So Close to Heaven (32 page)

T
HE
MONKS
at one of Bhutan’s most venerated temples were having a spat with the security officer assigned by the district’s civil administrator to guard the shrines and enforce new rules against littering and the harboring of stray dogs. On a winter morning when sunshine bathed the temple courtyard and glinted off the golden-brass butter lamps set out to dry after a scrubbing, the administrator had lined up the abbot and half a dozen monks like so many schoolboys for a dressing-down. The ineffectual security officer, standing a few feet away, head down almost to his chest, had reported that he was the victim of a monkish conspiracy. Nobody in holy robes obeyed him, he said, though at this temple they were wards of the state. Monks refused to tidy up their quarters. They gave leftovers to the pariah dogs. Worst of all, the caretaker-guard alleged, they threatened him.

The administrator was livid. Striding back and forth in front of the silent, expressionless monks in their maroon robes and assorted running shoes, he admonished them sternly, told them that their campaign of noncompliance was over and they would henceforth pick up their trash and stop feeding stray animals. He then turned sharply on his heel and strode out of the monastery yard. As he approached the gate of this sacred place, a tiny, velvety-brown puppy loped happily toward him out of curiosity, hunger, or a search for affection, as baby animals do. As their paths crossed, the administrator, without missing a step, kicked the little
dog out of his way, sending it rolling and squealing in pain and fright across the stones.

“In this place, there will be no dogs and no pigs,” the administrator later explained calmly. “They are filthy and spread disease.”

Bhutan has a stray-dog crisis, and it goes to the heart of the conflict between piety and progress in a Buddhist universe, where sparing the life and sensibilities of an animal is supposed to be an act of faith. Not infrequently and in many realms of activity in Bhutan and elsewhere in the Himalayas, monks and lamas are running into conflict with an increasingly intrusive and scientific state. The argument may be over opposition to modern medicine or the growth of secular education outside the monasteries, the spread of tourism to holy sites, or the treatment of animals, domestic or wild. As Rigzin Dorji made clear time and again, some topics may be open to debate, but there is really no latitude on the issue of protecting nonhuman life. All of us, down to the smallest mouse or insignificant insect, are sentient beings and therefore sacred in Buddha’s eyes.

“Today my mother may be human,” Rigzin Dorji said. “But when I die, I may be reborn as a dog, and then my mother may be a bitch. So therefore, you have to think that all living beings are my parents. My parents are infinite. Let my parents not suffer.”

Carried to extremes, the rule defies reason and overrides instincts of human kindness, leading to cruelties no less painful than outright abuse. On a path to Sherubtse College, a dog had collapsed and was obviously dying slowly and agonizingly, its hairless body riddled with open abscesses. Why not put it to death? I asked. Buddhism tells us not to take life, was the reply. I heard that again when I encountered along the road a horse turned out of a village because it had broken a leg and could not work. The bone-thin animal was hobbling clumsily along the bed of a stream beyond the farmers’ fields, dragging a useless back leg as it hunted for anything green and succulent on which to graze. No one apparently wanted it, or could afford to feed it just for pity’s sake. Yet no villager dared risk the karmic consequences of an act of euthanasia.

Horses and ponies are having a tough time with modernization too. Twice on the stretch of road from Tongsa to Tashigang, we pulled over to help local people calm village horses that had been brought down to the paved road to shorten the route to market towns and were driven wild with fear as they encountered advancing buses and trucks for the
first time. Bhutan had begun to join those developing nations where ruthless drivers, forgetting the rules about sentient beings, bully defenseless animals off the roads with misplaced bravado and even cruelty. We stopped because my Bhutanese companion on that trip was a village boy at heart and hated to see either farmers or animals suffer. First he ran to the assistance of a bewildered woman trying to recapture a crazed horse that had decided to escape the highway and run back to its village home after encountering a rattling, horn-blowing truck. That encounter passed off well: the horse recovered after the offending vehicle had disappeared around a bend. “Toot, toot!” the horse’s owner shouted venomously, shaking her fists at the back of the receding truck.

