So Close to Heaven (5 page)

Yet the day after I heard this story, I watched in acute embarrassment as a local administrator, visiting an even smaller and more vulnerable border hamlet near Sibsoo, set out to humiliate (for the benefit of his audience) a headmaster who refused to live in the free house he had been given on the grounds of an isolated school repeatedly attacked by militants. The man had fled with his family to the security of a nearby village. Moral support was what he needed, but the government official, retelling the story in front of the hapless, crestfallen headmaster, suddenly turned on him and began to cluck—“Cawk! Cawk! Cawk! Cawk!”—like an enormous chicken. The painfully insecure headmaster had just served us all cookies and tea at a castoff table in his abandoned house, trying his best to show he was still in charge of the burned-out, stripped-down school. Across a vacant field, a few brave teachers huddled in the still-standing classrooms with groups of little children, most of them Bhutanese Nepalis so poor they had to be given their tiny regulation ghos and kiras by the government.

As all of these problems boil over at once, Bhutan’s loyal friends fear not only for this imperiled society but also for the loss the world will incur if Durk Yul, the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon, slides toward disintegration or extinction.

What to keep? What to give up? And how much time to make the choice? On such questions, there is no consensus in Bhutan. There is only a vague fear, spreading like an inkblot, that an era has ended and no one knows what the next age will bring. The future, unlike the past, holds no hope of fantasy, no expectation of miraculous intervention by deities in times of trouble. No magic dances or Tantric rituals can chase away the new demons that stalk the Bhutanese hills.

Trapped between India and China, two giant nations wary of each
other; under relentless regional demographic pressures; and confused by their own uncertainties about how to deal with the secular outside world and its alien cultures, the Bhutanese are not optimistic. They have seen Ladakh, Tibet, and Sikkim vanish as independent Himalayan Buddhist realms, to be absorbed and altered by India or China. They derive only bleak hope from the knowledge that the Tibetan Buddhism that shaped their nation has found a new following in the West. Westerners take only what is relevant to them, usually the practice of meditation and aspects of traditional medicine. Himalayan Buddhism is much more than that; in Bhutan it is a rich stew of theology spiced by legend, superstition, astrological interpretation, and the worship of natural phenomena. Bhutanese Buddhism is Bhutanese Buddhism only in Bhutan.

At a time when the protection of minority rights and the spread of democracy have become high priorities worldwide, the Buddhists of Bhutan, followers of an arcane theology, are at a possibly fatal disadvantage. Nepali-Bhutanese rebels have set up shop in Kathmandu to spread the word that the panicked Drukpas—the Dragon People—are oppressors led by an evil king. In Thimphu, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck says ruefully that he knows how hard it is to defend monarchy at this point in history. One of his ministers was more direct: “If we were spotted owls, the world would care about us,” he said. “Can’t you see we are an endangered species, too?”

“The rich and splendorous culture of the Great Wheel of Buddhism, which once flourished in Sikkim, Tibet, Ladakh, Lahaul, and Spiti, is well on the path to extinction,” Jigmi Thinley, a Bhutanese government official, told a 1993 conference of scholars at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. “Today, Bhutan, the last bastion of this cultural heritage, is in a state of siege.”

T
HE
P
RECIOUS
R
ULER
of the Dragon People waits for visitors in his silk-lined lair at the top of a very steep flight of monastic ladder-steps in Tashichodzong, the fortress in Thimphu that houses the royal Bhutanese government and the head abbot of the Buddhist clergy, the
je khenpo.
Actually, there are several flights of punishing wooden steps from the austere stone gateway of the dzong to the upper reaches of the offices of the king, which are in a tower at the opposite corner of the long courtyard from the je khenpo’s temple and, until recently, the hall set aside for meetings twice a year of the National Assembly, the Tshogdu. Even before being bedazzled by the splendor of the high-ceilinged royal audience hall and its gilded throne, the intruding outsider is rendered breathless from the exertion of getting there.

As courtiers part the curtains that cover the door to the large but dimly lit chamber, the king is standing just inside, ready with a brief, disarming smile. He leads his guest past brilliant
thangkas
, paintings on brocaded scrolls, and other richly colored hangings garnishing the saffron-colored walls whose remaining spaces are ornamented with religious symbols embossed in gold leaf. Benches and pillows covered with the skins of snow leopards define the corner where His Majesty settles himself for interviews and audiences. The scene is photographed often and pictured just about every week in
Kuensel
: the king with the Indian ambassador, the king with the resident representative of the United Nations
Development Program, or, more recently (in the time of ethnic conflict), the king with leaders of Amnesty International, the king with a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Asked about the pelts of the endangered cats on which we sit, His Majesty disowns them, saying they were put there before his time, before Bhutan pledged to the world community to protect its animals and plants. “I had nothing to do with that,” he answers quickly, with only a faint trace of impatience at being sidetracked by the upholstery. He has more urgent issues to discuss.

