Barbara Crossette
SO CLOSE TO HEAVEN
Barbara Crossette, who joined The New York Times in 1973, spent seven years as a correspondent in Asia, and is now UN bureau chief. She was a Fulbright Professor of Journalism in India and has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and at Princeton University. She won the 1991 George Polk Award for foreign reporting. She lives in New York City and Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania.
Books by BARBARA CROSSETTE
India Facing the Twentieth Century
So Close to Heaven
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 1996
Copyright © 1995 by Barbara Crossette
Map copyright © 1995 by George Colbert
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Kingdom of Bhutan Mission to the United Nations: “A Message for My Parents Far Away” by Kuenga Wangmo from Tongsa Junior High School Magazine. Reprinted by permission of Ugyen Tshering, Permanent Representative of the Kingdom of Bhutan to the United Nations. Oxford University Press: Hymn excerpts from Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa, edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz (1928). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Oxford, England.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Crossette, Barbara.
So close to heaven: the vanishing Buddhist kingdoms of the Himalayas / Barbara Crossette.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80190-6
1. Buddhism—Himalaya Mountains Region. 2. Buddhism—Bhutan.
I. Title
BQ400.H542C76 1995
294.3’095496—dc20 94—38193 CIP
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com
Author photograph © Marianna Cook
v3.1
TO ALL HIMALAYAN BUDDHISTS WHO
FEAR THE EXTINCTION OF THEIR CULTURE MORE THAN DEATH
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Map
One And Then There Was One
Two The Druk Gyalpo
Three Becoming Buddha
Four Before Tibet, There Was Bon
Five The Road from Lumbini
Six Ladakh: Eclipsed by Other Gods
Seven Sikkim: “No One Heard Us Cry”
Eight Buddhist Nepal
Nine Buddha and the Bhutanese State
Ten The Dragon People
Eleven All Sentient Beings
Twelve Aum Rinzi’s World
Thirteen Two Capitals, Two Eras
Fourteen To Tashigang
Fifteen One Sunday in Bumthang
An Afterthought
A Glossary of Common Words
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
PREFACE
IN THE MONASTERY courtyard, a red-robed monk was dancing. His movements were studied, trancelike. He dipped and turned, balancing on one foot and then on the other. His open arms moved in slow motion as his hands traced studied patterns in the air. He was barefoot; it was winter. He seemed oblivious to everything the senses might register except perhaps for the rhythmic skishhhh, skishhhh, skishhhh of the small cymbals played by a fellow monk a few yards away under the cloistered porch. Oblique rays of a golden afternoon sun threw a celestial spotlight into the corner where these holy men toiled at perfecting their performance of a classical Bhutanese Buddhist temple dance. They were preparing for the Tshechu, the most important festival of the year for a Bhutanese monastery and for all who live or roam within striking distance of its walls. I stopped for a few minutes, unnoticed, to watch from a window above them, across the small courtyard enclosed by galleries where novices chanted, judges pored over codes of royal and religious law, and robed administrators of sword-bearing rank held court in the name of king and country. Centuries blurred.
Nothing in the tableau at Tashigang Dzong, a monastery-fortress near the eastern edge of Bhutan, would have been out of place in ancient times, when an esoteric form of Buddhism took root and grew into a family of Buddhist realms scattered across the Himalayas and into Central Asia. Bhutan, until very recently one of the world’s least accessible nations, is also the last of these independent Buddhist kingdoms. Thus this Tashigang monk and his ethereal dance were especially absorbing, because he was not merely a performer in a temple ritual but also an unself-conscious practitioner of an ancient Buddhist art that is part of a culture under intense pressures from within and without. Himalayan Buddhism as a civilization (more than a religion) is endangered where its roots are deepest, in its native mountains and stark plateaus, where heaven seems so near.
The story of how Buddhism in its most arcane Tantric form came to entrench itself across a landscape of frozen peaks, high windy flatlands, and deep verdant valleys may vary from one local mythology to another. But what has become of this shared mystical universe is no mystery; the evidence is laid out in modern Asian political history. One by one, all the Himalayan Buddhist kingdoms except Bhutan have been gobbled up by bigger powers, just as earlier Buddhist civilizations from Afghanistan to Mongolia were overrun or undermined. The most recent kingdom to disappear was Sikkim, in 1975. Tibet, the Himalayan Tantrics’ spiritual and literary heartland, fell under the heel of the Chinese army in the 1950s; during the Cultural Revolution the monasteries, focal points of Himalayan Buddhism and repositories of its books and records, were sacked. Since then, the Han Chinese have concentrated on changing Tibet’s ethnic composition and coopting its religious leadership.
