The Wayfinders (18 page)

In what Winston Churchill called the
“bloodstained century of violence,” Mao Zedong bears the dark distinction of
being the political leader most successful in killing his own people. When
Mao famously whispered into the ear of a young Dalai Lama that all religion
was poison, the Tibetan spiritual leader knew what was coming. The Great
Leap Forward, an egregiously ill-conceived campaign to collectivize all
production and make China the largest steel producer in the world, caused
the death by famine of 40 million Chinese in 1959. That same year the
People’s Liberation Army marched into Lhasa, fully intent on the destruction
of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Ideological fanaticism, materialist thought
control, and communist class struggle reached a watershed during the
Cultural Revolution, unleashed by Mao in 1966. Its goal was the creation of
a pure socialist cadre, men and women whose minds had been purged and
memories erased to yield a template upon which the thoughts of Mao could be
engraved. The true and just society would emerge in the wake of the
destruction of the Four Olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old
habits. Create the new by smashing the old. This was the official slogan of
what was heralded to be the last battle before the coming of the socialist
paradise.

All notions of religion and spirit, the poetics
of culture and family, intuitions about the relationship of man and woman
and nature, the scent of the soil, and the meaning of rain falling upon
stones had no place in Mao’s calculus of transformation and domination.
Nationality was considered a mere product of economic disparity. Once
material inequalities had been addressed, ethnic distinctions would wither.
Tibet, of course, exemplified the old; China, the new. Thus, the Cultural
Revolution both implied and demanded a total assault on every facet of
Tibet’s ancient civilization. Over a million Tibetans were killed, and in
time 6,000 monasteries and temples,
chörtens
and religious shrines were reduced to rubble,
blasted from the air and ground by artillery and bombs. Imagine for a moment
how we might feel as Canadians if something like this happened to our
country, if a nation inordinately more powerful were to invade, declare our
religious beliefs to be anathema, and proceed to destroy all of our
churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. I stress that the problem was
not of the Chinese people, who more than any suffered under Mao. The
insanity came about because of an idea, which grew from another layer of
violence, a pressure created by colonial history and the unexpected and
uncontrollable outcomes of a chaotic cultural encounter.

This history was very much on my mind when I
travelled a number of years ago in the Himalaya with two friends, Matthieu
Ricard and Sherab Barma. Matthieu, an inspired writer and photographer, did
advanced post-graduate studies in molecular biology at the Institut Pasteur
in Paris before leaving the academic world some forty years ago to take vows
as a Tibetan monk. For more than a decade he was the student and personal
aide of Khyentse Rinpoche, a revered spiritual lama of the Nyingma
tradition, and today from his base at the Shechen Monastery in Katmandu,
Matthieu remains a confidant and translator of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Sherab is a traditional Tibetan doctor, whose seven-year training included a
twelve-month solitary retreat in a cave to which he returns each year for a
month of meditation. The three of us met at Chiwong, a beautiful monastery
that clings like a swallow’s nest to the flank of the Himalaya in Nepal.
From there we went to the sanctuary of Thubten Choling, home to some 800
monks and nuns who devote their lives to personal transformation and what
Matthieu calls “the science of the mind that is Tibetan Buddhism.” The use
of this phrase intrigued me, especially as Matthieu had at one point in his
life pursued a career in scientific research and had worked in the lab of
François Jacob, a Nobel laureate.

“What is science,” he said one morning, “but the
empirical pursuit of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2,500 years of direct
observation as to the nature of mind? A lama once told me that Western
science and efficiency has made a major contribution to minor needs. We
spend all of our lifetimes trying to live to be a hundred without losing our
hair or teeth. The Buddhist spends his lifetime trying to understand the
nature of existence. Billboards in European cities celebrate teenagers in
underwear. The Tibetan billboard is the
mani
wall, mantras carved into stone, prayers for the
well being of all sentient beings.”

