So Close to Heaven (2 page)

From the vantage point of our era, Tibet may appear to be a sad civilization long stripped of the glories it enjoyed and the power it wielded more than a thousand years ago. Tens of thousands of its most devout people are scattered in a diaspora, and its god-king Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, struggles in exile to keep alive the Tibetan spirit, knowing he has scant material hope to offer younger hotbloods who want guerrilla war. We who encounter Tibet at the end of the twentieth century thus marvel at even what little we can discover of its glorious medieval history. In general, the lands where Himalayan Buddhism survived longest, in and around Tibet, are territories where much historical material is still undiscovered or inaccessible, and there has been very little modern archaeological and archival research. When extant, ancient documents are often laced with myth and magic. We are asked to believe marvelous, fantastic stories because the people whose history these tales tell believe them, and that makes them real enough. A traveler through Himalayan Buddhism often must put aside rational argument while traversing lands where spirits and the reincarnates of real and mythological heroes have never stopped sharing the topography with human life, with both comic and tragic results. In these thrilling histories, lamas fly or conjure up hailstorms and saints may have half a dozen or more manifestations, beneficent or belligerent, depending on the need of the moment. What unadulterated pleasure the unscholarly can take here in the knowledge that even academic experts cannot always agree on what constitutes historical fact, much less interpretation. So why not believe that certain monks could levitate a foot above the ground while circumambulating a stupa?

The flow of life and commerce that linked the Himalayan world to Central Asia was disrupted by Islam’s relentless march and by the imperial urges of Britain, China, Russia, and, for the brief moment history assigned it, the Soviet Union. For long years, pilgrimage and trade routes withered, monasteries were destroyed or abandoned. However, the future of inner Asia is suddenly full of possibility again. Artificial borders and barriers established by great powers are crumbling, new nations have
emerged from the collapse of the Soviet system, and at least some of inner Asia’s severed cultural and economic arteries may be rejoined, if ethnic peace prevails. Whether there is a future for Buddhism there is another matter.

If Himalayan Buddhism, reduced to one surviving independent monarchy, seems threatened by demographic and other pressures at home, it is not without hope worldwide. Interest in Tibetan Buddhism is growing in Europe, North America, and Asian nations farther to the east: in Thailand, among ethnic Chinese Malaysians, in Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. This attention is beginning to translate into support, psychological as well as financial, for a renewal of Buddhist studies in the Himalayas, especially in Nepal, a Hindu kingdom with a Buddhist heart. In unexpected places, monasteries and individual lamas are receiving generous (some monks would say corrupting) gifts from people continents away who have dipped into meditation, holistic medicine, or a monastic life and found something satisfying, something of value. This may not make all newcomers Buddhists, but it makes most of them sympathetic friends at a time when Himalayan Buddhism needs friends if it is to survive in the environment that gave it life.

This book is an excursion across one swath of the Himalayan Tantric Buddhist universe, the kingdoms strung along the southern exposure of Tibet. These small realms—in particular Ladakh, Sikkim, and Bhutan—were shaped and strengthened by Buddhism even as the religion was being swept from much of West, South, and Central Asia. In Ladakh and Sikkim, no longer independent states, degrees of melancholy infuse conversations about lost monarchies. And while Bhutan alone has avoided political assimilation into largely Hindu India, the Bhutanese are learning how perplexing, dangerous, and, most of all, lonely it is on the barricades. Yet virtually everywhere the tolerance, equanimity, good humor, and generosity of Himalayan Buddhist culture shine through. Though there may be outbursts of violence and splashes of greed among the believers, this is still one of the world’s most appealing civilizations.

“Here there is an openness,” an exiled Tibetan master, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, told me in Kathmandu between incoming calls on his cordless phone. “So while this is a very difficult philosophy, there is also common sense in it—and science, too. You could also say we understand the common needs. That means we all need love, we all need care. Buddha
dharma
teaches us a lot: how to respect each other, how to care.”

