Purna Harsha says again and again that the Newars never had a quarrel with Hinduism, which some of them adopted. The problems were political. He adds that in any case the term “Hindu” is too broad to apply to most Nepalis, who concentrate their devotion on one god in the Hindu pantheon, Shiva, and should rightly be called Shivaites. “In the histories of Nepal you won’t even find the word ‘Hinduism,’” he said. “Buddhism and Shivaism grew side by side here. Both hold each other in great respect. We speak of the Shiva-dharma and the Buddha-dharma.”
Purna Harsha Bajracharya, now retired, talked about how the persecution of Newar Buddhists during the century dominated by the Rana dynasty of hereditary prime ministers had inevitably led to a lack of self-assertion and a paucity of research into their own history and culture. He tells of scholars unable to publish or forced into exile because they did. Newar Buddhist culture can never really be obscured, however, because of the extraordinary public architecture and religious institutions it contributed to Nepali life. The child goddess Kumari, whose temple in Kathmandu’s Durbar Square draws sightseers hoping to catch a glimpse of the living deity, is a Newari ingredient in the Nepali cultural mix. The prepubescent Kumari, to whom by legend the valley belongs and to whom, therefore, everyone, including the king, must pay tribute once a year, is one of several such goddesses; Newar temples once had many more.
News of the vigor of Buddhism in Nepal is fast spreading beyond the Himalayas. Because Nepal, once closed to outsiders, has in recent decades become one of South Asia’s most open societies, easily accessible by air from both Western nations and East Asia, Kathmandu is attracting more international scholars and new believers from several continents. Go to prayers at almost any gompa around Kathmandu and there is likely to be, in addition to a few American or European voices, a handful of respectful Japanese, Thai, Malaysian, or Singaporean worshippers. The Westerners are no longer the stock characters who once drifted in from the fringes of the drug-taking, hippie Freak Street culture that was prepared to get high on just about anything the Nepalis could offer in the 1960s and ’70s, including the erotic Tantric Buddhist art whose proliferation a nineteenth-century Englishman had labeled a “filthy custom.” That carefree scene bottomed out sometime in the 1980s after the overland route from Europe was closed by war in Afghanistan and by a Nepali decision to raise the costs of travel in Nepal and to reorient tourism toward more affluent visitors and serious trekkers. The casual age has not entirely passed, of course. In a Kathmandu garden café I heard two backpacking Americans discuss what to do with their day. “Let’s go to Swayambhunath,” one said. “A lot of really cool things go on there.”
At the well-heeled Orgyen Tolku Gompa at Bodhnath, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche said he had noticed a continuing evolution of tourism in recent years. “Before, tourists came to look at the mountains. Then some started coming to see the monasteries. They see Kathmandu is a special place. Very holy. Tourists changed. Some began wanting to hear some teaching, to study with us,” he said. With new interest obviously came money. The rinpoche’s private quarters include a private chapel of evident affluence, decorated in the brilliant colors traditionally favored by Tibetans. The high ceiling was painted a bright aquamarine, with rafters lacquered red. Stylized paintings of religious motifs covered the walls, along which six brass and crystal sconces had been installed for light. From the rafters hung two large crystal chandeliers. At the altar, dominated by a larger-than-life image of Buddha, there was a collection of gold statues and fine ceramic temple guardian lions. The floor was carpeted in Tibetan rugs. The one unharmonious note was the hideous three-tiered plastic waterfall with a trick faucet and plastic flowers installed on a corner table. The faucet seemed to be suspended miraculously in midair, producing a stream of water from no visible source. (The water was being pumped up to the shiny golden tap from the bottom collection dish, through an unseen clear tube obscured by the stream flowing back down around it.) Incongruous kitsch though it was, it certainly caught the attention of disciples. Two boys sat riveted in front of it.
One of the most powerful and beloved of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist lamas, the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, established his base in Kathmandu, where he and his followers built the impressive Shechen temple and monastery. His Holiness, who had at one time instructed and inspired the Dalai Lama and served as a personal guru to members of Bhutan’s royal family, was the internationally recognized ranking lama of the Nyingmapa school and one of the last – if not the last – of the great Tibetan-born teacher-saints and tertons, discoverers or revealers of holy treasures. Twenty-two years of his life were spent in meditation, some of them in isolated caves in the manner of the great lamas of the past. He established and consecrated temples in Bhutan, India, and the West as well as in Nepal and set up a school of classical studies at Bhutan’s Simtokha Dzong. (His daughter Chhimi Wangmo is assistant director of Bhutan’s National Museum.) Though rooted in the Nyingmapa school, the rinpoche devoted much of his later life – he fled Tibet for Bhutan in 1959 – to preaching a nonsectarian Buddhism, drawing on the holy writings and philosophies of all schools.
