So Close to Heaven (28 page)

“After he constructed the temple, then he went to Mebartsho to bring the treasure back.” In other words, his base secure, Pema Lingpa took up the duties of terton.

Mebartsho, the Burning Lake, is no more than a shaded grotto over a bottomless pool deep in a forest glen not far from Jakar on the way out of Bumthang to lira. It is a powerfully holy spot to the Bhutanese and a place of almost supernatural enchantment to the curious outsider who goes there and listens to its story. You walk to Mebartsho, a good thing. People should approach places of religious or mythological drama softly, cut down to human size. The path follows the rim of a gorge, since
Mebartsho is a pool formed by the Tang River. Near the end of the walk, the path begins to descend, passing shallow caves in the rocky wall of the glen where faithful Bhutanese have placed dozens of tiny clay
tsha-tshas
or chaityas, miniature stupas, as sort of material prayers for forgiveness, better health, or other crucial needs. Then comes the stairway down to the deep, dark well of water where the miracle took place. Here is how a Bhutanese schoolbook explains what happened:

“When Pema Lingpa was around twenty-three years old,” it says (there we go again with a relative number), “he had a vision of the Guru Rinpoche giving him a scroll of prophecies for discovering hidden treasures. Following the directions given in the scroll, he went to the gorge of Tang Chhu below his village with some of his friends. He appeared to be somewhat strange to his friends. Immediately on their arrival at the gorge, he jumped into the pool in the river. He clambered out of the river clutching a box containing several religious texts. People were surprised and amazed when they heard about the incident and began to doubt the truth. On the next auspicious day, when he was about to jump into the lake, a crowd gathered on the rock to witness the sight. He held a butter lamp in his hand and prayed: ’If I am a demon, I will die. If I am the spiritual heir to Guru Rinpoche, I will fetch the treasures and come back with the lamp still lit.’ At this, he jumped into the lake. He reappeared after some time holding a ritual skull, a statue of Buddha, and the lamp, which was still burning. The lake came to be known as Mebartsho (Burning Lake). People’s faith in him began to grow and his fame as a terton began to spread.”

Like Guru Rinpoche and Pema Lingpa, the Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, the last of Bhutan’s three great historical figures, was a man of religion. But with the Shabdrung—literally, “the one at whose feet all submit”—we enter the kind of recorded time verifiable by reasonably good Bhutanese records and the relatively objective accounts of the first European visitors to Bhutan, two Portuguese Jesuits, João Cabral and Estevão Casella. The Jesuits were passing through on their way to Tibet in 1627 when they inadvertently got put under something close to house arrest for a number of months and had a lot of time on their hands to observe the daily life of the Shabdrung’s court. Casella’s written record of their “visit”—the Bhutanese regarded them as honored guests whose hosts just didn’t want them to move on—gave historians a benchmark by which to judge the later years of the Shabdrung’s rule and to measure
the extent to which this exile from Tibet was able to consolidate his power while unifying the state. Still, the mysteries of Bhutan persisted. When the Shabdrung died in 1651, his death was kept a secret for exactly fifty-eight and a half years. Anyone who asked about him was told he was in retreat.

Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal had been a Drukpa abbot when he arrived in Bhutan in 1616, but his fame as a civil administrator in his adopted land soon outshone his religious reputation, save perhaps for his ability to call up magic and perform superhuman feats in tight spots. The Shabdrung had no sooner arrived in Bhutan than a series of six Tibetan invasions took place, all aimed at preventing him from establishing a power base so near the Tibetan border. In every case, the Tibetans went down to defeat, sooner or later. That left the Shabdrung free to begin organizing a kind of central government for Bhutan based on a division of labor between a
desi
, or secular head of state, and the
je khenpo
, or chief abbot, the national religious leader. Below the desi were three
penlops
or governors of large regions: the Paro penlop in the west and southwest, the Dagana penlop in the south-central area, and the Tongsa penlop in the east and southeast. A few semiautonomous subregions were left to the administration of
dzongpons
, local officials who like the penlops were based in the massive fortresses the Shabdrung constructed at strategic points around the country. Although there were fortified monasteries in Bhutan before the Shabdrung’s time, they were never on the scale of those he built, nor were they designed for so many secular and religious functions. In planning his mini-capitals, the Shabdrung sent word across the Himalayas, to Tibet, Nepal, and Ladakh, to find the finest craftspeople to construct and ornament the fortresses and the temples sheltered within their walls. These fortresses alone would demonstrate the genius of Ngawang Namgyal in pacifying, securing, and uplifting the country and its people. To be sure, there continued to be regional feuds and battles after his death, but the system held. The dzongs remain a unique Bhutanese institution architecturally, socially, and administratively.

The Shabdrung didn’t stop at desis and dzongs. He also codified laws and established an ethical system for officials, the spirit of which Bhutan may have to draw on heavily if it is to stay above the sea of corruption swamping the rest of South Asia. Under the Shabdrung’s rules, seventh-graders are taught by their history books, “no officials or priests are allowed to send out alms-begging parties.” Neither can any administrator
“accept or demand any present for marriages or separations for which he is the civilian representative.” In short, anyone with power “should not give the subjects unnecessary trouble.”

