So Close to Heaven (31 page)

Thus, when all goes well, the Bhutanese enter professions with a deep grounding in their own culture as well as the linguistic and educational
tools to learn what is new. But there is more to the shaping of the Bhutanese character; a lot more. Buddhism has certainly contributed to making the Bhutanese more tolerant and curious than their Hindu or Islamic neighbors in South Asia. Thais and Sri Lankans, also Buddhists, have been open to new ideas and quick to change course if they feel the change makes sense. The clever, literate Burmese were once thought to have a bright future, until a series of stifling military dictatorships snuffed out their hopes. A century ago, when Bhutan was almost entirely sealed off from the world, the British political officer Claude White was fascinated by their social sophistication. “I have always found the Bhutanese, as well as the Sikkim people, very appreciative of English food, and as they are Buddhists with no question of caste, they consider it an honor to be asked to meals, and are most anxious to return any hospitality they receive, in marked contrast to the natives of India, who are defiled and outcasted by such intercourse with strangers,” he wrote on his first expedition to Bhutan in 1905.

Though the Bhutanese may be wary of their more powerful neighbors, the Indians and Chinese (and for obvious reasons the Nepalis), they do not exhibit a corrosive inferiority complex or a tendency to run themselves and their country down—an annoying characteristic of the gabby Pakistani elite, among other members of the South Asian talking classes. The Bhutanese can be sure of themselves without resorting to combative arrogance. Once after I spoke on Bhutan to an Asia Society audience in Washington, D.C., a Bhutanese student introduced himself after the slide show. I asked him if I had got Bhutan right in my remarks. “Most of it,” he said kindly, and then changed the subject. He would not be drawn out on my mistakes, though I really wanted to know what he thought. Had this been an Indian audience, I would have been pressed vociferously and with considerable bombast to recant publicly at least one statement or another.

“The Bhutanese are a very special people,” said Dr. Kees Goudsuaard, the Dutch coordinator of a wildly successful UNICEF vaccination drive whom I met some years ago at the Hotel Druk in Thimphu. “They are receptive to new ideas without ever throwing away what they think is valuable. The achievements made in health here are the achievements of the Bhutanese people; our part is the easy part.” Michael O’Hara of the United Nations Development Program told me later that the Bhutanese “don’t buy everything you say the first time.” They are more deliberative
and analytical. “They listen to you and ponder, and then decide. Development here is by Bhutanese government plan, not by the decisions of donors.”

Eva Nisseus, who headed the UNICEF office in Bhutan for more than five years, said that in only a few decades of work—starting from a medieval base in 1960—the Bhutanese had pulled ahead of all their neighbors in creating modern health services. While she noted that there was much to be done—women needed to be taught more about their bodies and about hygiene in the home to cut death rates among babies and young children, especially in isolated rural areas—the Bhutanese had set up more than seventy clinics, twenty hospitals, and a system of “walking doctors” and medical technicians who visit the remotest settlements. Basic childhood inoculations were universally available by the early 1990s, an extraordinary achievement given the terrain and the scattering of fewer than half a million people over a country the size of Switzerland. In receiving medical attention or nutritious meals, girls enjoy equal treatment with boys in the family, she said, adding that this national pattern had been adopted even by the Hindu-Nepali Bhutanese of the south. This presents a striking contrast to the debilitating, even life-threatening deprivation girls often face in India or in Hindu communities of Nepal. A new education system for the primary years was, meanwhile, reinforcing Bhutanese tradition and the values of life lived close to the land.

Everyone with experience in Bhutan seems to have a wonderful story or two to illustrate the Bhutanese nonchalance about taking on the world single-handed. Apart from Ugyen Dorji—the baker in Thimphu who walked out of an impoverished life in the hills and a few years later was training with an Austrian pastry chef in Bregenz—my favorite character is Phuntso, a Bhutanese monk of about thirty whom I met in Kathmandu. In 1990, he told me, he left Bhutan to visit America. In Kathmandu, with the help of some Bhutanese with the funds to assist him as an act of faith, he got an American visa and a ticket to Bangkok. There he managed somehow to get a Thai International flight to Seattle. Monks always receive a great deal of deference and help from Thai airlines, though Phuntso wasn’t too clear about how the flight was paid for. Anyway, he arrived in Seattle with no money and in debt for his tickets. He did have one phone number belonging to an American Buddhist in Los Angeles. Immigration officials must have been aghast at this slender,
single-minded man in dark crimson robes with almost no possessions. They questioned him for three hours in Seattle and then gambled and sent him on to southern California, where someone from a Buddhist center was summoned to meet him and give him a place to stay for a week while he looked for his Los Angeles contact, whom he identified as Arthur Schanche or “Dr. Aht.” According to Phuntso, this generous benefactor enrolled him in an English-language school and gave him a place to stay for two years, strictly as an act of devotion.

Free of material cares, Phuntso had a good deal of time to size up American Buddhists. “Some were good and some not so good,” he said. “Some seem to be looking for something for themselves, not for mankind.” He was most impressed with Chinese-American Buddhists, he said, because they seemed the most genuine. Thai-American Buddhists were too clannish to penetrate, however. Thais had their own temples, he said, which were Theravada Buddhist, not Mahayana, in any case. And New York, he decided, was too cold to visit when a trip became possible. For these and other reasons, he was unable to see nearly as much as he would have liked of America and its Buddhist communities. Back in Kathmandu at the small Nyingma Institute, Phuntso was pondering his next move. He was due to undertake the traditional three years and three months of meditation in retreat. He couldn’t decide where to go.