In appearance, the king exemplifies the arresting good looks and natural grace of many of the northern Bhutanese: black hair above a slightly tawny face with the high cheekbones and dark, almond-shaped eyes of the Tibeto-Burman people. Strong and well proportioned like most Bhutanese, the king is resplendent in a gho of handwoven silk in deep blue and gold stripes, the gold patterned lightly in red by adding an extra weft to the weave, a hallmark of the most highly treasured Bhutanese textiles. Over his left shoulder is draped a kabne of saffron-colored raw silk. Every Bhutanese man is required to possess a kabne in a color or design appropriate to his rank, whether exalted or lowly, and to wear it in dzongs and other government buildings. The saffron-gold shade is worn by only two men: the monarch and the je khenpo. His Majesty wears black knee socks and Western dress shoes instead of the traditional knee-high boots made of animal skin or felt, now seen mostly on ceremonial occasions. There is a winter chill in the audience hall, only slightly mitigated by the hot tea and fresh savory pastries. The king has a slight cold, and a bit of untraditional plaid flannel shirt escapes from beneath the collar of his gho as he reaches for a handkerchief now and then during a conversation on a dismal afternoon. He has a solemn, even superserious, demeanor and voices his thoughts in precise language, using his expressive eyes but almost no facial or hand gestures as he speaks—or as he listens with apparent interest to his guests. It is the common experience of those of us who have met him that at the end of your interview he begins his, asking very direct questions about international politics and soliciting opinions on Bhutanese affairs. His head is full of facts about Bhutanese development—he says he spends a lot of his time reading files—and he pleads his case for international understanding tirelessly and with a repertoire of well-rehearsed arguments, as delegations
of foreigners who have heard about the trouble in the south come and go. Saving the last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom has become his full-time job.

Jigme Singye Wangchuck, born in 1954, is the fourth king of the hereditary dynasty established in 1907. Before his sagacious great-grandfather, Ugyen Wangchuck, adopted the royal title (with the blessing and encouragement of the British colonial government in India), Bhutan was at best a loosely united country with a three-hundred-year-old system of parallel religious and temporal leaders who left most local affairs in the hands of
penlops
, appointed regional governors. Early British chroniclers recorded how trips to the kingdom were often postponed or disrupted because of clashes between rival penlops, who had become feudal lords with bases in their respective widely scattered dzongs. From these fortresses, with high walls and huge protective gates, they forayed out to war on one another much like medieval European kings and princes. By the turn of the twentieth century, power had concentrated in two penlops, in Paro and Tongsa.

Ugyen Wangchuck, whose family came from the Bumthang area in central Bhutan, was the penlop of Tongsa, a title kept alive today by Bhutanese crown princes. Penlop Ugyen Wangchuck had used both his military and his diplomatic skills to unite the country and best his chief rival, the Paro penlop. Ugyen Wangchuck’s masterstroke internationally was to back (and join) a successful British expedition against Tibet in 1904, and then help draft the Anglo-Tibetan accord that followed. The British, rulers of neighboring India at the time, had immense power in the region, and they became his strong supporters.

Ugyen Wangchuck’s decision to make common cause with imperial Britain, which had in the previous century snatched from his father, Jigme Namgyal, a large area of land along the Indian border claimed by the Bhutanese, could have been a difficult one. The Tibetans were virtually kith and kin (barring about a century of aggression during and after the unification of Bhutan in the 1600s), and Tibet was the wellspring of Bhutanese Tantric Buddhist culture. On the other hand, Tibet’s attitude did not seem entirely friendly at the turn of the twentieth century. Alu Dorji, a former Thimphu penlop and an old enemy of Ugyen Wangchuck, had been in exile in Tibet plotting to draw Tibetans into a campaign to undermine the new strongman of Bhutan. Another of the
Tongsa penlop’s rivals, the Paro penlop, had disapproved of the British march against Lhasa. His career paid the price.

Ugyen Wangchuck, on the other hand, went on to collect a British honor, the medal of a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire, and the crown of Bhutan, an unusual embroidered cap with a wide upturned brim all around. Ostentatious jewels have no place in Bhutan’s crown or, for that matter, in royal Bhutanese court life. The crown, which photographs of Ugyen Wangchuck show him wearing several years before his formal coronation, is topped with the head of a raven. The raven is a manifestation of the preeminent local guardian deity, Gompo Jarodonchen, a form of Mahakala, the black guardian god. The room or corner set aside for Mahakala in a monastery is barred to women, Bhutanese and foreign alike. The abbot at Tashigang Dzong—instinctively (if surprisingly) aware, as are most Bhutanese, that this kind of discrimination requires an explanation—made a great effort to explain the rationale to me.

“Especially the monks here have to emphasize celibacy throughout the life,” he said through the regional administrator who had brought me into the monastery, causing the abbot a flicker of anxiety at the outset. “They have to refrain from the women,” he went on, as we hovered at the door of Mahakala’s temple, one of many shrines in the dzong. “Having contact with the women, they land up in human misery. And that particular deity is their deity. It’s not that the deity is against women. But when we want to renounce the world, the first thing we give up is the women. This is the first reason. There are many other reasons.” He rushed on to the next shrine without elaborating.

The enabling act that made possible the formal establishment of a hereditary monarchy in Bhutan came in a meeting of lay and religious leaders in 1907. They officially offered the crown to Ugyen Wangchuck and with it authority over both secular and some religious affairs. The first king’s coronation took place in December of that year. It was a splendid affair, with “a dense throng of spectators, monks and laymen” crowding the great hall at Punakha Dzong, which was lit with countless butter lamps, according to John Claude White, the British political officer who attended the coronation as London’s official representative. As a monastic band struck up the appropriate music, a crush of uninvited Bhutanese citizens tried to invade through the roof, where an opening
had been made for light and air, and were “repeatedly driven off by the lamas,” White wrote.