So Close to Heaven (41 page)

Outside the reception hall, the driveway of the lodge bordered on a hill with sweeping views of Tongsa Dzong and its watchtower, the
tadzong
, higher up the mountain. As I began to climb the hill behind the hotel, I was soon joined by the usual pack of curious dogs, and a free-ranging horse. A few minutes later, I passed a veterinary substation, relieved that there might be a supply of rabies vaccine. Before long, it was apparent that I was headed into a schoolyard, where the track seemed to dead-end. The path was stony, and miserably littered for so beautiful a site. I inventoried one Maggi seasoning packet, two unmatched tennis shoes, numerous candy wrappers, an Indian newspaper, rusting tin cans, and the ubiquitous plastic bottles. At the top of the rise was Tongsa Junior High School, a boarding establishment. Boarding schools (all of them free) are inevitable in a country as difficult to traverse as Bhutan. I could hear the students splashing and shrieking at their morning baths, and it seemed too early to interrupt, so I retreated to the lodge until the school day began, and then returned.

The headmaster, Chewang Dukpa, was alive with enthusiasm as he ordered aides to run off in several directions to prepare the classes for a visitor. As we marched from room to room, I knew I had lost control of the day. But the exercise was worth it. At Tongsa, teachers were giving an old twist to new ideas. I heard children learning to sing folk songs in English. One went like this:

I was given a copy of the newly minted
Tongsa Junior High School Magazine
, in which there were stories and poems written by pupils in both English and Dzongkha. Some had folk themes, or were attempts to reproduce parables in which animals demonstrated lessons applicable to human life and behavior. Some were touchingly human moments recorded with the candor of children. One little boy wrote of his loveless life since the death of his mother. Another child, Kuenga Wangmo, a girl in seventh grade, gave away her homesickness in a poem called “A Message for My Parents Far Away.” Echoing a verse that sounded vaguely familiar, she wrote:

Down in Tongsa town, a bumpy trip from the hilltop school and the tourist lodge, we ran into Mani Dorji and his pony Tshering outside a provisions store. Tongsa is an engaging village, a strip of basic shops and rudimentary restaurants with a nice collection of folk-art paintings on
what would otherwise be mundane commercial walls. Mani Dorji and Tshering had been in town loading up on essential supplies for his village, some days’ walk into the higher reaches of the valley. Tshering the pony (really a small horse) was relaxed as his master loaded him with grain sacks and other commodities that would have to suffice for several months, since a trip to town was long and arduous. Tshering was a veteran.

Two days later, Vinod, my interpreter, and I finally neared Tashigang, after what was for them a very leisurely trip with overnight stops in Bumthang and Mongar. “I’ve driven from Tashigang to Thimphu in one straight trip,” my interpreter boasted. I wasn’t fazed, particularly since we had hit snow and ice on the highest passes along the road, the Ura La and Thumsing La—just about the time when Vinod allowed that this was his first trip to the east. This news would have been a little less unnerving if we weren’t destined to take the same route back to Thimphu when our eastern jaunt ended.

Tashigang, everyone said, would be fun. And it was. It is a big town by rural Bhutanese standards, and the commercial center for the most heavily populated (that is, several hundred thousand people) part of Bhutan. Tashigang’s main street was colorful, with shops trimmed in bold blue paint outside and overflowing with goods inside. There was the buzz of a frontier trading post, and the streets were enlivened by groups of nomads from the eastern reaches of Merak-Taksang who wore clothes made of hides and felt caps with protruding tails all around that acted like little gutters, forcing rain to run off away from their heads. There were passable eateries and bars that did a good business, judging from the uncoordinated lurchings of some folks on the streets. Yet here in the east lived people who were proud of being much more pious than their western Bhutanese counterparts.

This is one part of Bhutan where deforestation is a problem. The hillsides above Tashigang Dzong were bone-dry and stripped of trees, a by-product of too much land-clearing for farming. But apart from that, the prevalence from Mongar to the eastern border of bamboo-and-thatch construction and the flowers I had learned to associate with Southeast Asia softened the atmosphere. A view of bougainvillea made my spartan guesthouse room in Tashigang easier to live with. Never mind that taking a (cold) shower meant being careful not to fall into the squat toilet that shared the drain on the floor of what was quite literally
a water closet in a cubbyhole off my bedroom. At least I had the WC to myself. I had to go to town to buy a towel, since my traveling model was drying on the rail fence outside. But this was a good excuse for wandering around the local shops, where all kinds of garish Indian towels were sold, along with the machine-made imported fabrics that were undercutting weavers in a region known for its fine loom work. From Tashigang there is a road south to the Indian state of Assam; some Bhutanese traders could speak Assamese, they said, so frequent were their trips.