Once on a visit to the Bumthang district in central Bhutan, I went looking for something like a model village, to see what improvements rural Bhutanese families would make if they wanted to live better lives by earning money in farming or business, but on a smaller scale than the new capitalists of Thimphu. I was sent to Jalikhar, close to Jakar town, where a gentleman named Ap Singye owns one of the grandest houses. At its back, the house overlooks one of Bhutan’s most bucolic scenes, a broad expanse of meadow along the aquamarine waters of the Tang Chhu, where horses grazed among the willows. In front are more pastures on gently sloping hills. The ground is so good here that a little farther down the road environment and agriculture specialists were able to restore a deforested hill in a few decades through natural regeneration. That taught them to fence off other land to stop the free grazing of cattle.

Ap Singye’s house is a two-story affair that we entered from the back, through a farmyard. Singye has done well in farming and from dabbling in other businesses locally. In fact, he wasn’t home when we arrived, so
someone sent to town for him. Singye was conversant with the world. A relative—I seem to recall it was his son—had gone to study in Hong Kong. He was eager to show me his house. The ground floor, as always in rural Bhutan, was left unfinished for storage space. The main rooms were on the floor above. We tarried longest in two of them, the kitchen and the family prayer room. The kitchen’s centerpiece was a large smokeless stove made of clay, which dominated a corner of the room. This luxury gave the family clean air to breathe indoors, a marked improvement over traditional smoke-filled kitchens. Next to the kitchen was an empty room, with only a few long wooden poles suspended on ropes from the ceiling “to dry things,” Singye explained. Later in another home, someone explained that the empty room would be given to a visiting monk or other distinguished guest. Monks are regularly invited into Bhutanese homes to perform special ceremonies for a family, not all of the rites strictly Buddhist. Monks can be called to cleanse a home of troublesome spirits or illness. They may be specialists in building talismans to ward off evil. They are there in birth, illness, and death.

A door from Singye’s empty guest room toward the back of the house led to the family prayer room, which also served as the formal parlor. He ushered us to a rug-covered couch while his wife prepared hot buttered tea for us, with bowls of roasted grains to thicken the salty drink. While we waited, Singye talked about his family, and I had time to absorb the family altar opposite where we were seated. It was an exceptionally elaborate construction of wood, perhaps six feet wide, with gilded panels reaching to the ceiling. On the altar itself, there was an image of a sainted lama swathed in yellow silk, a silver pitcher of holy water topped by peacock feathers on its lid, a vase of cut grain, and a bowl of roasted cereals. There was also a stylized torma confection in gold or brass and the seven offering bowls filled symbolically with water. At the center of the assembly of religious objects was a sizable painting, about twelve by eighteen inches, of the Dalai Lama standing as if in a preaching pose, radiating light in rays above and around his head. It was framed in silver. Over the Dalai Lama’s shoulder, several gilded images of Buddha looked down from niches in the altar’s panels.

Singye and his family had most certainly invested a substantial part of their wealth in this altar. It stood alone in the sturdy but simple house as a kind of glittering chimera or a vision beheld in a dream of heaven. For
Bhutanese of middle age, the advent of a cash economy and the chance to accumulate a disposable income has meant the opportunity to glorify their homes and lives with altars worthy of their gods and deities. It has provided the wherewithal to give more generously to monks and monasteries and to undertake pilgrimages. For this first generation of beneficiaries of development, religion and the more rapid salvation of the soul have been the highest priorities.

But now what?

The signs of the future are already evident in Thimphu and Phuntsholing, where members of the next generation, now in their teens and twenties, are spending more time in shops, cinemas, and cafés than in temples. At the Institute of Traditional Medicine, Dr. Morisco didn’t think anyone should be too complacent about Bhutan. “The Bhutanese face the same threats and dangers we have in the West,” he said. “I mean, many of them, if they had the chance, they would go straight to New York and live in New York as a probably one hundred percent New Yorker. I don’t think being Bhutanese there would make a difference. This is a society that has grown and formed itself over the centuries on the basis of Buddhist teachings, and that has given it special qualities. But the Bhutanese of today have inherited this without any merit of their own. Now they have to make their own choices. There is one good thing about the Bhutanese government, that is that it is an enlightened government, because it has an enlightened king. Definitely, the government is much more ahead than the people in controlling development. With more freedom, what choices would the people make? Like now there is a trend to go toward private businesses. That poses a lot of intrinsic problems because the government has been able to keep back all the negative development. Once the initiative goes to private business, I have serious doubts that many Bhutanese businessmen care a thing, for example, about nature.”

Sonam Gyatso is a young monk who also worries about the future of Bhutan. At the age of twenty-eight, he gave up his career as an accountant, still a new profession, and turned back to religion. “I changed my dress and became monk,” is how he described it. He had gone to Kathmandu to immerse himself in the study of classical Tibetan and the Buddhist philosophy, rejecting a chance to study in the South Indian city of Mysore, also a center of Buddhist scholarship, because it seemed too far
away for him. He wanted to stay closer to Bhutan. In Kathmandu, he lived among other mountain people, mostly Ladakhis and Sherpas, while he studied and thought about how to help prop up his country’s spirit.

“I pray to see our country in peace,” he said. “There are so many struggles in Bhutan now. We are becoming unhappy people.”