can show a lot of things using a combination of material objects,” he said. “But that’s not really spiritual. It is another thing if that is achieved through meditation, practice. But if one monk or lama had the power to perform miracles, this is mostly kept quiet. They are not showing these things. Only if it is necessary do lamas show the miracle. If someone is a magician working with material things, then he always performs it. Such a person might be a lama, might be a monk, but we have to be very careful about this kind of miracle or supernatural power he seems to be performing.”

True supernatural powers are not contrived, but spring naturally from higher levels of Tantric practice, said Sangay Wangchuck. “When you are learning Buddhism, the basic teaching, we are not studying these things. But when you come to a certain level, these practices come to you naturally. Step by step if you study and do whatever you have to do, you reach that level by yourself. But we Buddhists are never concerned much about this.” At a time when monastic communities are fighting to retain their primacy in the life of Bhutan, a debate over lamas who can turn themselves into animals or birds ranks in importance with the argument over how many angels fit on the head of a pin.