So Close to Heaven (16 page)

But even the artifacts and fakes aren’t much compensation for the sense that the inspiration and soul of these Buddhist ruins have long departed, and they seem aloof and sterile. In part, this is because the Gandhara civilization is really twice removed from contemporary Pakistani life: neither the Hellenistic influence on its art—the drape of a robe or the occasional image of a Greek god—nor Buddhism itself has a place
here. Pakistanis are not hostile to Buddhism; it is merely irrelevant to the all-encompassing Islamic society in which most of them live, a culture that does not separate religion and the state and only (and barely) tolerates minority beliefs. Contemporary life in the northern territory of Baltistan may be something of an exception; there descendants of Tibetan-speaking Buddhists maintain some old temples and are encouraged by foreigners trekking in the area to take more interest in their unusual history.

Many of the best examples of Gandhara Buddhist art and architecture are no longer where their creators placed them. Pieces have been lost or removed to museums. Fortunately, there are three good collections not far away. One is the Taxila museum itself, a lovely single-story gallery set in a park with flower gardens near the Bhir Mound, site of the first of three ancient cities in the Taxila Valley. Other collections are in museums in Lahore and Peshawar. The best-known of the Gandhara sculptures, the startling skin-and-bones image of the fasting Buddha, sits in illuminated glory in Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital. This gaunt, riveting, disturbing figure is worlds removed from the self-possessed, plump Buddhas of East Asia or the fearsome manifestations of Himalayan Tantric iconography. Until I stood before the Gandhara Buddha I had no real sense of the diversity, and thus the universality, of Buddhism.

O
NE
OF
SEVERAL
long, once-busy trade routes leading away from ancient Taxila could—if war and politics had not intervened—bring today’s Tantric pilgrim home from the source of his faith in the Swat Valley to the first outpost of the still-living Himalayan Buddhist world, Ladakh, and beyond it to the heartland of Himalayan Buddhism in Tibet. The journey eastward from Swat is a pilgrimage now largely encumbered or more often blocked altogether at heavily fortified mountain borders guarded zealously by India, Pakistan, and China. But there are accessible pockets and detours. For example, Gilgit and the already mentioned Baltistan, northern territories of Pakistan, were once part of a Tibetan Buddhist empire and they too are littered with ancient artifacts and resonant with tales of monks and magic. These areas are mentioned frequently by Tibetans as repositories of knowledge. A Tibetan empire once encompassed them.

The old caravan trail eastward into the Himalayas passed through Kashmir, a bastion of Buddhist art and scholarship that survived longer than most Buddhist centers of northern India. The road then branched into two main routes into Central Asia across high passes in the Karakoram Mountains. The more easterly route, through Srinagar, the Kashmiri summer capital and now a largely Muslim city, leads to Leh, Ladakh’s main town, on the barren edge of the Tibetan plateau.

The land fate willed to Ladakh may be parched and the air painfully thin, but these hardships only add to the power of an uncommon natural
setting that overwhelms the senses of even those who feel they have seen it all. Here, at 11,500 feet or more, the upper Indus winds across a rocky desert fringed in peaks under a crystal sky bejeweled after dark with a million extraordinarily brilliant stars. Even if insomnia is a warning of altitude sickness, a bout or two is worth having on a clear and cold Ladakhi night. My first night in Ladakh was in October. I lay awake in a country guesthouse, stuffed with aspirin and bottled water, wondering whether to worry about my inability to sleep. This is life above and beyond the craggy Himalayas; one can easily be enveloped in the disorienting sense of being on another earth. I pulled back the curtains to take in an acrylic-black Ladakhi sky. The jumbo stars seemed to pulsate and flare. The white moon shone on strange, empty mountains, pale intruders against a backdrop of nothingness. It was mesmerizing. In the utter silence, I fell asleep.

Missing here are the undulating pastures, the frequent sheltered valleys, and the dark, canopied, vine-wrapped groves of much of the rest of the Himalayan landscape. In a lot of Ladakh, you can see where you are headed, and where you’ve come from, for many unobstructed miles. Old monasteries and the remains of palaces often cling, sunbleached, to vertical rock faces, as if monks and kings plotted to make a harsh land yet tougher on frail humans condemned to trek and climb, trek and climb, without so much as a cooling stream, a grassy bank, or a spreading tree for respite.

“In the barren wilderness, nothing grows wild,” wrote Helena Norberg-Hodge in a 1988 socioecological study of a land she had lived in for more than a decade. “Not the smallest shrub, hardly a blade of grass. Even time seems to stand still, suspended on the thin air. Yet here, in one of the highest, driest and coldest lands on earth, a people has for more than a thousand years not only made a living, but prospered. Channeling water down from snow-fed streams, they have formed oases in the desert, and established a remarkable culture.”

Himalayan Buddhism is at home here, though the atmosphere is still laced with traces of Central Asia. The terrain lacks the lushness of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim but shares the latitude and landscape of much of Tibet. Although Buddhism probably first reached Ladakh from India via Kashmir, and most likely in its Hinayana form, Mahayana schools prevailed as the region came under the influence of Tibetan migrants,
monks, and conquerors. Ladakhi Buddhists say that the ninth and tenth centuries, following the introduction of Tantric Buddhism, were years of revitalization of the faith. Today, in houses, temples, and chortens, in language, art, and rituals, the Tibetan, Nepali, Sikkimese, or Bhutanese Buddhist would find familiarity and similarity.