I
AM
HAUNTED
by a particular front page of
Kuensel
, Bhutan’s only newspaper.
Kuensel
is a weekly publication, and the date of this issue is April 10, 1993. The page is dominated by a large photograph of five young men in disheveled versions of the robelike garment, the
gho
, that Bhutanese men have worn for centuries. The shifty-eyed youth on the far right, on the edge of what is obviously an identity parade arranged by the police, looks uneasy and seems to be leaning out of this grisly group portrait. The one on the left appears slightly deformed or otherwise handicapped and has a hunted look. The three in the middle are fresh-faced, clean-cut lads who stare straight ahead, with little expression. In Bhutan, the last independent Himalayan Buddhist kingdom, a mountain paradise that only yesterday seemed untarnished by brutality or greed, the crime that this band of rural ruffians stands accused of is beyond atrocity: slitting the throat of an elderly monk (who had just given them food and a place to sleep) and smashing with a hammer and ax the heads of his two novices, in the hope of making off with a few treasures from the holy man’s temple.

But that isn’t all of the story. The gang failed to accomplish their goal of snatching the relics from Chimme Lhakhang, an isolated shrine, because they were interrupted by the screams of a village woman somewhere down the hill, and they fled. She was shouting, “Someone is being killed!” Unknown to the murderers in the temple, however, she wasn’t exposing them. She was alerting her neighbors to her own situation.
In a land where the avoidance of violence is a cultural assumption and women are strong, her husband was beating her to death.

The imagery is jarring. Isn’t this supposed to be a Buddhist kingdom dedicated to the ideals of a nonviolent religion that sometimes seems more like an ethical system than a creed? Didn’t I come here to see Buddhism as it is lived from day to day in a country that is the last of its line? Everywhere else in the Himalayan Buddhist world, people talked about how things used to be. Go to Bhutan, they said, where the universe is intact.

For decades, many Westerners repelled by materialism and a surfeit of industrial development have sought solace and reassurance in the Buddhist and Hindu East. In recent years, especially in India and Nepal, such sojourns have involved a certain measure of denial. Like writers looking for only those facts or quotes that will back a preconceived conclusion, spiritual tourists and other romantics who roam the Indian subcontinent and the Himalayas often bypass the worldly horrors around them: too many people, too little food, scant respect for nature, and a dearth of humane national policies to match professed beliefs and moral postures. To experience close-up the Eastern transcendence they extol from afar, outsiders must not look too closely at the commercialization of spirituality either—at the temple touts, the gold-plated gurus, the factory-wrapped loaves of sliced white bread left as offerings to the gods.

Denial, however, has never been demanded of visitors to Bhutan. In the increasingly choked and often turbulent regions of inner Asia, Bhutan—the nation known to its Buddhist majority as Druk Yul, the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon—stood alone as a nation unsullied. It was a place where, despite a punishing terrain, life was (and mostly still is) lived at a different pace and with attractive values, among them a strong sense of individual self-reliance within supportive communities, an openness of spirit, and a large measure of self-respect that makes people look foreigners in the eye as equals. Bhutanese live in sturdy houses of mud walls and wooden half-timbering below gently pitched roofs finished with rough shingles held down by rocks. Woodwork and sometimes outer walls are decorated by village craftsmen in gently muted colors with designs drawn from Buddhist iconography and folklore. There are towns—I think of Mongar, Tongsa, or Tashigang—where clusters of painted, ornamented buildings could have materialized from illustrations in old fairy tales.

The land the Bhutanese inhabit, wedged between the world’s two most populous countries, China and India, could also be drawn from the pages of a storybook. Spread over soaring icy mountains, black-dark gorges echoing with the roar of rushing water, emerald valleys silent under the sun, and forests rustling day and night with life of every kind, Bhutan is the size of Switzerland but has fewer than a million people, no cities as we know them, and no more than half a dozen paved roads of any significance. More people walk or travel by horseback than ride in motorized vehicles of any kind; topography ensures that this transportation pattern will endure indefinitely. The leg muscles of the Bhutanese, men and women, are magnificent. It takes strength and energy to live, as most Bhutanese do, at altitudes above five thousand feet, sometimes in villages so impossibly high above the valleys they farm that a lowlander can only stand and stare in disbelief at the precipitous passage between the warmth of home and the necessities and temptations provided by the outside world. And then urban life may be represented by no more than a ramshackle market stall at the side of the nearest (a relative term here) road. For the Bhutanese man or woman who leaves such an environment for a trip abroad, international travel is the easy part, or so Ugyen Dorji of the Jichu Drake Bakery told me with astonishing matter-of-factness as he described how he, a village boy, was shipped to Austria to be trained in pastrymaking under one of the more unusual national human resources policies. For him, the Austrian Alps were hardly worth writing home about.