So Close to Heaven (23 page)

Not long ago, Tibetan refugees in Nepal worried that their welcome was wearing thin. Searching for information on events in Lhasa, where an anti-Chinese movement is always rumbling beneath the surface, exploding now and then in demonstrations, I met new émigrés from Tibet nearly surreptitiously in the late 1980s, so great was the concern of host Tibetans who had established themselves in Nepal and did not want their livelihoods jeopardized. But in 1990, a Nepali democracy movement forced a change in the country’s constitution to reduce the power of the monarchy. New elections brought secular parties into office, and threats to Buddhism seemed to dissipate, just as they did when Nepal first tried democracy in the 1950s.

The Buddhist renaissance has probably had the least effect on the Newars, despite long years of good relations with the Tibetans, says Purna Harsha Bajracharya, a Newar from a family of Buddhist scholars. Bajracharya was instrumental in beginning the Nepali Archaeology Department’s first excavations of Lord Buddha’s birthplace in Lumbini in the 1960s. His name,
vajra-acarya
in its Sanskrit form, literally means a Tantric master. I went to see him at his small home above a busy bazaar near the center of Kathmandu. The high-pitched product advertising of the street vendors and loud arguments of barter combined with bicycle bells and the horns of motorized rickshaws were so pervasive that Purna Harsha’s soft voice was hard to hear when I played back my tapes of our first talk that evening.

But this cacophony was probably appropriate, for the Newars have always been Nepal’s most committed urbanites, thriving at the heart of commerce. For more than a thousand years, they dominated trade routes between India and China from their family bases in the Kathmandu Valley and their trading houses and mercantile associations in Lhasa. Wool, silk, tea, rice, precious corals, works of art, silver, and finally manufactured goods moved along Himalayan trails on pack animals. Along the same routes, Tibetan Buddhists came south to visit the great shrines of Nepal. Newar lamas, including Purna Harsha’s forebears, went to Lhasa to exchange learned opinions. The Newar trade monopoly was not broken until early in the twentieth century when the British encouraged the opening of new routes to Tibet from the northeastern Indian hill town of Kalimpong through Sikkim.

Purna Harsha’s house backed onto a much quieter zone built around a Newari Buddhist
vihara
, a small temple-monastery marking the home of an important family. This vihara was in a state of decline, its owner having died some years ago “without issue,” in Purna Harsha’s words. He has informally taken over responsibility for the small enclosed square with delicately carved wooden doors and lintels that enclosed the shrine to a god now gone. A tailor has moved in on one side; other families fill the rest of the space, using the pump that Purna Harsha’s family installed over a centuries-old well that still produces good water. In front of the shrine stands a
chaitya
, the Newar equivalent of a chorten or stupa. Purna Harsha, a man of great dignity and generosity, says that his duties amount to little more than “putting a few flowers there from time to time.” In truth, he seems to take pains to salvage this corner of history, abused as it is by newcomers without an appreciation of its value.

Many other Newar compounds have suffered amid the general decay of old Kathmandu, where buildings collapse and mounds of fly-covered garbage fill once-sacred pools and pile up at many an intersection, repelling tourists. Newars, with their considerable intellectual and design skills, were responsible for the architecturally remarkable cores of the valley’s three magnificent medieval cities—Bhaktapur, Patan, and Kathmandu—and were sought after across the Himalayas and in Tibet as craftsmen for both Buddhist and Hindu buildings.

Newars believe that one of their own, the young Princess Bhrikuti, carried a civilized form of Buddhism with her to Tibet when she became one of two wives of the Tibetan king-emperor Songsten Gampo in the
seventh century. Indeed, Newars say that she took with her to Lhasa a statue of the Lord Buddha so valuable and exceptional in its execution that the famous Jokhang temple was built (by Newar craftsmen) to house it. Purna Harsha says that Newari women have always taken important parts in religious ceremonies and family affairs. They were traditionally free to move around the town and sometimes took lessons from monks—at least until the Rana period, when they became the targets of licentious officials whose militant Hindu upbringing conveyed little understanding of the Buddhist social order. A kind of self-imposed purdah set in, and is only now being broken down.