What is gone, however, is the richness, the profusion of Buddhist art spilling into public life that marks, for example, the ambience of a Bhutanese dzong, which served as both fortress and monastic center, with civil administration thrown in for good measure. Ladakh once had dzongs, too, built on commanding hilltops, but they faced operational obstacles that may have doomed them even in what should have been their days of glory. In this dry region, according to Alexander Cunningham, a colonial British military engineer who surveyed Ladakh in the mid-nineteenth century, the inaccessible dzongs, most now in ruins, had no internal water supply. Water carriers struggling up steep tracks from springs, wells, or a river below could not meet the needs of any significant population; a community’s growth was perforce constricted.

No glittering new temples and sturdy monasteries rise here nowadays as they still do in Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal. Surviving Ladakhi monasteries seem more spartan, even decrepit, when compared with the gompas of other Himalayan Buddhists. Where monastic communities remain, their populations seem thin and their temples and courtyards often lack the bustle and purposefulness of a Bhutanese dzong or a Tibetan-Nepali temple. Water is still a problem.

True, there are roadside chortens and many walls bearing the familiar incantation
Om mani padme hum.
Prayer wheels spin in the shadows of monasteries. Prayer flags flutter on garden poles and from corner to corner of flat rooftops, where small hearths for offerings to local guardian deities are also constructed. As in many other places in the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau, such altars and the deities Ladakhis seek to appease antedate Buddhism but have been happily incorporated by it. In daily life there is often much more comfort to be derived from keeping the neighborhood spirits content than from contemplating the greater glories of Buddhism, which can wait for festival days. In Ladakhi homes, couch-beds are covered with Tibetan-style carpets and the furniture or woodwork may be painted with colorful designs incorporating one or more of the Eight Lucky Signs common in one form or another in all
Tantric Buddhist decorative art: the treasure vase, the endless knot, the victory banner, the wheel of law, the protective golden parasol, the omniscient golden fish, the conch shell, and the lotus.

Still, Buddhist life in Ladakh bears only a pallid resemblance to the Bhutanese cultural environment, though both were almost equally steeped in an all-embracing Buddhist civilization when they began to modernize in the 1960s and open to tourism in the 1970s. Sikkim, too, seems a livelier place, its active temples full of monks and boisterous novices. Ladakhis, convinced that their mounting religious and material losses are by-products of politics and geography—forces beyond their control—alternate between panic and grief as they confront the erosion. Now and then, anger explodes into rebellion.

Historically, the Ladakhi capital of Leh was not only an important town on the trade routes to Central Asia and old Cathay, but also the center of an independent Tibetan Buddhist nation under a king, called a
chogyal
in Tibetan, for about eight hundred years before falling to Hindu rulers, the Dogras, in the 1830s. A few decades later, Ladakh was folded into the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir by the British. When India won independence in 1947, New Delhi incorporated Ladakh along with part of Jammu and Kashmir; the rest is under Pakistani control after several inconclusive wars and India’s repeated stubborn refusals to allow a plebiscite. The Kashmiri act of accession to India is still technically a matter of international dispute—the subject of unfulfilled United Nations resolutions—but in practical terms, Buddhist Ladakhis became a minority within a minority. Ladakh, with about 150,000 people and a slim Buddhist majority, fell under the jurisdiction of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir, which in turn is part of Hindu-majority India.

Because a road links Leh to the Muslim Kashmir Valley, Ladakhis believe they are especially vulnerable to shrewd Kashmiri traders and hoteliers, who, they say, have moved into many areas of Ladakh in sufficient numbers to upset the economic, social, and religious structure. Ladakh, by virtue of its position on ancient trade routes, had a significant Muslim population for centuries, but these old families are not viewed with the hostility usually reserved for relative newcomers from Srinagar or Delhi who have parlayed their reasonably easy access into dominance in the tourist business, the largest money earner. Before the area was opened to foreigners, most Ladakhis lived on farming, growing grains, potatoes, and sometimes vegetables and fruit, wherever it was possible.
Others kept livestock herds, especially goats and sheep for wool. Apart from the bazaars of Leh and Kargil, there were few market centers with the extensive service industries that give birth to a comfortable middle class. Medicine and law were the leading professions, though the ranks of doctors and lawyers were small. A handful of land-rich families lived, and still live, well—though not in palaces or mansions. The most luxurious home I visited had perhaps six or seven modest rooms, plus a simple kitchen and bath. A few pieces of handcrafted wood furniture, including some fine antiques, were crammed into a parlor and dining room each not much more than ten or twelve feet square. In other homes, where there was no inherited wealth, wooden platforms covered with Tibetan-style rugs served as daytime couches and beds at night in the one or two rooms inhabited by a family.

Periodically, Ladakhis agitate to break free of domination by Muslim Kashmir. They know there is scant hope of regaining the wealth and independence they once enjoyed as subjects of a Buddhist kingdom, but many hope for some kind of special territorial status within India, separate from the rest of Jammu and Kashmir. When I first went to Ladakh in 1989, the Ladakh Buddhist Association was in the throes of an intense civil disobedience campaign. “Kashmiri dogs go back!” read one banner, an ironic echo of the slogan Kashmiris use in expressing their views of New Delhi’s occupying troops: “Indian dogs go home!” For centuries in the Kashmir-Ladakh area, the image of a dog was associated with unwanted miscreants forced into banishment. Cunningham noted in the 1800s that Ladakhi criminals were sometimes branded with irons bearing a dog’s head and the inscription “dog marked—expelled” before being run out of town with taunts and threats.