So Close to Heaven (13 page)

But on the ground in Bhutan, as elsewhere in these mountain realms, Himalayan Buddhism seems a much less esoteric way of life than its sophisticated theology would suggest. Early in the morning in Thimphu, I would sometimes go to the Memorial Chorten to watch the faithful at prayer from the distance of a park bench. It was a scene repeated with variations at temples as diverse as the high-tech (by Tibetan standards), Western-financed Rumtek monastery in Sikkim or at numerous small shrines in offtrack Buddhist enclaves in Nepal. In Thimphu, old women and men, well-dressed young professionals—probably civil servants or the vanguard of the new business class—and schoolchildren in uniform all turned up at the chorten before the workday began to spin the prayer wheels near the gate and take in a few circumambulations, clockwise walks around the shrine, while chanting mantras with the help of prayer beads and now and then pausing before images placed in niches on the four outer walls.

One morning, about two dozen people, alone or in small groups, were walking around the base of the chorten. There were old men and women in worn clothing and young executives in smartly tailored ghos in understated stripes or plaids, worn with silken knee socks, the best Western-style leather loafers or shoes, and sometimes stylish briefcases, which they put down on the grass to free both hands for worship. Most carried prayer beads. One elderly gentleman with a gigantic goiter and decrepit basketball shoes shuffled along alone, chanting, “
Om mani padme hum
”—“Hail to the jewel in the lotus”—the mantra of the mountains. The air was cool. Most people seemed to stop to pray before
one niche bathed by warm sun. Each clasped two hands above the head, then before the face and again at chest level, all the movements in quick succession. This signifies mind-speech-body. Some then dropped to the ground and prostrated themselves. Others resumed walking.

The circumambulation routine seems to combine a morning constitutional with an act of devotion. People are ready then to face the day physically and spiritually refreshed. After an hour, as people came and went, several monks joined the procession, one leading a stately and very old woman in Tibetan dress. All gave the large prayer wheels near the gate the obligatory spin that rings a bell. At one point there was a constant clang of bells even when no one was entering the courtyard; an urchin had wandered in from the street and was spinning the prayer wheels for fun. He seemed to be Nepali or Indian, not Bhutanese, but no one chased him away. Another little boy arrived, ragged and piggybacking a baby. He stood and watched as luckier boys headed for school burst into the courtyard in a noisy pack, chewing bubble gum, to follow the daybreak ritual with about as much reverence as British schoolboys attacking compulsory morning prayers. The children’s school uniforms, boys’ and girls’, had been tailored into small versions of the national costume.

A young couple came to share breakfast on the grass. Their clothes said they were not Bhutanese, but possibly Indian or Nepali laborers from one of the construction projects; these laborers live in hovels on the edge of town. She carried a tiffin box and a thermos, and served him rice, lentils, and tea, waiting until he finished before she ate. They did not circumambulate or pray. No doubt they were Hindus. Hindus find peace here, too.

There is a good deal of unseen ritual attached to the ubiquitous prayer beads carried around the chorten and everywhere else a pious Buddhist goes, said the Rinpoche Mynar Trilku, a Tibetan scholar who is also curator of Bhutan’s National Museum. The beads are part of a good Buddhist’s basic kit, along with a prayer book and an amulet containing a holy relic or religious writing. “Normally in olden days when you traveled, you had an amulet,” he said. “Lamas have a bigger one, laymen a smaller one. Then maybe if the layman is a religious person who reads, he has his prayer book and his rosary. Other laymen, they have just the rosary. When you’re traveling and you sleep, you keep it normally above
your head. You hang the rosary, prayer book, and amulet on the head of the bed.” To be effective, however, the amulet and beads must first be ritually prepared, the rinpoche said.

“Normally when a rosary you take, first you go to the lama to get the authorization, because in Buddhism the most important is you know how to read a mantra,” he explained. “Unless you have authorization from a lama, the effect is nil, or not much. So normally, they go to the lama to get the authorization for a particular mantra. It may be just syllables. Then once the authorization is done, they give the rosary to the lama to bless. So the lama takes the rosary, he may chant a few mantras on the rosary, and then he gives it back. And then they do their mantras on it.” A string of prayer beads may be custom-made to coincide in number with the syllables of an assigned mantra, though this is done less and less nowadays, the rinpoche said.