I had often heard in Bhutan about the blurring of sectarian divisions. I remember in particular what the abbot of Tashigang Dzong told me as we stood by a huge, complicated, multifaceted sculpture in one of his temples that looked at first sight like a confusing jumble of images piled on a giant plant. “This is the holy tree,” he said. “Here is the lotus grown from the lake. On the leaves the different Buddha scholars are. We have different sects. Here is the leader of Nyingma and how he achieved enlightenment. And next is another sect called Karmapa, and this is its lineage. And this is Guru, and this is the sect that was followed by Shabdrung. Up there at the top is Buddha himself. So you see no matter what denomination or what sect, the root is same, the body same, and ultimate truth is one. Root is same, ultimate goal is same. Only approach is different.”
In poems, essays, and talks in Asia and the West, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche went beyond mere nonsectarianism. He gave the religion that recognized him as a leader in 1910, while he was still in his mother’s womb, a true sense of universality. After he died in September 1991, Bhutan spent more than a year praying and preparing for his final funeral rites. Present at the purjang or cremation ceremony in November 1992 – during which, Bhutan’s weekly newspaper said, “the last mortal remains of His Holiness dissolved into the state of luminosity” – were the Bhutanese royal family, more than fifty thousand monks and tulkus, and thousands of other followers and admirers from around the world. Many more would have come if Bhutan could have handled them. The cremation took place on a meadow in Paro, in view of the Taktsang monastery, where the Guru Rinpoche was believed to have descended on a flying tiger in the eighth century bearing the Nyingma Tantric teachings. The cremation pyre of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was a work of Bhutanese artisanship at its best: a carved, roofed pavilion bedecked in silk, with altars around the clay coffin overflowing with the finest offerings of food and religious objects. Tibetan Buddhism may never again see this exalted ceremony performed with such purity of ritual and in such an unspoiled cultural and natural environment. While Himalayan Buddhists await the rinpoche’s reincarnation, his legacy lives on in Kathmandu in the shadow of Bodhnath.
“Kathmandu is developing into an important center for Buddhist study,” another Tibetan lama, Khenpo Rigzin, said during one of our conversations at the Nyingma Institute of Nepal, a new monastic school just outside Kathmandu memorable for its quiet, superserious atmosphere. The institute has a Tibetan-American patron, Tarthang Tulku, a publisher of Buddhist texts in Berkeley, California, Khenpo Rigzin said. Novice monks – still all boys, no girls – from across the Himalayan region and India come here to take a nine-year course that is heavy on Buddhist philosophy. So far, no Westerners had enrolled as students, Khenpo Rigzin said, though they are admitted for research. He added politely, even sweetly, that Western students might pose a problem, given the very different intellectual a
nd spiritual environment that produced them. In his experience, he said, he found it took them a little longer to grasp things. A concept he could teach a Bhutanese, Sikkimese, or Sherpa in a week would take two or three weeks to penetrate the mind of an American, he thought.
Khenpo Rigzin has turned down many offers to teach in the West, because he believes the Himalayan milieu is important to him. “I know that the standard of life is very good in America. But we need something different. According to our philosophy, we must realize the dharma. The way of living must be there. It is good for monks to stay in a group, to practice prayer together. Here I feel sure, secure. It’s easier to live as lama in Nepal.”
If anything, Nepal is already becoming spoiled by success, Khenpo Rigzin said, reflecting the burgeoning sense among some leading Buddhist lamas that too much luxury is creeping into monastic life. In some cases, that is already an understatement. A Kathmandu businessman told me how when he tried to sell a Mercedes-Benz, he got no takers in the royal family or among wealthy houses, but found a Tibetan rinpoche ready and willing to pay cash for the car. One day, leaving a Kathmandu restaurant after lunch, I saw two monks head toward a new Hyundai parked out front. The older one got into the back; the younger one (wearing a cowboy hat) folded his robes, slid into the driver’s seat, and sped away. The ideal life of a monk, Khenpo Rigzin said, is to follow the Lord Buddha’s own advice to avoid cities, corrupting influences, distraction. He said that only the greatest of lamas would be able to concentrate in the busy atmosphere of some gompas these days.
His Holiness Ngawang Tenzing Zangbo, the Sherpas’ Tengboche abbot and overseer of all Buddhist gompas in Nepal when I met him, said pithily that these days too many monks “prefer electricity to butter lamps.” He expanded on this to say that there was nothing inherently bad about new inventions and modern life in general. The problem came when these things became preoccupations. “Good clothing, for instance,” he said. “In other times, lamas never wanted the best garments. They could go barefoot and possess nothing. Now they are asking for better robes. At Tengboche, I am trying my level best to keep things as traditional as possible. I want to improve life a little bit, make it more comfortable, but stay always within tradition. I believe that when you learn the harder way, when you experience hardship, this means more and is closer to our teaching.”
He said that he is not surprised to see Westerners flocking to Tibetan monasteries in Nepal. “In the West, there are too many distractions,” he said. “People long to come to these mountains. Here you can learn things through your heart.” He noted that Kathmandu also drew many Himalayan people because of its proximity to sacred places, but was confident that many lamas among them would return to remote areas and practice a wholesome religion, free of urban temptations. He hopes that the spiritual boom will result in higher levels of religious life all around the region and not the further degradation of monastic life through materialism. He sounded as if it might be touch-and-go in some places.
