So Close to Heaven (9 page)

“Everywhere else dramatic changes have taken place,” the king had said that day. “What is at stake here is the survival of the Bhutanese people and our religion. We are really the last bastion of Himalayan Buddhism.”

O
N
A
DISMAL
afternoon, when a Kathmandu spring had reverted without warning to wintry drizzle and dull gray skies, I went for a long walk up the hill behind the massive white stupa at Bodhnath, where one splendorous new monastery after another has risen to serve exiled Tibetans and all others seeking to study Buddhism since the Chinese began their assaults on religious life in Lhasa and other holy places. I was looking for Shechen, the temple and meditation center established by this century’s most revered and beloved Bhutanese lama, the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. These few square miles above what everyone calls “Bodha” are becoming the world capital of Tibetan Buddhism, a place to start or finish or break a journey of discovery in the Himalayan kingdoms. Along the muddy lanes and footpaths, mostly rutted tracks too narrow for cars, that lead away from the dominating stupa, Tibetan women with roundish, leathery faces and cheerful smiles sell all the paraphernalia of the faith: prayer wheels to be spun with flicks of the wrist while walking, prayer beads, offering bowls, bells, the stylized double-diamond thunderbolts called
dorjis
(which look like ornate little barbells), Tibetan seals with sealing wax, and sometimes the brass spoons used to measure the ingredients in traditional medicine. Scattered among the stalls are open-fronted tailor shops where men stitch simple monastic garments or more elaborate temple hangings. Monks and novices of all ages and nationalities scurry along the unpaved footpaths or dawdle in groups to talk with acquaintances. I asked directions of a very
earnest American woman, struggling up a grade in rubber sandals and a rather unorthodox set of maroon robes; other pilgrims were speaking French. As evening approached, the familiar drones of lessons being read and prayers said rose to the accompaniment of blasts from monotonal monastic trumpets and the rhythmic beat of drums.

So far, nothing would disturb the soothing vision of Buddhism that its impassioned advocates promote, except for the green-and-white Pakistan International Airlines Airbus nosing its way into the valley to land over the hill at Kathmandu’s international airport. The problem is underfoot. The once-gentle mountain meadows on which these
gompas
—monasteries—stand are strewn with garbage, trash, and human waste. Pink and green plastic bags take the place of spring flowers among tufts of grass where scrawny dogs root for rotting scraps of food. At the approach to the Shechen monastery, the large welcoming sign painted on the main staircase tells us in a couple of languages not to urinate on the walls. (The monks doing so are around the side of the building out of sight of the sign.) Someone on orange roller skates zips across the main courtyard, a rectangular space, perhaps a city block long and half as wide, enclosed by monastery offices and the cells of monks. The monastery temple—an arresting gold-trimmed, deep red building several stories high—occupies the center of the courtyard, its triple-tiered pagoda roof rising above an ornate portico held up by slender pillars whose capitals are lavishly painted in religious motifs. The temple’s stone steps are littered with plastic sandals and running shoes, not the soft velvet-thonged slippers of Burmese monks. Inside the monastic walls almost no vegetation has survived the human traffic. Is this a life of peace in natural harmony with the environment, which every Buddhist has a duty to protect? How far had I come from the monasteries of Bhutan?

To travel through the peaks and valleys of Himalayan Buddhism is to become a collector of fragmented images and a teasing array of sense impressions, many of them bound to counter the stereotypes of simplicity and serenity that we expect to define a Buddhist universe. At the end of the journey, the traveler assembles these sense fragments into an individualistic understanding of what has been seen and experienced. Maybe that’s the way it should be, since Buddhism itself teaches us that each person must seek his own way to knowledge and enlightenment in this life or some other. Furthermore, in the Himalayan kingdoms, past and present, there has always been diversity of practice, if not belief. Local
deities elbow into the theology of textbooks. Natural landmarks may be sacred only to those in their neighborhoods. Certain mythological characters or
bodhisattvas
—deferred Buddhas who play the role of saints—are more highly venerated in one place than another. In Buddhism, there is no Rome, no Mecca, no Jerusalem, no single book of rules for all. Even in the golden age of Tibetan monastic life, each gompa was likely to follow only one school, sect, or famous lama. In short, what we conveniently label Tibetan or Himalayan Buddhism is at grassroots level a riotous assortment of rituals and superstitions, icons and symbols, folklore and creed. In a few far corners of this earthy faith, animal sacrifice persists, lamas work magic, and drunken monks have been known to brawl. There is nothing Zen-like about this branch of Lord Buddha’s clan.

Maybe geography has more than a little to do with the uncommon vitality of Himalayan Buddhism. To be born in this environment—where the body is strained to its limits while the soul is freed to soar above nature at its most magnificent—is to live a daily life of extremes. You awake in the morning more often than not cramped by the misty chill that comes with nighttime in the thin air of high altitudes. By midday, the sun brings sweat and somnolence. Long evenings are cheered by a fire and draughts of
chang
, a grain-based alcoholic drink, or some other powerful fermentation that loosens the tongue and sometimes the temper. Smiles crack weather-worn faces, and eyes that may seem expressionless by day flash and twinkle with recharged animation. Then, in the last warmth of the hearth, comes sleep. The darkness of night is complete, unique, beyond the reach of adjectives.

