So Close to Heaven (12 page)

I
MET
S
ANGAY
W
ANGCHUCK
because I had asked for help in identifying the objects that crowded the altars of Himalayan temples and drew the devotion of ordinary people whose shared treasures they were. Village shrines, whose old statues and bright, polished vessels amid an array of offerings—replicated in the prayer rooms of thousands of Bhutanese homes, large and small—are as much an integral part of daily life as the fields, clinics, homes, and schools. In many small hamlets, a rudimentary temple with only a lama or two, or maybe none, is the only focal point for the community. Most Bhutanese shrines and monastic chapels have not been forced by security concerns to pack away altar treasures or restrict the spontaneous use of them by worshippers. Furthermore, confounding the outsider, Himalayan Buddhist holy places tolerate deities and legendary beings who wander in from other faiths or the powerful local spirit world and who may be accorded shrines of their own under the roofs of more classic icons. I had seen bowls, chalices, pitchers, money, food, candle-powered revolving lamps, photographs in silver frames, peacock feathers, and once a Heineken can placed before images of Buddhas or saints in various forms, temperaments, or colorations.

Monastery compounds and the courtyards of dzongs are egalitarian places for people as well as spirits. The rich and poor, powerful and humble, cross paths on pilgrimages to the country’s holiest places, not only in Bhutan but also in other Himalayan kingdoms, past and present. Though temples are often dark and palpably holy, they are not forbidding
places. Peals of laughter float out of corners perfumed by butter lamps, where worshippers pay (I guess they would say they make a contribution) to have a monk roll a set of three dice in the hope of getting a lucky number, which may be interpreted as a sign to be read before an important undertaking or just as a bit of extra good fortune perhaps to sweeten life. If the first throw turns out badly, you can always try again and again until something better turns up, preferably an auspicious odd number. The monks enjoy the game too.

To strip this wildly abundant universe down to its textbook basics, Sangay Wangchuck and I went on a tour of two more austere and orthodox holy places, Thimphu’s Memorial Chorten, built in honor of King Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, who died in 1972, and Simtokha Dzong, a seventeenth-century monastery-fortress that is now a school emphasizing Himalayan Buddhist culture—though here, too, a frightening likeness of the familiar protector Mahakala, a destructive god apparently borrowed from (or shared with) Hinduism, glowered over a corner of the inner sanctuary.

We started with the Memorial Chorten’s votive butter lamps and the brass offering bowls, usually seven of them in a row, filled with fresh water every morning to symbolize all the material donations that the gods appreciate. There were, however, eight bowls on the altar before which we stood at the foot of a three-story, three-dimensional mandala representing one deity and his entourage. Sangay Wangchuck had just finished saying that the mandala followed the teachings of the Nyingmapa school, the oldest order of Tantric Buddhism, even though Bhutan’s official Buddhist school is the Drukpa branch of the Kagyupa order, a younger school.

But the eight brass bowls where there should have been seven was not a sectarian matter. My instructor was adroit. Sangay Wangchuck explained what each water-filled brass bowl symbolized, first the seven standard ones, and then the mysterious eighth. “From here, this is the drinking water, this the washing-the-feet water, then the flower offering, then incense offering, then lamp offering—should be the lamp here; light offering actually—then this should be the perfume offering, this food offering. Then music offering there. This is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight offerings.” Music? But by then we were moving on to the
torma
, those sugary-looking, pastel-tinted constructions of flour and butter that soften the brass and silver of altars. It was much later
that I heard from a Tibetan-born lama about “eight lucky offerings.” Unfortunately, the same lama told me there were always seven symbolic offering bowls. Okay.

The Bhutanese, not alone among Asians, love numbered categories. Among my favorites are Buddhism’s “five nonretentions” and the “eight conditions of nonleisure.” These are described by Khetsun Sangpo Rinbochay in his
Tantric Practice in Nying-ma
(translated by the Buddhist scholar Jeffrey Hopkins). As I tried to grasp even the outlines of Himalayan Buddhism, I identified immediately with the nonretentions: retaining the words but not the meaning, retaining the meaning but not the words, retaining the meaning without identifying it, retaining the meaning but confusing the order, and retaining the wrong meaning. As for the eight conditions of nonleisure—birth as a hell-being, as a hungry ghost, as an animal, as a god of long life, in an uncultured area, as a person possessed of erroneous views, in a land where Buddha has not been, or as a stupid person—I found not just a couple that fit.

But despite the twos (or fours or fives) of this and the eights of that, there is a certain marvelous flexibility to the Bhutanese mind when it comes to the quantification of phenomena—brass bowls, kilometers, or whatever—and to the application of universally accepted ordinal or chronological concepts. The calendar is an example. At the start of a public ceremony in eastern Bhutan, the presiding official began with a statement of that day’s date, according to Bhutanese reckoning. It was a wonderful poetic recitation that went something like “On this twenty-sixth day of the ninth month of the year of the Water Monkey …” Because I didn’t have a pencil and paper and the ceremony was long, the exact wording was gone from my head by the end of the event, but I wanted to make a note of it. That was on a Thursday. Only three days later, on Sunday, I remembered to ask a local administrator to recall Thursday’s date for me. He said he didn’t know. I replied that I would settle for today’s date on the Bhutanese calendar, and would work back to the one I had missed. He said that wasn’t so easy. “Sometimes we add extra days if they are auspicious, or drop one if it isn’t,” he said. “These things are never the same.” Fascinated, I asked other people in the small town where I was staying about the Bhutanese calendar. The question drew a lot of blank stares. Many people did not appear to know how to reckon months and days—although I have seen the Bhutanese calendar displayed in schools—or simply did not feel it was necessary to focus on
what particular day it was, unless it was a festival date or other important event. Yet somehow it all comes together again early each year on Losar, the Himalayan Buddhist New Year, after which everyone is left to drift off again into his or her own time zone.