The essence of the Buddhist path, Matthieu
explained, is distilled in the Four Noble Truths. All life is suffering. By
this the Buddha did not mean that all life was negation, but only that
terrible things happen. Evil was not exceptional but part of the existing
order of things, a consequence of human actions or karma. The cause of
suffering was ignorance. By ignorance the Buddha did not mean stupidity. He
meant the tendency of human beings to cling to the cruel illusion of their
own permanence and centrality, their isolation and separation from the
stream of universal existence. The third of the Noble Truths was the
revelation that ignorance could be overcome, and the fourth and most
essential was the delineation of a contemplative practice that if followed
promised an end to suffering and a true liberation and transformation of the
human heart. The goal was not to escape the world, but to escape being
enslaved by it. The purpose of practice was not the elimination of self, but
the annihilation of ignorance, and the unmasking of the true Buddha nature,
which like a buried jewel shines bright within every human being, waiting to
be revealed. The Buddha’s transmission, in short, offered nothing less than
a road map to enlightenment.

Over the course of nearly a month Matthieu and
Sherab led me on a remarkable pilgrimage that ultimately took us to the
flank of Everest. Our goal was not the mountain, but the home of a simple
Buddhist nun by the name of Tsetsam Ani. Sherab explained that as a young
woman she had been very beautiful, but devoted to the dharma, and with no
interest in marriage. Pursued nevertheless by a wealthy merchant who had the
power to demand of her family betrothal, she escaped by climbing down a
cliffside latrine and eventually made her way on foot across the Himalaya
into Tibet, where she took her vows. When she returned to her Nepali home in
the Khumbu Valley, she entered lifelong retreat. For forty-five years she
had not left the confines of a single small room. She had some human
contact. Food was brought each day, and now that she was elderly Sherab as a
physician examined her from time to time. But she had fundamentally
dedicated her life to contemplative practice and solitude. She was the hero
of heroes, a true Bodhisattva, the wisdom hero, the realized being who had
found enlightenment and yet remained in the realm of samsara, of suffering
and ignorance, to assist all sentient beings achieve their own liberation.

Approaching the shuttered window of her tiny
room, I half expected to be met by a mad woman. Instead the wooden door
opened to reveal the happiest of eyes, sparkling with light and laughter.
Her hair was speckled with grey and cut short. Her body was slight but
strong, and only when her hands came together in ritual greeting did I
realize how old she indeed was. She offered us sweets, and then immediately
took Matthieu to task for the elaborate, baroque, and quite unnecessary
rituals of the monastic life. She had distilled her entire religious
practice into a single mantra,
Om Mani Padme Hum
, six syllables
representing the six realms that must be passed before the whole of samsara
is emptied and complete purity is embraced through the heart essence of the
Buddha. In reciting this one prayer every waking moment for forty-five years
she had dedicated herself to the spreading of compassion and loving
kindness. With each breath she had moved that much closer to her goal, which
was not a place but a state of mind, not a destination but a path of
salvation and liberation.

We stayed with Tsetsam Ani for perhaps an hour
and then left her to her devotions. As we moved away from the village we
happened to pass some climbers making their way toward Everest base camp.
Most of us would find it inconceivable to do what this gentle woman had
done; some would call it a waste of a human life. Most Tibetan Buddhists
find it equally incomprehensible that one would choose to walk to heights
where the air is so thin that consciousness is obliterated. To enter a death
zone deliberately, to risk losing the opportunity of personal transformation
and escape from the realm of samsara, merely to climb a mountain, is for
them a fool’s folly, the actual waste of a precious incarnation.

The Buddhists spend their time getting prepared
for a moment that we spend most of our lives pretending does not exist,
which is death. We dwell in a whirlwind of activity, racing against time,
defining success by measures of the material world, wealth and achievements,
credentials of one sort or another. This to the Buddhists is the essence of
ignorance. They remind us that all life grows old and that all possessions
decay. Every moment is precious and we all have a choice, to continue on the
spinning carousel of delusion, or to step off into a new realm of spiritual
possibilities. They offer an alternative that is not a dogma but a path,
long and difficult but in so many ways irresistible.

