This is the extreme south of China’s Yunnan Province (which boasts the world’s most northern tropical rainforest), where a rich mix of “minorities” follow traditions not dissimilar to those of their hill tribe cousins in northern Thailand, Burma and Indo-China. To the untrained eye, the sacred hills of Xishuangbanna appear indistinguishable from other forests that grace this land of green hills.
But to local villagers, the 400 “holy hills” in Xishuangbanna are the homes of dragons. People here call them lung shan, or dragon hills, sacred forests which provide for people’s spiritual and physical well-being.
Doctor Bo and his patient sit on a bouncy split rattan platform at the back of his village house. He diagnoses the woman’s illness by feeling her pulse and sensing the flow of energy in her body. He asks a few questions and then unwraps some of the treasures of his personal pharmacy.
It is an unlikely pharmacoepia. Sawdust. Twigs. Crumbled leaves. Crushed roots. The dried head of a soft-shelled river turtle.
Bo Wan Kan, of the Dai tribe, one of the 23 Chinese minorities in Xishuangbanna, practices traditional medicine with plants and animals that he collects from the wild. Like 80 percent of the people in the developing world, the residents of the Dai village where Dr. Bo practices depend on traditional medicine for their primary health care.
Dr. Bo collects his medicinal plants from a nearby forest adjoining the “white elephant” sacred grove behind his home. He explained that the ten-hectare holy forest “provides the village’s life insurance.” It is a repository of medicinal plants which could be collected in an emergency if the supplies outside the forest disappear. Priests long ago recognized this role and built a “white elephant” temple on the site, representing Lord Buddha’s last incarnation before returning as a man. The presence of such a temple near a sacred grove fits neatly with Lord Buddha’s observation that “the forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously the products of its life activity; it affords protection to all beings.”
Although poorly studied, the sacred groves of Xishuangbanna may contain important new natural pharmaceuticals. Dr. Pei Sheng Ji, director of the Kunming Botanical Institute and one of China’s leading ethnobotanists, has listed some 25 new drugs that have been developed from Chinese traditional medicines used by national minorities. About one third come from the minorities in Xishuagbanna. One example: From Tripterygium hypoglaucum, a plant used by the predominant Dai tribe, Chinese researchers have extracted a compound called triptotide hypolide, which is now prescribed by doctors throughout the country to treat rheumatism and arthritis.
The forest harbours wildlife, including many bird species which eat insects that would otherwise eat the villagers’ rice crops. The forest also acts as a watershed, ensuring a regular flow of clean water throughout the year – water used for washing, cooking, fishing and irrigation.
Pei Sheng-ji speculates on the origin of sacred groves such as these: “Like many early groups, the Dai associated the forests, the animals and plants that inhabited them, and the forces of nature with the supernatural realm. Proper actions and respect for the gods were believed to result in peace and well-being for the villagers. Improper activities and disrespect, on the other hand, incurred the wrath of the gods who punished the Dai villagers with a variety of misfortunes. Thus, the early Dai were encouraged to live in “harmony” with their surroundings. The holy hill is a kind of natural conservation area founded with the help of the gods, and all animals, plants, land and sources of water within it are inviolable.”
I love the symmetry. Practical medicinal plants and emotional religious comfort. Yang and yin. Lingam and yoni. Day and night, light and dark, dry season and monsoon. The cycles of Asian life roll on, unhindered.
If a community can have a sacred grove, why not a family? I returned to southern India.
“Yes, some things remain mysterious,” botanist N.C. Nair advises. “Even though this place is full of nagas they don’t harm people.”
We are in a private sacred grove in the Kerala town of Changanacherry. The Nair family claims the grove is a thousand years old.
The Nair homestead lies off a busy commercial street; the devotions of a meuzzein from a nearby mosque compete with the whine of a nearby sawmill. Cranes, an uncommon sight in this part of India, perch in the trees. They pay no heed to the woman who enters the 100 square meter grove, pushes away brambles and lights the evening flame in front of a knee‑high stone naga statue.