The second case nearly ended in tragedy. An overloaded bus with a thoughtless driver honking his horn and screeching his brakes as he came toward us had no sooner passed by than we drove into the chaos he had left in his wake. A horse was rearing and whinnying in the middle of the road, its baskets of produce overturned and emptying in the dust and exhaust. A woman near tears was nearby, watching her son try to rein in the frantic animal. The boy soon lost control, and the horse began to gallop away senselessly, with the wild eyes of a beast possessed by demons. We crept along behind them in our car and asked the young man if he wanted to ride with us, thinking we could catch up with the horse and persuade it to stop. “No!” he said decisively. “It will surely throw itself into the ravine and die.” We pulled off into a shallow ditch to wait out the drama.

My companion was off and running again, although the horse had a very long lead and might soon be out of sight. Suddenly a young woman appeared at a bend in the road ahead, and, sizing up the situation quickly, she walked slowly into the path of the terrified animal. She began speaking. The horse slowed for just a second, long enough for her to lunge for the reins. She clung to the still-skittish animal and was dragged for a few yards. Then it was all over. The horse stopped and let her stroke its head.

“You see,” my Bhutanese companion explained, “that horse was cared for by a woman in his village. So when he heard the voice of a girl, he felt safe.” The son took the reins and led the panting but footsure animal almost straight up the steep canyon beside the road, and fastened it to a tree out of sight of traffic, where it would be left to rest. He told us that the horse had never been out of its village on anything but a dirt trail; this was its first trip to town along the highway. The driver of the
noisy bus had blasted his horn at an already wary animal on a road cut into a rocky hillside with no spare land left for refuge on either side. If a second bus jockey had come along, the horse might have chosen to plunge to its death. Fortunately, traffic is still light in Bhutan’s farther reaches.

For the devout Buddhist, shouldering the burden of responsibility for animals can sometimes take tragicomic turns. In Nepal, where Hinduism and Buddhism coexist and sometimes overlap, Buddhists run from temple to temple in Kathmandu on certain Hindu festival days to pray for the souls of goats or other animals served up for ritual slaughter. In Bhutan, where Buddhists believe they can eat meat but not butcher animals, a farmer will bring fresh yak flesh to market but never admit to killing the yak. He will say that the yak, a surefooted, high-altitude animal, fell off a rock or met some other unlikely accident. Strips of meat are cured in the winter—sun-dried on the ground or air-dried on clotheslines—to make a delicacy appreciated everywhere in Bhutan. But I never saw a butcher shop. The only animal I saw butchered, in the privacy of someone’s home, was a pig being cut up for the winter larder at the headquarters of a joint Bhutanese-European agriculture project. The pig, however, has very low status.

A seller’s coyness about the origins of meat or the circumstances surrounding the death of the animal whose parts are for sale pose special problems for someone like Kelzang Tenzin, who struggled for years to make a modest success of the first European-style demi-haute-cuisine restaurant on a back alley in Thimphu, the Bhutanese capital. Optimistically, he called his bistro The Rendezvous, but it never quite lived up to its name. It was shrouded in gloom and empty last time I saw it, shortly before it closed, and its owner moved on to try his luck at the golf course café. Kelzang Tenzin trained as a chef at Holiday Inns in Hong Kong and Singapore and came back to Bhutan in the late 1980s determined to open a kitchen of international standards that would both educate Bhutanese and attract affluent foreigners from the offices of international development agencies and the handful of tourist hotels. He acknowledged when I met him over coffee that he was more or less done in early into the experiment by the absence of culinary herbs—and, more important, high-quality meat. Without good ingredients, his recipes were not very useful.

“Cooking in Bhutan has never been an important thing in life,” he
said. “People eat at home, and they eat simply. Religion has a lot to do with it. Because killing animals is not acceptable, a lot of our meat comes from India. It is of very poor quality, because animals there are not fed well and they are slaughtered too old, by primitive slaughtering methods. People in Bhutan don’t want to catch fish, either, so I can’t concentrate on that. We have very good, excellent rainbow trout, but I can’t get enough of it. People don’t want jobs that take life.”

The annals of Bhutanese development economics are replete with tales of Buddhist intransigence in the face of new ideas that might affect the well-being of animals. Silk production will never reach the quantity or quality of neighboring countries, despairing officials say, because the Bhutanese will not throw cocoons with still-living silkworms into boiling water. In the town of Jakar, in Bumthang district, two young men from southern Bhutan, where Hinduism predominates, were tending a demonstration bee-keeping project when I dropped in one day. The royal government is urging farmers to produce honey for extra household income. Most Buddhist Bhutanese balk, saying that making honey kills bees. You can see them lying around on the grass, dead as can be, right in front of the hive, they insist. So many tiny souls at risk.