At the Memorial Chorten, Sangay Wangchuck and I were studying the sugary torma, which he said were of two kinds. The bigger elaborate ones, great sunbursts of overlapping colored petals radiating from a central circle, similar to some of those on display at the National Museum, were the work of monks, who had created them as acts of faith to be semipermanent altar ornaments. Nowhere in the Himalayas had I seen such exquisite constructions as those on the altars of Bhutan. These are both larger than average and far more elaborately and artistically formed than others. Smaller torma, some looking like crudely formed cookies, were offered by lay Bhutanese worshippers, who also brought modest gifts to leave under a nearby portrait of the late king. That day, the centerpiece among these gifts was a yellow plastic bucket with a few plastic flowers.

“The small torma is like a symbolic food offering,” Sangay Wangchuck was saying. “They make these traditional shapes themselves and bring. Or sweets they bring. Here is a dry flower, a special flower. It is traditional, but we can use any flower here.” Whatever else the faithful bring, water is still the most popular and sensible form of offering, given with the purest of intentions, he said. In Buddhist thinking (as in Christian parables and stories), the ideal attitude is that the simplest gift can have the most value. “So usually, we did water offering only,” Sangay Wangchuck said. “Easy. You don’t have any greed with that. Right? Water is everywhere available, so you can offer it without greediness—materialism. Some offerings may be more valuable. So maybe sometimes you think, well, this is too valuable, you cannot give that. Maybe you spend a lot of money, so there will be attachment there. But water doesn’t have any attachment, because you can offer as much as you can. So therefore maybe it is simple, but is accumulating a lot of merit, free of attachment. Anybody can do it. Anybody can offer it.”

Getting a handle on the three-dimensional mandala in front of us—one of the chorten’s three levels of monumental constructions of carved and painted images climbing toward a pinnacle crowned by a deity—was a lot more difficult than understanding the purity of spirit required for making a meaningful offering. Sangay Wangchuck, a tall, easygoing,
but erudite man with a cosmopolitan frame of mind after stints as a monk in Sri Lanka and as an adviser to a Tibetan Buddhist temple in Woodstock, New York, spoke English in his own way but certainly meant to speak clearly. Yet here was what he considered a simple explanation of what we were looking at on the chorten’s ground floor: “So this is the mandala of the Dorji Phurba. Its main feature, we call in Sanskrit
Vajrakila. Vajra
means thunderbolt, or indestructible symbol, and the
kila
means ‘nail’ something, symbolizing ’subdue all the negativities.’ The
Vajrakila
has many retinues, mainly four. Each one has the other retinues. So they will be called the mandala. ‘Mandala’ means an assembly of that particular deity. Especially you find in the Buddhism they use ‘mandala’ for two things: one a symbol of that particular deity, one an offering. That mandala offering is a universal offering, offering to the object all the universe, that is mandala offering. If you say ‘mandala,’ that is an assembly of that particular deity. But then you can see the diagram, flat that is, that is actually their palace, or something like that.”

After a few hours in Sangay Wangchuck’s company, if much remained murky because of my ignorance, what actually became reasonably clear to me, never a student of Buddhism, was that many of the terms we understand to represent only one object or aspect of a multifaceted religion like this may have many meanings and usages. I had raised the definition of the term “mandala” with him because in my mind the word had always meant a two-dimensional mystical graphic of circles and squares—whether schematic “paintings” in colored sand or the floor plan of the stupendous Javanese temple at Borobudur. Here in Thimphu I faced a larger-than-life jumbled pyramid of earth beings (some with animal faces) and demigods scrambling or struggling or getting tramped underfoot (“pressing out the negatives,” Sangay Wangchuck volunteered) as they groped upward toward the commanding visage of their deity in the upper reaches of their world. At the top, the deity was locked in sexual embrace with his consort, an erotic pose that Himalayan Buddhists are taught is the interaction of compassion and wisdom, or means and wisdom, with wisdom represented by the female form. Some of the powerful faces on the way up the mandala were terrifying. Sangay Wangchuck explained that this was because the more intractable negatives didn’t respond to a placid Buddha, and so there had to be “semiwrathful or very wrathful emanations.”

Those who are tempted to dabble in Tibetan Buddhism are repeatedly
reminded that such a quest is not a part-time occupation satisfied by occasional bouts of concentration. Among Tantric communities, the monks and scholars of the faith kindly but firmly deflected all but the most basic of questions about a very complex and often secretive religion with sexual rituals and intimations of the supernatural they could not or would not describe in detail. I acquiesced willingly because I was not seeking instruction or enlightenment, though it was frustrating to know that there would be much I would never comprehend. “You have to go through the practice,” a Bhutanese monk told me. “Then you will understand.” I came to learn that even in quests for what seemed like basic information, it was necessary to be patient and let knowledge come in its own time.