“She is ashamed to tell you, but her family might get rid of the grove,” N.C. Nair confesses. “Their children have left home and the old folks find it tiresome to light the lamp each day and perform the necessary Hindu puja (religious ceremony) every six months. And they can earn good money by planting coconut trees where this sacred grove now stands.”
In the grove migratory birds sing. Just outside the grove cows graze between coconut palms. Evening prayers begin at the mosque.
“I would be sad if this sacred grove falls into the hands of non‑believers,” Mr. Nair says. “It would be lost. I am sad, but what else can I do?”
Madhav Gadgil and V.D. Vartak observe that private sacred groves, such as those of the Nair family, are the most threatened of all traditional conservation sites “because they can fetch considerable money in the short run for poor farmers,” when sold to merchants who want to extract timber or convert the trees to charcoal.
Conservationist Vijay Paranjpye urges that conservationists rethink the concept of protected areas. Instead of legislating wild areas as wildlife sanctuaries, he argues, which is largely a Euro‑A‑American concept, it would be wise to instead provide legal protection to already established sacred groves. “These represent probably the single most important ecological heritage of the ancient culture in India,” Mr Paranjpye says.
Environmental researcher and economist Ajay Rastogi notes that sacred groves benefit from indirect legislation in several states, such as restrictions on felling and transporting certain tree species. While there is no special legislation for this category of nature reserve, sacred groves do seem to enjoy de facto protection. The demands of modern life and development may, however, place greater pressures on them in the future.
What is clear is that sacred groves and holy forests offer a valid conservation option. “There are many ways of respecting nature,” Vithal Rajan observes. “The skill is choosing the one that works best.”
Does that skill extend to manipulating traditional belief patterns and actually creating sacred groves?
In this world of fast food, fast bucks and fast gratification, is it possible to speed up the normal process and deliberately create a sacred grove?
“We’ve created several in recent years,” notes M.A. Partha Sarathy, a Bangalore-based renaissance man who recently was awarded the UNEP Global 500 for his work in conservation.
He explained the process. “At one site in Karanataka state we took an existing forest patch and re-instituted it as a sacred site by putting up a sign that read ‘Devara Kadu’, God’s Forest.”
“That’s all?”
“No, it wasn’t that easy. We gave the forest a bit of history and presented it the context of the local people’s common fear that powerful forest goddesses reside in such groves.” I was surprised it worked so smoothly.
“You’ve also got to get the head man on side,” Partha Sarathy explained. “In this case the head man’s father had been cured of a serious illness by medicinal plants that came from this forest. He gave us his blessing to turn it into a protected site and the people went along with the idea.”
A “deification” of a wooded area of which Partha Sarathy is particularly proud lies just at the outskirts of bustling Bangalore, a multi-faceted city of 4.5 million in Karanataka State known for its imaginative town planning, universities and rapidly expanding industry.
In the early 1970s an electronics factory on the outskirts of town cleared 80 acr
es of land to provide housing for its 22,000 workers. In the inevitable vacant lots which occurred, the company managers, all keen conservationists, planted thousands of seedlings. But, as one of the managers explains, there was a high plant-mortality rate because no one took on the responsibility to care for the trees. Some took away seedlings to plant in their own homes, and others ignored the remaining trees. What had been everybody’s business finished up as being no one’s responsibility.
“About that time India was converting from miles to kilometers,” Partha Sarathy explains. “We were able to buy the discarded tombstone-shaped stone mile markers for almost nothing. We hired stone carvers from out of town and asked them to carve Hindu religious symbols in place of the Roman numerals. We placed these new “deified” markers next to some of the newly planted trees, and sprinkled them with kum kum, a red powder used in worship.
“Before too long we found people starting to treat these special trees with respect and to “worship” them. Even more important, they watered the “deified” saplings and the others as well. We seem to have created a ‘sacred grove’ out of a vacant lot.”