“Normally now the rosary has one hundred eleven or maybe one hundred eight beads. If somebody’s really religious, then they have got other beads, ten each, which are side-hangings to keep count.” The idea is to recite a mantra in multiples of one hundred; the extra eleven (or eight) beads on the main string are there for insurance. “We believe that when you do a mantra, you may make a mistake by finger or by mouth,” the rinpoche said. “So we give ten percent extra beads. The one hundred eleven or one hundred eight is counted as one hundred.” Each round of recitations can then be ticked off, abacus-fashion, by pushing aside one of the optional counting beads, if you have them. “Once you go around once, then you take out one on the side; that means you’ve done a hundred—though you’ve really done one hundred eleven,” the rinpoche said. Is this extra-bead insurance policy universal? When I got home I dug out a string of Burmese prayer beads from a pagoda in Mandalay. There were 109. Maybe the Burmese are slightly more attentive, but still not perfect.

When the worshipper has recited one hundred mantras ten times and used all appended scorekeeping beads, there may be additional counters in the shape of sacred symbols to move to next, each signifying a thousand prayer cycles. The repetition of acts of devotion is important to the Bhutanese. In several temples I was shown hollows in the polished floors where certain monks or abbots were reputed to have prostrated themselves so many times that they carved imprints of their feet on the wooden planks as they dug in their toes to raise and lower themselves
again and again and again. Contemporary worshippers often choose to pray on those same spots, burnishing a continuity of grace and merit.

The obsession with repeated ritual worries some Bhutanese purists, among them Rigzin Dorji, the national culture czar who was in charge of safeguarding tradition as Bhutan was opening to the world. A sophisticated layman hip to the jargon of the international lending organizations that conservative Bhutan holds at arm’s length, Rigzin Dorji said he looked at ritual as the spiritual equivalent of “sustainable development”—enough grace to keep one afloat in this life and maybe to bank a little merit for the next. “Buddha said, Don’t accept me blindly,” Rigzin Dorji said. “He said, Test my teachings as you test for gold. Test the validity of my truth. Teaching should suit the changing times. Analyze my teachings, the Buddha said. But not everybody can analyze. Simple people can’t. So they do simple rituals. Ritual is just to make yourself okay. It has nothing to do with the salvation. For salvation, you have to perfect yourself, become yourself Buddha, because salvation lies in your own hand. Salvation doesn’t lie in the hands of the gods or deities. So therefore, they can just help you in removing temporary badness. Your problems are connected with past karma, and nobody else can help that.”

Bhutanese Buddhists take every opportunity to demonstrate their faith, especially on holy days, when circumambulators crowd the ground around sacred shrines and some other, unexpected places. Because Thimphu’s National Library has so many holy books, people come there to walk around the building, chanting mantras, as they also do at the National Museum. Indeed, the aura of sanctity around the National Library complicated a recent silverfish crisis, I was told by the deputy librarian, Gyonpo Tshering. We were looking out a window of the magnificent library building toward an incongruous squat log cabin that had sprung up just outside. It was the home of a newfangled fumigation machine.

Like silverfish anywhere, those in Bhutan love books—not for their tough, handmade Bhutanese paper, but for their tasty ink, made of natural products such as charcoal dust, plant extracts, and animal blood. The volumes in Bhutan’s National Library are not ordinary library books. They are a rare collection of priceless little bundles of calligraphy, some of them hundreds of years old; each unbound “volume” consists of pages collected between carved boards, wrapped in silk, and tied with a
silken ribbon. The classification system consists of tiny satin flaps in colors coded, more or less, to match subjects. The books, most of them devoted to the Buddhist canon—there are also some Western-style books on an upper floor—sit on open wooden shelves in dark, silent rooms that exude the atmosphere of a temple. In fact, an imposing altar with images of Bhutan’s most sacred legendary-historical figures—the Guru Rinpoche, Pema Lingpa, and the Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal—dominates the second-floor stacks.

Perhaps because a Japanese scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, Yoshiro Imaeda, had served as an adviser to the National Library for a number of years, or perhaps because the Japanese have lately taken a passionate interest in preserving the wellsprings of all things Buddhist in the Himalayas and South Asia, Japan offered to help remove the thousands of silverfish that had begun to romp cheekily through the priceless collection of books, boring holes in volume after volume. The answer, said the experts, was a fumigator, a wonderful machine into which the books would go, to emerge insect-free. They could then be placed in custom-made metal boxes and returned to sandalwood shelves, not so beautifully displayed but certainly better protected from the ravages of one of God’s least explicable creatures.