Physically, this is a universe of hamlets clinging to some flat fragment of land or least-precipitous slope along the foothills of snow-covered mountains that divide earth from heaven in an almost unbroken line from Pakistan across the arc of inner Asia to Burma. Inhabited hillsides, mere anthills when seen from the sky, are laced at ground level with spiderwebs of dirt footpaths from field to home, home to home, village to roadhead. Climbing and carrying, all paths seem to lead up, up, up. Men, women, and children spend hours bent over, eyes on the trail, as they trudge between home and points of commerce, a clear spring, or the ever-giving forest, carrying loads of sticks, water, harvested crops, or family provisions. When streams tumble down the rocky creases where one slope meets the next, women gather over laundry and talk as water-powered
prayer wheels work feverishly if squeakily at sending petitions to the gods.

My images of the Buddhist hills are always populated, as if the people and terrain were eternally interrelated. I remember how Tamara Bhandari, the unforgettable host of a once-famous travelers’ stop in the Indian city of Amritsar known only as Mrs. Bhandari’s Guest House, sorted the valleys to the north of her by religion—Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist—as if the land itself had taken on a faith and the choice had tempered the atmosphere. The Himalayas, humanly speaking, are both vast and intimate. If a veritable sea of exhilarating, ruthless mountains rises and falls from horizon to horizon, these same peaks shelter and often divide hundreds (maybe thousands) of social microcosms united only by their roughly shared Buddhist touchstones, their monks, and their legends.

In my visits to Buddhist regions of the Himalayas, the starting point was more often political than religious, but ultimately this led to many questions about Buddhism itself. Only the sense-dead can spend any time in the Buddhist hills without wanting to know more about the sustaining faith, its obvious egalitarianism, its rationality—demons and deities notwithstanding—and its inherent justice and fairness. In Ladakh, Sikkim, and Bhutan in particular, I wanted to understand how a Buddhist polity worked.

Historically, Buddhism grew and expanded its reach through the support of enlightened (or shrewd) emperors and kings. These realms, while feudal in organization, were not usually intolerant theocracies. Rulers—among them the early kings of Tibet and Nepal—saw in Buddhism not a philosophy with which to garb authority or cloak conquest but a force for civilizing and elevating their courts and the people they ruled. More recently, with the demise or dilution of the old kingdoms, Himalayan Buddhists have begun putting more emphasis on the political parameters of their religious communities, drawing lines in the sand to save their cultures. Tibetans, Ladakhis, and Bhutanese in recent decades have consciously made Buddhism the hallmark of their nationality and sometimes a banner for militancy or even violence that in some few places (at certain overheated moments) approaches religious fundamentalism. I wanted to know why these embattled Buddhists thought this system was worth fighting for.

After visits to Buddhist sites across the subcontinent, I returned again and again to Bhutan for the obvious reason that this was the sole remaining
Himalayan Buddhist monarchy, the only laboratory left to us at the end of the twentieth century. And time seemed to be running out there also. In Bhutan now, it is impossible to avoid being drawn into the debate over religion and the state. This makes it a fascinating place to experience Buddhism in its Himalayan environment, and to learn how Buddhism shaped much of the Himalayan world that is no longer strictly Buddhist.

No other nation outside Bhutan has Tantric Buddhism as the state religion; its monastic institutions, for better or worse, are found there in their purest forms—in the sense that they have been least disturbed over centuries, not necessarily because they set universal standards. When I had the opportunity to spend time in monasteries, temples, and fortresses once closed to outsiders, I went eagerly and gratefully. The journey began in Thimphu.

T
HE
FLAP-THWACK
, flap-thwack of spirit flags snapped by the wind, the whirr of prayer wheels, and the clang of bells were the only sounds to be heard as a royal protocol officer and I climbed through the crisp morning air toward the Changgangkha Lhakhang, an ancient temple and monastic school in the hills above Thimphu. The temple is somewhere between five hundred and eight hundred years old, depending on which account of its history one chooses to accept or how much literal truth one sees in the mythological chronology that surrounds its founding. But there is no disagreement that the monastery stands on sacred ground, blessed by a sainted lama, Phajo Drugom Shigpo, who is credited with being the first Tibetan to bring the official Drukpa sect’s teachings to Bhutan.

According to the delightful story told by the custodians of the temple, the elderly Phajo Drugom Shigpo won the love of a village girl of heavenly beauty who indeed turned out to be a celestial nymph. They eloped to a cave in a recess of the Thimphu Valley, where they were trailed by her mother, who had been made the object of ridicule by her neighbors because of the odd match her nubile daughter had made. Bursting into their hideaway, she caught them in the act of meditating. That didn’t stop her from launching into a tirade of recrimination against their presumed carnal union. The saint paused before this whirlwind, then promptly turned himself into a manifestation of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva
of Compassion, a figure of intense veneration across the Himalayas. This particular manifestation of the popular androgynous-looking bodhisattva is known as the “Avalokitesvara with a thousand arms and eleven heads.” The nymph’s earthly mother was overwhelmed by the miracle and retreated. In due course, the pious couple had seven sons (or descendants?), one of whom built the Changgangkha Lhakhang on land the lama Phajo Drugom Shigpo had earlier blessed. The temple’s most important treasure, apart from a trove of precious manuscripts, is a statue of Avalokitesvara in a sitting position, as if still in meditation. Bhutanese religious authorities say that all other statues of the god in temples around the country are standing.