Chapter 6
WATCH WHAT YOU SAY IN BURMA’S SACRED FORESTS
What’s a more powerful conservation incentive – a government jail or a spiritual punishment?
ZEE-O-THIT-HLA, Burma
Myint Naing has one of the easier jobs in the Myanmar forestry department. Since 1999 his task has been to protect the Zee-O Thit-Hla sacred forest, which has been a government forest reserve since 1988. No one has cut a tree during that period. Is it the fear of a three-year prison sentence that has kept this cool holy grove intact while its surroundings lie barren and baking? Or is its environmental integrity due to something mystical, something far beyond government control?
While the Zee-O Thit-Hla sacred forest might have government protection, I sense that its real power, and hence the reason it survives, lies in things that go bump in the night. Throughout Asia one hears stories. A jealous wife puts a black magic curse on her husband’s mistress that makes the woman go mad. A man coughs blood, and when doctors X-ray his lungs they find dozens of metal pins, put there by a sorcerer. A farmer spends the night in the forest and when dawn comes villagers find that he has entranced a man-eating tiger into a cage.
Trouble is, it’s awfully hard to actually meet some of these magic-imbued people – these surreal episodes always seem to take place “in a distant village, over the next hill”.
When I ask what trouble could befall someone who violates the sanctity of this sacred forest in Burma, I expect the usual generalizations – “you’ll fall sick”, or “bad things will happen.” So I listen with a grain of salt when I hear that a farmer’s house had burned down after he and a companion cursed and acted disrespectively in this holy grove outside Bagan. I figure it for just another Asian tale, an urban legend told by cosmopolitan skeptics about curious (and superstitious) rural folks who live far from the sophisticated capitals of Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila. Such stories are common, but irritatingly hard to analyze – one would welcome a team of Mythbusters to put some scientific empiricism into reports about men who sell their children’s souls, enabling them to turn into were-pigs to get rich. Soldiers whose sacred amulets have enabled them to survive being shot. Men who magically “teleport” themselves from one point to another. People who eat glass. Even a car repair method that relies on incantations and prayers instead of mallets and soldering irons. My amateur attempts at busting these myths usually results in a stalemate due to too-many-degrees-of-separation – the person I’m talking with heard it from his sister-in-law who heard it from someone in the pub – that kind of thing. So when I was told that the people who were punished for intruding on this sacred forest in this forgotten corner of Burma actually existed, I was skeptical.
“No, they’re real,” the village elder insists. “The unfortunate men were U Aung Khin and his son-in-law U Aye San. Want to meet them?”
To get to the Zee-O Thit-Hla forest (the name roughly translates as “beautiful old forest of Zee O village”) I drive about ten kilometers outside the famous ruins of Bagan in the direction of Mount Popa, turn north and bounce along for 12 kilometers on a rutted dusty track suited for ox carts or sturdy four-wheel-drive vehicles. I pass fields of parched earth the reddish-color of a fair-skinned European after a day in the sun, a desiccated land punctuated by fallow groundnut cultivations and one or two villages in which life in the thatched roof houses probably hasn’t changed all that much since the monumental stupas of Bagan were built a thousand years ago.
U Thu Taw, an age-softened man wearing an immaculate long-sleeved white shirt with a Nehru collar, white turban and checked longyi, in the calm manner of many Burmese, doesn’t seem especially surprised to see a stranger pop into his dusty village of a thousand people and start asking about the local sacred forest.
If a visitor asks the right questions he can find sacred forests throughout the swath of Hindu/Buddhist countries that runs from India through southern China and across to Vietnam. Holy groves are protected areas that generally have no government status, but nevertheless remain forested oases in often-heavily populated areas. Local people generally insist that anyone who enters these holy forests must follow strict folk taboos – no swearing or loud noise, no lewd behavior (one couple reportedly became barren after they had a tryst in the Zee-O Thit-Hla forest), and don’t take anything out, not even a twig.