The Buddhists speak not of sin and judgment, of
good and evil, but only of ignorance and suffering, with all emphasis being
on compassion. To take refuge in the Buddha demands no act of blind faith,
and certainly implies no mandate to go out and persuade the rest of the
world to think as you think. At its core it is simply a wisdom philosophy, a
set of contemplative practices, a spiritual path informed by 2,500 years of
empirical observation and deduction that, if followed, offers the certain
promise of a transformation of the human heart. Finding serenity through the
dharma is the experimental proof that validates the Buddhist science of the
mind, just as a falling apple proves to us the existence of gravity. It may
be hard to understand what all of this means, but it exists for the
Tibetans. Many Tibetans do not believe that we went to the moon, but we did.
We may not believe that they achieve enlightenment in this lifetime, but
they do.

In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha cautions that
the world is fleeting, like a candle in the wind, a phantom, a dream, the
light of stars fading with the dawn. It is upon this insight that Tibetans
measure their past and chart their future. They leave the rest of the world
to ask how we possibly could have allowed such a blast of sorrow to sweep
through their land, and why to this day we continue to tolerate the wrath of
China, even as it pursues the dismantling of Tibetan culture and the
violation of a people and a nation that has truly given so much to humanity.

CRUEL AND COMPLEX
as the Chinese domination of Tibet has been, it
is fundamentally a story of power and presumption, the economic and military
capability of one people to impose its will on another, and the assertion of
superiority of knowledge and culture that such an imposition implies. This
essential dynamic also drives the cult of progress that is the modern
development paradigm. The motivations may in some instances be more benign,
though certainly the Chinese government believes strongly in the
righteousness of its policies in Tibet, but the consequences can be equally
devastating for the peoples and cultures whose lives the international
community has elected to change and improve.

In the Kaisut desert of northern Kenya, drought
is not a cruel anomaly but a regular feature of climate. Surviving drought
is the key adaptive imperative of all the pastoral nomads, tribal peoples
such as the Rendille, Samburu, Ariaal, Boran, and Gabra. To guarantee the
continuity of the clan it is vital to maintain herds of camels and cattle
large enough so that at least some animals will survive an extreme period of
desiccation and provide the essential capital from which to rebuild the
wealth of the family. To a great extent this liability and obligation
determines the structure of the society; it makes the people who they are.
To maintain large herds it is useful for a patriarch to have a large number
of children, and thus these societies typically are polygamous. But with men
taking multiple wives, there is the challenge of dealing with virile young
men of marriageable age who may not have partners to marry. The elders solve
this problem essentially by getting rid of the young men, dispatching them
for a period of ten years to remote encampments where they are charged with
the duty of protecting the herds from enemy raiders. To make this separation
from the social space of the community desirable, it is enveloped in
prestige. The greatest event of a young man’s life, a ritual for which he
trains for months, is his public circumcision, the moment when he enters the
privileged world of the warrior. The ceremony is held only once every
fourteen years, and those who endure it together are bonded for life. Should
a lad flinch as the nine slits are made to the foreskin, he will shame his
clan forever. But few fail, for the honour is immense.

Transformed physically, socially, and
spiritually, the warriors move to the desert, where they live together on a
diet of herbs gathered in the shade of frail acacia trees, mixed with milk
and blood drawn each night from the jugular of a heifer. Still, there
remains the problem of the human libido. To resolve this dilemma the
warriors are allowed to return periodically to the community, provided they
go nowhere near the married women. They are, however, permitted to approach
unmarried maidens. Premarital sexual liaisons are open and tolerated, up
until the moment the young woman is betrothed to an elder, at which time the
relationship must cease. But the warrior is encouraged and indeed expected
to attend the wedding of his former lover and publicly mock the virility of
the old man who has taken his place at his lover’s side. A single adaptive
challenge, surviving drought, reverberates through the entire culture,
defining for these nomadic tribes what it means to be human.