There was no electricity at night in our little guesthouse, but that’s when my fat candles from Thimphu came in handy. I lit two of them the first evening and broke out
Rabbit at Rest
, a book by a fellow Pennsylvanian that I had been meaning to read for several years. Here, I thought, I finally have all the time in the world to complete John Updike’s Rabbit cycle while getting back in touch with that other civilization I had temporarily left behind as I voyaged through Himalayan Buddhism. After several hundred miles on the road and a lot of temples, a change of mental imagery was in order.

But as I turned the pages, lo and behold, there was Harry Angstrom talking about the Dalai Lama.

F
AR
FROM
the tropical torpor of Lumbini, and a world away from the desert-dry caves and ruins of what was once Buddhist Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is one perfect valley, temperate in climate and holy in atmosphere, where a traveler through Himalayan Buddhism can put down all the baggage of the voyage and begin to sort the images and souvenirs. In Bumthang, many strings begin to come together. Here our old friend the Guru Rinpoche seems never to have left this earth, so vivid are his manifestations. The entertainments of Aum Rinzi’s youth live on in folk dances around a fire when travelers get together for a meal. Here monastic communities, some very small, seem to have been living and practicing a faith unchanged in centuries. It would be easy to believe that in dark monastery chapels, founders of the orders still walk among the relics.

Perhaps most important are the people of today who live in the midst of all this antiquity and theology. Richard Gombrich, introducing
The World of Buddhism
, reminds us that “spread by traders and protected by kings, through most of its history Buddhism has flourished among peasants.” Bumthang is a valley of farmers and herders. But there is more to the people of Bumthang than occupation. Men and women of character, adaptable and self-confident, the Bhutanese of Bumthang have been propelled into a great experiment. With a little help from outsiders, they are upgrading their standard of living in some important material ways, while being encouraged to protect and burnish all that is traditional. If
grassroots Himalayan Buddhism can modernize here without a cultural price, there can be hope in many other valleys beyond those of Bhutan.

For centuries, travelers have been writing about the special qualities of Bumthang, perhaps no one so floridly as the fourteenth-century lama Longchen Ramjampa. He was moved to call Bumthang a grove of the gods, a paradise, a home for heroes and demigoddesses, “a lotus in bloom.” The Bhutanese Special Commission on Cultural Affairs quoted the lama liberally in its laudatory pamphlet
Bumthang: A Cultural Nest of Bhutan.
He found the views marvelous everywhere his gaze wandered in the valley. “It appears to be enclosed by a fencing of gems. The snowcapped hills and mountains are symmetrically arranged, the fertile valleys and plains are wide and extensive, the forests are lush, smooth and green. Flowers, fruits and medicinal herbs abound, and the climate is equitable,” the longchen noted. He also discovered that in Bumthang “blessings are near and it is easier to practice dharma without inertia and to achieve
siddhi
,” or magical Tantric powers. Just looking at the impression of the Guru Rinpoche’s body on the rocks at Kurjey “is sufficient for one to attain liberation.”

As for the people, Longchen Ramjampa classified them as “mild-natured, peace-loving, well-behaved, law-abiding and rather more good-looking than the others.” Most contemporary visitors are inclined to agree. If Bhutan had not been shut off from the world when the sixties generation and later the dabblers in New Age mysticism went looking for Nirvana, Bumthang might have been overrun and suffered, in miniature, the fate of Kathmandu. In Thimphu, the Bhutanese are alert to the danger even now, since a road through the valley reduces travel time to only a day from the international airport at Paro. But the capable people of Bumthang don’t seem to worry too much. They can handle just about anything. Just look at Tshering Hamo.

Tshering Hamo is in my bathroom at Bumthang’s Wangdicholing Guesthouse, scrubbing noisily and furiously on an old bracelet from the eastern town of Radi. It was one of two offered to me in Tashigang by a waiter who told me that the grimy, chunky silver bands he pulled from the folds of his gho belonged to an old widower forced to sell his late wife’s jewelry to raise cash to light butter lamps in her memory. I wanted to believe this sweet, sad story and go on thinking that the quick-buck philosophy had not yet been introduced this far east. Eager to see what lay hidden under the patina of grime, I fantasized that in Bumthang,
where I would be the next day, I could find some silver polish that had strayed over the mountains in the sack of a trader from India or China. Lurching and skidding back across the icy mountain passes from Tashigang to Bumthang, I dwelt on the hope of spending the long evening by the fire polishing my treasures.

At Wangdicholing, Tshering Hamo scoffed at my silver-polish plan, as did the shopkeepers in Bumthang’s main market town, Jakar. One of them giggled behind her hands as she watched my silly attempts to act out my need. Finally a boy of about twelve, left in charge of a small general store crammed with, among other things, prayer flags, candles, plastic flowers, rope, buckets, laundry detergent, towels, incense, ballpoint pens, school exercise books, locks, wheat flour, candy, and what looked like dung cakes but could have been tea bricks, helpfully sold me a seventeen-rupee (less than fifty-cent) toothbrush from India that he thought might dislodge the generously encrusted village dirt, adding without conviction that I could wait to try the brass polish he heard they sold in Thimphu.