“Forests have guardian spirits,” notes Sein Tu, retired professor of psychology of Mandalay University. “Where the spirits feel slighted by infractions such as foul language, they are believed to mete out terrible punishments to the wrong-doer, as in the case of a young man known to me who scornfully urinated in front of a nat-altar, and suffered a complete mental breakdown.”
At the entrance to the 40-acre Zee-O-Thit-Hla sacred forest I ask if I should remove my shoes. U Thu Taw murmurs a vague incantation to the forest spirits: “This is a visitor with tender soles, give him permission to wear shoes.” Apparently he receives an okay, and he nods agreement. Not wishing to tempt fate though, I remove my hiking boots and socks.
A shed some thirty meters into the forest contains puppet-sized statues of the forest’s guardian nat spirits, omnipresent demi-deities which in Myanmar control important events in people’s lives. A simple tin-roofed open-air shelter forms the nat shrine for this forest. Small statues of the resident nats welcome visitors – U Hla Tin Aung and Daw Pun Nya Yin, nat brother and sister, wear red robes, their hands painted golden. They extend their palms in greeting.
The air is cool inside the forest, a welcome relief from the arid, cactus-dotted landscapes outside the perimeter. I stroll amidst mature trees so large I can’t put my arms around them, including several fine ficus trees, which are seldom found in the arid zone. Some 35 tree species have been catalogued in this oasis of green. Is Zee-O Thit-Hla a relict forest, the last example of a richer flora that existed prior to the deforestation that accompanied the 11th to 13th century construction of the great temples of Bagan?
This is conservation by the people, for the people. Sacred groves, or “life reserves”, as one villager describes them, survive today because they serve people’s physical and spiritual needs.
In one sense, sacred forests fit my Cartesian, left-brained worldview – they act as watersheds, offer shelter for animals, are repositories for medicinal plants and, in an emergency and given the proper ceremonies, can provide timber to rebuild a village ravaged by fire.
But they are also places of magic. When I was a boy I believed in gardens filled with unicorns and sprites and goblins. I know these special places existed – I saw them in my picture books and in my mind’s eye.
Back in the village, I am finally introduced to U Aye San, the man who allegedly broke the taboos concerning this sacred grove and suffered as a result. He is a middle-aged man who appears perfectly, well, normal. “My father-in-law, U Aung Khin, was acting eccentric the morning that
we entered the sacred forest,” U Aye San says. “Yes, we were disrespectful but we didn’t know we were breaking the taboo.”
As any cop will tell you, ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law, and the spirit-policemen of Zee-O Thit-Hla Forest served punishment. “A few hours after we returned to the village I heard a commotion,” U Aye San explains. “U Aung Khin’s house was burning. He was inside, and got burned. But it was very odd. The cooking fire had been extinguished. The fire apparently started spontaneously, among the dried toddy palm leaves.”
I am introduced to the hapless father-in-law. U Aung Khin is 84 (“my secret of long life is rice and toddy”) and half deaf. Our translator shouts into his good ear, but to no avail. He is either embarrassed to speak about the event, or his memory is gone. He cannot confirm or deny U Aye San’s story.
On departure, I ask Myint Naing, the Zee-O Thit-Hla forest guard, which is a stronger deterrent to villagers – the nats or the government. “The nats,” he says without hesitation. “Definitely the nats.”
Chapter 7
CONSERVATION EXPERIMENT IN PHILIPPINES PROVIDES BENEFITS AND FRUSTRATIONS
Twenty-five percent of world’s coral reefs already gone; community management one way to stop destruction
APO ISLAND, Philippines
I sat on a postcard-pretty beach with Mario Pascobello, the village head of tiny Apo Island in the central Philippines, who explained the good news: the take of the village’s fishermen has increased dramatically since the community agreed in 1982 to protect its coral reefs.
The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen Page 16