That the Newars’ Tibeto-Burman language became Sanskritized, and that the Newars were apparently forced beginning in the fourteenth century under the Malla dynasty to adopt a Hindu caste system completely alien to Buddhist teaching, did not diminish their firm commitment to Buddhism, even after the Gorkhas, Hindus of Indian origin from the Terai, took over the Nepali monarchy in the eighteenth century. Purna Harsha Bajracharya argues that the caste system was forced on Newars out of necessity by the Malla kings, some of them Buddhists or sympathetic to Buddhism, who feared Newari solidarity. “When the rulers found everyone united among us, they were angry. The caste system became useful to divide us.” It was enforced more rigorously after the end of Malla rule by Gorkha rulers, who also imposed caste on the Tibetan-speaking people of the north and assigned most of them a low status.

Purna Harsha says again and again that the Newars never had a quarrel with Hinduism, which some of them adopted. The problems were political. He adds that in any case the term “Hindu” is too broad to apply to most Nepalis, who concentrate their devotion on one god in the Hindu pantheon, Shiva, and should rightly be called Shivaites. “In the histories of Nepal you won’t even find the word ‘Hinduism,’ ” he said. “Buddhism and Shivaism grew side by side here. Both hold each other in great respect. We speak of the
Shiva-dharma
and the
Buddha-dhartna.
”

Purna Harsha Bajracharya, now retired, talked about how the persecution of Newar Buddhists during the century dominated by the Rana dynasty of hereditary prime ministers had inevitably led to a lack of self-assertion and a paucity of research into their own history and culture. He tells of scholars unable to publish or forced into exile because they did. Newar Buddhist culture can never really be obscured, however, because
of the extraordinary public architecture and religious institutions it contributed to Nepali life. The child goddess Kumari, whose temple in Kathmandu’s Durbar Square draws sightseers hoping to catch a glimpse of the living deity, is a Newari ingredient in the Nepali cultural mix. The prepubescent Kumari, to whom by legend the valley belongs and to whom, therefore, everyone, including the king, must pay tribute once a year, is one of several such goddesses; Newar temples once had many more.

News of the vigor of Buddhism in Nepal is fast spreading beyond the Himalayas. Because Nepal, once closed to outsiders, has in recent decades become one of South Asia’s most open societies, easily accessible by air from both Western nations and East Asia, Kathmandu is attracting more international scholars and new believers from several continents. Go to prayers at almost any gompa around Kathmandu and there is likely to be, in addition to a few American or European voices, a handful of respectful Japanese, Thai, Malaysian, or Singaporean worshippers. The Westerners are no longer the stock characters who once drifted in from the fringes of the drug-taking, hippie Freak Street culture that was prepared to get high on just about anything the Nepalis could offer in the 1960s and ’70s, including the erotic Tantric Buddhist art whose proliferation a nineteenth-century Englishman had labeled a “filthy custom.” That carefree scene bottomed out sometime in the 1980s after the overland route from Europe was closed by war in Afghanistan and by a Nepali decision to raise the costs of travel in Nepal and to reorient tourism toward more affluent visitors and serious trekkers. The casual age has not entirely passed, of course. In a Kathmandu garden café I heard two backpacking Americans discuss what to do with their day. “Let’s go to Swayambhunath,” one said. “A lot of really cool things go on there.”

At the well-heeled Orgyen Tolku Gompa at Bodhnath, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche said he had noticed a continuing evolution of tourism in recent years. “Before, tourists came to look at the mountains. Then some started coming to see the monasteries. They see Kathmandu is a special place. Very holy. Tourists changed. Some began wanting to hear some teaching, to study with us,” he said. With new interest obviously came money. The rinpoche’s private quarters include a private chapel of evident affluence, decorated in the brilliant colors traditionally favored by Tibetans. The high ceiling was painted a bright aquamarine, with rafters lacquered red. Stylized paintings of religious motifs covered the
walls, along which six brass and crystal sconces had been installed for light. From the rafters hung two large crystal chandeliers. At the altar, dominated by a larger-than-life image of Buddha, there was a collection of gold statues and fine ceramic temple guardian lions. The floor was carpeted in Tibetan rugs. The one unharmonious note was the hideous three-tiered plastic waterfall with a trick faucet and plastic flowers installed on a corner table. The faucet seemed to be suspended miraculously in midair, producing a stream of water from no visible source. (The water was being pumped up to the shiny golden tap from the bottom collection dish, through an unseen clear tube obscured by the stream flowing back down around it.) Incongruous kitsch though it was, it certainly caught the attention of disciples. Two boys sat riveted in front of it.