“We try to tell the northern Bhutanese people that the bees are not killed by our method,” said Teknath Chamlagai, who introduced himself as a beekeeper-technician, educated in Alberta, Canada. The experimental bee station, resting on a small patch of clover meadow no more than a dip in a hillside, has developed special hives with multiple trays for extracting honey without the necessity of smoking out the bees. But skepticism still greets the explanation that worker bees self-destruct of their own volition and have not somehow given their lives to the honeypot. “These people don’t want any bees to die in any way for the honey,” Teknath said with a shake of his head.

In story and symbol, animals and birds enrich the lives of Bhutanese in many ways. Local artists decorate houses and shops with stylized paintings of deer, yak, snow lions, and, of course, dragons. At the center of Tibetan Buddhist paintings of the Wheel of Life are a rooster, snake, and boar—symbols of the three cardinal faults of passion, hatred, and delusion. In the Dragon Kingdom, it is somehow not surprising that the national animal is a sort of half-mythical beast called the takin. A takin, unique to high Himalayan reaches, has a buffalolike head with horns (and a very serious, slightly hangdog face) connected to the body of what
could be a sturdy, overgrown furry goat. A few of them live, pathetically, in a fenced enclosure above the Motithang Hotel in Thimphu, but their true home is in the shadows of glaciers, in valleys above twelve thousand feet, where they share steep pastures with musk deer, blue sheep, snow leopards, Himalayan bear, and a number of rare pheasants and other wildfowl.

To the Bhutanese family living as high as thirteen thousand feet or more, all kinds of animals, wild and tame, are omnipresent and often essential in daily life. Domesticated beasts provide all the energy that can be harnessed in hamlets beyond the reach of roads, hydroelectricity, and kerosene-powered generators. Children come of age tending yaks or caring for horses, expanding their knowledge as they work. Father William Mackey, the Canadian Jesuit who has become a Bhutanese citizen and a high-ranking administrator in Bhutan’s education department, said he learned decades ago when teaching math to village children that they instinctively understood numerical sets in a way a Western child did not. The knowledge came from tending animals.

“The little boy who takes the cows out, he knows he takes seven cows,” the sprightly priest said as he passed around cakes during tea at his Thimphu home. “The foundation of sets, the mathematics of sets, that kid knows, because seven is not seven to him. There may be two cows up there on the hill, three down here in the field—where are the other two? Or four may be brown and three black. The concept of sets that kid knows before he comes to school. Or the little girl who lets out twelve chickens. She needs twelve back when she comes home, so she learns how to count them, six over here, five there, and so on. People on a farm have fantastic knowledge.”

Beyond the farmyard, wild animals are omnipresent, blurring the lines that divide human habitation from the realm of other sentient beings, real or mythical, and the world of the spirits who share both spaces. Even in Thimphu, a capital city that is no more than a frontier outpost, bears and panthers prowl. Townspeople tell stories of big mountain cats that snack on chickens and pet dogs, disappearing afterward to sleep off the feast in the trackless surrounding forests. When terrorism began to empty hamlets in southern Bhutan after an ethnic Nepali insurgency took off in the early 1990s, loyal citizens who remained soon complained that wild beasts were returning from the tropical jungles to reclaim the abandoned fields and threaten the families who chose to stay
behind. The south has a hot, dense landscape, where not only buffalo but also elephants, tigers, rhinoceros, and deer roam among the mixture of bamboo, chik grass, and temperate-zone trees.

Guests at the Motithang Hotel, on the edge of Thimphu, used to be told to stay indoors at night to avoid the perils of unexpectedly running into wildlife—especially bears or big cats. When my husband and I stayed at the Motithang several years ago, we took the staff’s advice. Consequently, the only Himalayan bear we saw was in the drafty lobby, dead and stuffed. Wearing a ferocious snarl, it reared up on its hind legs, its ears wired out at forty-five-degree angles from its massive fur head. But in its forepaws, the poor bear had been humiliated into holding a tray with a red, blue, and green straw basket resting on it. About a dozen pink and white paper flowers on plastic stems with shiny green leaves stuck out stiffly over the basket’s edge. The whole effect was ludicrous but sad. Last time I passed by the Motithang to see if there were still takin, the national animal, living in the enclosure up the hill, the lobby was being remodeled for a more sophisticated tourist age. What, I asked myself, will be the fate of the peaceful bear and his bouquet?