Gyonpo Tshering said that he had been assured that the fumigator could be tucked into the basement of the library. Anywhere else would have been offensive to the gods and spirits, not least of all because the fumigator had no other function but to destroy many small sentient beings. “Fumigation is some kind of poison, and we don’t want to disturb the spirits with it,” Gyonpo Tshering said. Apparently the librarians had come to terms with the need to take the lives of insects—or did the machine just chase them away?—in the interests of saving irreplaceable books. When the mechanical savior arrived, however, it was too big for the cellar door. Admitting it through an upper floor was simply unthinkable. So it got its own temporary little house on the ground between the main library building and its administration wing, while librarians went looking for money to build it a permanent residence.

This unexpected crisis took time and energy away from the librarians’ main task of cataloguing and preserving unknown thousands of books stored indifferently in dzongs and temples all over Bhutan. I had seen some of them tossed carelessly into wooden chests or on shelves gathering dust—and no doubt silverfish—in shrines far away from Thimphu.
Some get eaten by rats or made into shredded nests by other vermin. The librarians, then led by Lopen Pemala, wanted these scattered collections to stay in place, but with better care. The fear in Thimphu was that if word of the great fumigator got around, people would be arriving with fragile treasures in market sacks, wanting to put them through the machine whether they needed debugging or not.

Gyonpo Tshering said that there were untold numbers of old manuscripts stored in private temples and in monasteries, where lamas still produced books under distinctive imprints. “If you can keep them properly where they are, that’s the best solution,” he said, recounting the story of the Bumthang temple with books reputed to be in the handwriting of the saint Pema Lingpa, whose life is wrapped into the history of the place. “No one is allowed to see these, according to the monks,” the librarian said. “But if the lama is not able to take care of these, they will be gone. We need a national literary survey. We need to reach illiterate people who may have these valuable things in private possession. We need funds. Then if people are interested to sell, we can buy. Or we can at least borrow these books for microfilming. Some people may be taking care of treasures. But human beings have their ups and downs.”

Because books of holy writings are considered sacred in themselves, they are never to be abandoned as trash. They are burned instead—cremated, really. From this practice came the notion that all writing in Dzongkha, the Tibetan-based “language of the dzongs,” is sacred, no matter what the subject. Modern Bhutanese label this a quaint myth no longer applicable in an age of textbooks and newspapers. Maybe. But it is still more than likely that if your purchases in a shop are not plunked into a plastic bag they will be wrapped in a castoff Indian newspaper, not the Bhutanese weekly
Kuensel
, in any of its three languages, Dzongkha, Nepali, or English.

In the minds of many rural Bhutanese, the concept of education outside monastic walls is recent, and learning is associated primarily with the world of lamas and monks. Even in the schools that are now changing the lives of a new generation, the day begins with a Buddhist hymn, linking the schoolroom to the heavens in the minds of tots. But if an outsider has to suspend a preference for the separation of church and state in order to experience the seamlessness of the overlap of spiritual and mundane in Buddhist regions of Bhutan, the visitor also comes to realize that a lot of what seems to be associated with Buddhism is in
reality based on something far deeper and older in the traditions of this country and others across the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau.

At the most basic level, there is secular superstition, probably linked to the fear of bad magic. Superstition is woven deeply into daily life in Bhutan, to judge from many small rituals. When it is time to make decisions, in rural villages and among the sophisticated, Western-educated elite of Thimphu alike, the adherence to superstitious acts or astrological advice varies only in degree. A poor farmer may put off a new venture if he is warned against starting it on a given day. His middle-class town-dwelling counterpart may try to trick the spirits instead. “If we want to go on a trip Thursday but the day is not auspicious,” a businesswoman explained, “we pack the car on Wednesday and pretend to drive away but go along the road only for a short while to fool the spirits. Then we come back and leave the next day the way we planned all along.” A family in Thimphu found a novel way to avoid a wedding curse. Monks given a prospective bride’s and groom’s horoscopes to scan had warned against an impending marriage, finding dissonance between the two charts. To circumvent trouble, the family of the bride dressed a female relative in the wedding dress and ostentatiously conducted a mock ceremony. When the meddling spirits had departed, apparently believing that the wedding was over, the real marriage took place. Everybody enjoyed a good laugh, and a sigh of relief.