The Tantric schools—what most Westerners call Tibetan Buddhism—can be considered collectively as the third and most vigorous form of a religion that began more than 2,500 years ago in northern India. The Hinayana, or Theravada, school was the earliest; it is now the dominant form of Buddhism in Southeast Asia, Burma, and Sri Lanka. The Mahayana school followed; it would take root in China, Vietnam, and East Asia. Tantrayana, replete with secret and often sexual rites, emerged from the Mahayana school and was embraced across mountainous inner Asia from the Hindu Kush to the Himalayas. With an intensity and drama that were a match for its environment, Tantric Buddhism offered adherents a shortcut to Nirvana.
“The Hinayana should be taken as knowledge. The Mahayana should be taken as attitude. Tantra means practice. Tantrayana is the quickest way to become Buddha—like a rocket going to the moon,” said Dasho Rigzin Dorji, who as head of a unique Bhutanese civic treasure, the Special Commission on Cultural Affairs, was the man in charge of safe-guarding the Bhutanese way of life in the face of encroachments from the outside world and tendencies toward cultural carelessness at home.
Tantric Buddhism, sharing physical and psychic space with a pantheon of local deities and countless temperamental spirits, rose to its highest philosophical and artistic levels on the trans-Himalayan Tibetan plateau, where it had settled firmly by the eighth century, building on or supplanting earlier Buddhist teachings from both China and the Indian subcontinent. Over the years, the great monasteries of Tibet, set in the geographical watershed from which flow some of Asia’s mightiest rivers—the Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween, and Mekong—became fonts of Buddhist scholarship. The teachings and miracles of great lamas were known
and studied in Ladakh, Mustang, Sikkim, Bhutan, and smaller pockets throughout the region where Tibetan monks also traveled. Worldwide, the central relationship of the teacher-lama and his student-adept came to define the Tibetan-Tantric Buddhist tradition.
The Tibetan plateau was once truly a place close to heaven. Legend says that until a careless king cut down a miraculous rope, there was a stairway to the immortals somewhere on this moonscape terrain. In Tibet and all along the Himalayas, the mountains whose name means “abode of the gods,” there are peaks still regarded as sacred, Kailash, Khumbila, Sagarmatha, Kanchenjunga, and Jhomolhari among them. In their shadows, spirituality survives, even in poverty and dislocation.
The Himalayan and Central Asian Buddhist universe was probably better known to ancient travelers and chroniclers than its history or its surviving cultures are to us today. These lands were part of an inner Asian world of no special interest to maritime powers during the age of European exploration, from which we drew much of our early knowledge of the East as schoolchildren, Marco Polo notwithstanding. Yet long before the explorers of our Western history books embarked boldly or even foolishly on their long ocean voyages to India, China, and the South Seas to build commercial empires or find “new” lands, vibrant sophisticated societies were thriving in inner Asia’s vast expanses, far away from the sea lanes. From the edge of ancient Persia and the Turkic world to the portals of China, from the Pamirs to the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas, Central Asia was for centuries before the Prophet Mohammed’s birth, and for some time after, a world influenced by Buddhism. For a few hundred years, in the seventh and eighth centuries, a Tibetan empire strong enough to box in the Tang dynasty of China on its western flank flourished in the landlocked heart of Asia. Tibetan armies advanced and retreated from bases on the Tibetan plateau; Himalayan monks and soldiers traded influences with Buddhists of other schools, reinforcing a cosmopolitan culture.
From the vantage point of our era, Tibet may appear to be a sad civilization long stripped of the glories it enjoyed and the power it wielded more than a thousand years ago. Tens of thousands of its most devout people are scattered in a diaspora, and its god-king Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, struggles in exile to keep alive the Tibetan spirit, knowing he has scant material hope to offer younger hotbloods who want guerrilla war. We who encounter Tibet at the end of the twentieth century thus marvel at even what little we can discover of its glorious medieval history. In general, the lands where Himalayan Buddhism survived longest, in and around Tibet, are territories where much historical material is still undiscovered or inaccessible, and there has been very little modern archaeological and archival research. When extant, ancient documents are often laced with myth and magic. We are asked to believe marvelous, fantastic stories because the people whose history these tales tell believe them, and that makes them real enough. A traveler through Himalayan Buddhism often must put aside rational argument while traversing lands where spirits and the reincarnates of real and mythological heroes have never stopped sharing the topography with human life, with both comic and tragic results. In these thrilling histories, lamas fly or conjure up hailstorms and saints may have half a dozen or more manifestations, beneficent or belligerent, depending on the need of the moment. What unadulterated pleasure the unscholarly can take here in the knowledge that even academic experts cannot always agree on what constitutes historical fact, much less interpretation. So why not believe that certain monks could levitate a foot above the ground while circumambulating a stupa?