The Shabdrung, while reputedly living a simple life, able to exist on a diet of fruit and milk, was not short of self-confidence. During his rule, he wrote a treatise extolling his strengths and virtues known as “The Sixteen I’s,” which was reproduced on his personal seal, a wheel with sixteen spokes. It goes like this in Bhutanese schoolbooks:

When the Shabdrung died, or his death was finally acknowledged at the turn of the eighteenth century, three reincarnations of him began to appear more or less simultaneously, representing his body, speech, and mind. Over the two hundred years that followed, these reincarnations have been gradually downplayed and phased out. But the power of the Shabdrung lives on. When a rumor swept Thimphu in 1992 that a Bhutanese exile from India claiming to be a contemporary incarnate was about to pay a brief visit, crowds gathered outside a hotel where he was expected to stay, but the rumor was never more than that.

Ngawang Namgyal’s administrative system survived the founder’s death, however, staffed by an ever-expanding class of civil servants who, then as now, shared the dzongs with monks. In the fields around, farmers
labored under a feudal system that traded labor for sustenance and protection. In a cashless economy, landless peasants were essentially serfs or even slaves to landowners. Taxes were paid in crops of rice, barley, or buckwheat, supplemented by supplies of wood and butter. The tradition lingers in symbolic ways.

Dasho Rinzin Gyetsen, the dzongda of Tashigang, told me that when he took office in that remote eastern dzong, people walked for as long as five days from distant villages to bring him gifts of butter, hard-boiled eggs, vegetables, and other products of their farms. He in turn was expected to visit their communities. “A dasho takes a vow before the king to serve the people,” he said. “And a dzongda has very close links with them. On my trips to their villages, the people provide food, drink, and horses all along the way. When I arrive, the best house in a village is emptied for me; the family moves away all its possessions and leaves it clean. If there is no suitable house, people construct a shelter of firs or leafy branches and stand guard all night while I sleep. They will roast a pig and ask that the food be served by the dzongda’s own hand.”

Because regional feuds continued to disrupt the otherwise bucolic life of Bhutan well into the twentieth century, the arts of war were not neglected. Every Bhutanese man learned archery and swordsmanship and could be called up at any time to garrison a dzong or march against a troublesome neighboring lord. There were few guns of any kind, so Bhutanese soldiers were able to protect themselves reasonably well with iron helmets and shields made of hide or thickly woven vines or grasses. Battles began with ritual dances and prayers to the guardian deities of a place—much fiercer gods than any in the Buddhist pantheon of incarnations. Soldiers were often barefoot.

It was such an army that took on the British in the hope of saving a valuable belt of rich land that served as a buffer between the Himalayan foothills and the higher elevations of Bhutan. The area, several hundred miles in length, was known as the Duars, literally the “doors” or gates from the plains into the hills running along river valleys. The strip of land, divided into the Bengal Duars and the Assam Duars, corresponding to those Indian states, included not only fertile plains but also a number of hill towns. The British, administrators of an armed commercial empire in India in its early years, quarreled intermittently with the Bhutanese in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries over trade, access to Tibet, and occasional Bhutanese incursions into territory deemed to
be under the protection of Calcutta, the headquarters of the East India Company.

Peter Collister, in his excellent book
Bhutan and the British
, looks to the temper of the age to explain why Britain saw fit to pick fights with this small country, especially in the nineteenth century, when relations dropped to an all-time low. The Victorians, he found, combined a heightened fear of Russia and China (both just over the Himalayan horizon) with “the evangelistic and moralising spirit of the times.” Ashley Eden, one of the least sympathetic of the emissaries sent to deal with the Bhutanese, prepared a report whose language Collister described as superficial and scathing. Eden went so far as to make the suggestion that the country might be successfully colonized.

Meanwhile, the British nibbled away at territory. In 1772 the Bhutanese fought and lost a battle with Britain over the small kingdom of Cooch Behar, now in India’s state of West Bengal. In 1841, the Assam Duars were annexed by the British, setting off two decades of skirmishes with the Bhutanese. Near the end of 1864, the British issued a proclamation of complaints that amounted to a declaration of war on Bhutan. Six hundred elephants and countless bullocks were assembled for the task of breaching the mountain kingdom’s defenses in the Bengal Duars, according to Collister. Artillery was moved into place, and the Anglo-Bhutanese War began with an attack on a Bhutanese fort at Dalingcote, near the forested meeting point of Sikkim, Bhutan, and India. The Bhutanese defended themselves with bows and arrows and rocks.

In a few months, all the Duars were in British hands, and peace was restored with the 1865 Treaty of Sinchu-la. The British turned to other projects. The Bhutanese, bruised and humiliated, retreated to their mountain domain. But Bhutan had escaped colonization; the British were never able to station even a resident political officer in the country. Bhutan could turn to new projects, the most important of which was the stabilizing and reunifying of a country torn by civil strife and foreign wars for nearly two centuries. Jigme Namgyal, penlop of Tongsa, almost completed the task between 1865 and his death in 1885. The final victory was left to his son and heir, Ugyen Wangchuck, who became Bhutan’s first king, the Druk Gyalpo, Precious Ruler of the Dragon People.