Almost all Buddhists in the Himalayas, not just lamas, are coming into frequent contact with wealthier Buddhists, both Mahayana and Theravada, from Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and farther east. A glimpse of their obvious affluence has a powerful effect. Bhikku Nirmala Nanda, one of a small number of impoverished Theravada monks in Nepal and the abbot of a temple in Lumbini, is grateful for the gifts brought by Thai pilgrims, but alarmed at their materialism. “They come with so many baggages full of things,” he told me as we shared tea, he in his chair of honor near the altar and I on the steps nearby that led to his mango grove in the sunny courtyard. “I have to tell them, ‘If you carry so much heavy baggage, it will be very difficult to get to Nirvana. Reaching enlightenment will take a longer time than if you are free of this weight.’” I told him the biblical story in which Jesus declared that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich man to enter heaven. He said he hadn’t heard that one, and chuckled at the symmetry.
CHOMOLUNGMA SINGS THE BLUES
Ed Douglas
Ed Douglas is a journalist author and climber. He is the editor of the Alpine Journal, the world’s oldest mountaineering publication, and has written regularly for the Guardian for 25 years. His ten books include a biography of Tenzing Norgay, with Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Everest.
REBEL WITHOUT A YAK
Another steep climb brought us to the entrance of the Sagarmatha National Park. Gaps among the trees just before the park boundary were strong evidence of how development of the Khumbu had damaged the area’s ecology. This was the worst example of deforestation I would see while trekking in the Khumbu, although further south in Solu on the trek back from Lukla to Jiri the damage was much more extensive and little was being done to correct it. The determining factor is the park authority which regulates the management of the Khumbu’s forests. People building lodges had come outside the boundary to cut trees for construction which was why the damage was so bad just here above the village of Monjo. There has historically been considerable friction between Sherpas and the park’s managers who were heavily prescriptive in their early attempts to control deforestation. Since then the authorities have learned to work more closely with established local forestry practices. The whole subject of forestry is highly complex and controversial and evidence can and has been used to suggest that tourists are wicked, national government is wicked or that “ancient” Sherpa forestry management practices – known as shinggi nawa – are not so ancient and were probably introduced by the Rana regime in the nineteenth century. Anyone who has an urge to understand the maintenance of this crucial resource has no shortage of material to go to. No environment or culture in the world has been picked over like the Khumbu.
It is clear that the nationalisation of the forests after the Rana regime fell had some negative effect on the Khumbu, but that this effect has been exaggerated. It is also clear that the Sherpas themselves started using a lot more wood in the 1960s and 1970s, before large numbers of tourists arrived, because their trading habits which took them away from the Khumbu for as much as five months during the coldest time of the year were disrupted when the Chinese invasion of Tibet closed the border. Ironically, news of the decision to establish a national park prompted many Sherpas to cut trees in large numbers because they feared access would be severely restricted in future years. Their fears were realised when in the early 1980s, soon after the establishment of the park, new regulations that banned all tree-felling, even lopping of branches, were enforced by a Nepalese army unit. There were those in the park’s administration who understood that such draconian measures would alienate local people and the New Zealand advisors who helped in the park’s establishment tried hard to include Sherpas in its management, consulting widely at village meetings and training Khumbu Sherpas in conservation and park management.
Part of the problem has been that the term “national park” means different things to different people. In Nepal, to the Sherpas, it meant parks like Chitwan in the Terai or Rara in the far west of the country where people had been cleared from their homes. People establishing the parks had in mind such models as the Yellowstone in the United States where natural preservation is paramount. This may work in wilderness areas with no or very few local inhabitants but could not possibly in a region as settled and developed as the Khumbu where every scrap of land that can be used has been for the benefit of people. This concept of conservation and development is something more commonly understood in England and Wales since national parks there have had to wrestle with these problems since their inception.
The revolution in 1990 gave fresh impetus to Sherpas who wanted to re-establish their rights to managing land and forestry. The local panchayats were dissolved and two development committees, each covering several villages, were established to replace them. These changes also coincided with the appointment of a new chief warden for the park, Surya Bahadur Pandey, who proved sympathetic to established Sherpa ways of land management. He ov
ersaw a range of changes which in effect created a two-tier system of control which reinstated shinggi nawa at a local level but left final authorisation with the park. The Himalayan Trust has established nurseries in the Khumbu and the Worldwide Fund for Nature has started work on improving those areas like Monjo that have suffered because they are just outside the boundary. These changes have improved the outlook greatly. What has become clear, however, is that nothing can be done for the long term without the co-operation of local people. At the same time, the importance of the environment to their economic future has to be stressed. Trekkers come to the Khumbu because it is beautiful and the income they provide is very sensitive to its maintenance. I was reminded of the continuing tensions between national and local opinion as I handed over the few hundred rupees permit fee to the park official. Where this money goes and what it is used for I still don’t fully understand but I felt sure that it wasn’t all going to the maintenance of the park.
From outside the office there was a burst of shouting and a German in his late forties appeared in the doorway, closely followed by a strutting, moustachioed soldier carrying a sten gun that looked like it was last fired in Burma in 1945.
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