One of the most powerful and beloved of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist lamas, the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, established his base in Kathmandu, where he and his followers built the impressive Shechen temple and monastery. His Holiness, who had at one time instructed and inspired the Dalai Lama and served as a personal guru to members of Bhutan’s royal family, was the internationally recognized ranking lama of the Nyingmapa school and one of the last—if not
the
last—of the great Tibetan-born teacher-saints and
tertons
, discoverers or revealers of holy treasures. Twenty-two years of his life were spent in meditation, some of them in isolated caves in the manner of the great lamas of the past. He established and consecrated temples in Bhutan, India, and the West as well as in Nepal and set up a school of classical studies at Bhutan’s Simtokha Dzong. (His daughter Chhirni Wangmo is assistant director of Bhutan’s National Museum.) Though rooted in the Nyingmapa school, the rinpoche devoted much of his later life—he fled Tibet for Bhutan in 1959—to preaching a nonsectarian Buddhism, drawing on the holy writings and philosophies of all schools.

I had often heard in Bhutan about the blurring of sectarian divisions. I remember in particular what the abbot of Tashigang Dzong told me as we stood by a huge, complicated, multifaceted sculpture in one of his temples that looked at first sight like a confusing jumble of images piled on a giant plant. “This is the holy tree,” he said. “Here is the lotus grown from the lake. On the leaves the different Buddha scholars are. We have different sects. Here is the leader of Nyingma and how he achieved enlightenment. And next is another sect called Karmapa, and
this is its lineage. And this is Guru, and this is the sect that was followed by Shabdrung. Up there at the top is Buddha himself. So you see no matter what denomination or what sect, the root is same, the body same, and ultimate truth is one. Root is same, ultimate goal is same. Only approach is different.”

In poems, essays, and talks in Asia and the West, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche went beyond mere nonsectarianism. He gave the religion that recognized him as a leader in 1910, while he was still in his mother’s womb, a true sense of universality. After he died in September 1991, Bhutan spent more than a year praying and preparing for his final funeral rites. Present at the
purjang
or cremation ceremony in November 1992—during which, Bhutan’s weekly newspaper said, “the last mortal remains of His Holiness dissolved into the state of luminosity”—were the Bhutanese royal family, more than fifty thousand monks and tulkus, and thousands of other followers and admirers from around the world. Many more would have come if Bhutan could have handled them. The cremation took place on a meadow in Paro, in view of the Taktsang monastery, where the Guru Rinpoche was believed to have descended on a flying tiger in the eighth century bearing the Nyingma Tantric teachings. The cremation pyre of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was a work of Bhutanese artisanship at its best: a carved, roofed pavilion bedecked in silk, with altars around the clay coffin overflowing with the finest offerings of food and religious objects. Tibetan Buddhism may never again see this exalted ceremony performed with such purity of ritual and in such an unspoiled cultural and natural environment. While Himalayan Buddhists await the rinpoche’s reincarnation, his legacy lives on in Kathmandu in the shadow of Bodhnath.

“Kathmandu is developing into an important center for Buddhist study,” another Tibetan lama, Khenpo Rigzin, said during one of our conversations at the Nyingma Institute of Nepal, a new monastic school just outside Kathmandu memorable for its quiet, superserious atmosphere. The institute has a Tibetan-American patron, Tarthang Tulku, a publisher of Buddhist texts in Berkeley, California, Khenpo Rigzin said. Novice monks—still all boys, no girls—from across the Himalayan region and India come here to take a nine-year course that is heavy on Buddhist philosophy. So far, no Westerners had enrolled as students, Khenpo Rigzin said, though they are admitted for research. He added politely, even sweetly, that Western students might pose a problem,
given the very different intellectual and spiritual environment that produced them. In his experience, he said, he found it took them a little longer to grasp things. A concept he could teach a Bhutanese, Sikkimese, or Sherpa in a week would take two or three weeks to penetrate the mind of an American, he thought.