The flow of life and commerce that linked the Himalayan world to Central Asia was disrupted by Islam’s relentless march and by the imperial urges of Britain, China, Russia, and, for the brief moment history assigned it, the Soviet Union. For long years, pilgrimage and trade routes withered, monasteries were destroyed or abandoned. However, the future of inner Asia is suddenly full of possibility again. Artificial borders and barriers established by great powers are crumbling, new nations have emerged from the collapse of the Soviet system, and at least some of inner Asia’s severed cultural and economic arteries may be rejoined, if ethnic peace prevails. Whether there is a future for Buddhism there is another matter.
If Himalayan Buddhism, reduced to one surviving independent monarchy, seems threatened by demographic and other pressures at home, it is not without hope worldwide. Interest in Tibetan Buddhism is growing in Europe, North America, and Asian nations farther to the east: in Thailand, among ethnic Chinese Malaysians, in Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. This attention is beginning to translate into support, psychological as well as financial, for a renewal of Buddhist studies in the Himalayas, especially in Nepal, a Hindu kingdom with a Buddhist heart. In unexpected places, monasteries and individual lamas are receiving generous (some monks would say corrupting) gifts from people continents away who have dipped into meditation, holistic medicine, or a monastic life and found something satisfying, something of value. This may not make all newcomers Buddhists, but it makes most of them sympathetic friends at a time when Himalayan Buddhism needs friends if it is to survive in the environment that gave it life.
This book is an excursion across one swath of the Himalayan Tantric Buddhist universe, the kingdoms strung along the southern exposure of Tibet. These small realms—in particular Ladakh, Sikkim, and Bhutan—were shaped and strengthened by Buddhism even as the religion was being swept from much of West, South, and Central Asia. In Ladakh and Sikkim, no longer independent states, degrees of melancholy infuse conversations about lost monarchies. And while Bhutan alone has avoided political assimilation into largely Hindu India, the Bhutanese are learning how perplexing, dangerous, and, most of all, lonely it is on the barricades. Yet virtually everywhere the tolerance, equanimity, good humor, and generosity of Himalayan Buddhist culture shine through. Though there may be outbursts of violence and splashes of greed among the believers, this is still one of the world’s most appealing civilizations.
“Here there is an openness,” an exiled Tibetan master, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, told me in Kathmandu between incoming calls on his cordless phone. “So while this is a very difficult philosophy, there is also common sense in it—and science, too. You could also say we understand the common needs. That means we all need love, we all need care. Buddha dharma teaches us a lot: how to respect each other, how to care.”
Chapter 1
AND THEN THERE WAS ONE
I AM HAUNTED by a particular front page of Kuensel, Bhutan’s only newspaper. Kuensel is a weekly publication, and the date of this issue is April 10, 1993. The page is dominated by a large photograph of five young men in disheveled versions of the robelike garment, the gho, that Bhutanese men have worn for centuries. The shifty-eyed youth on the far right, on the edge of what is obviously an identity parade arranged by the police, looks uneasy and seems to be leaning out of this grisly group portrait. The one on the left appears slightly deformed or otherwise handicapped and has a hunted look. The three in the middle are fresh-faced, clean-cut lads who stare straight ahead, with little expression. In Bhutan, the last independent Himalayan Buddhist kingdom, a mountain paradise that only yesterday seemed untarnished by brutality or greed, the crime that this band of rural ruffians stands accused of is beyond atrocity: slitting the throat of an elderly monk (who had just given them food and a place to sleep) and smashing with a hammer and ax the heads of his two novices, in the hope of making off with a few treasures from the holy man’s temple.
But that isn’t all of the story. The gang failed to accomplish their goal of snatching the relics from Chimme Lhakhang, an isolated shrine, because they were interrupted by the screams of a village woman somewhere down the hill, and they fled. She was shouting, “Someone is being killed!” Unknown to the murderers in the temple, however, she wasn’t exposing them. She was alerting her neighbors to her own situation. In a land where the avoidance of violence is a cultural assumption and women are strong, her husband was beating her to death.
The imagery is jarring. Isn
’t this supposed to be a Buddhist kingdom dedicated to the ideals of a nonviolent religion that sometimes seems more like an ethical system than a creed? Didn’t I come here to see Buddhism as it is lived from day to day in a country that is the last of its line? Everywhere else in the Himalayan Buddhist world, people talked about how things used to be. Go to Bhutan, they said, where the universe is intact.
For decades, many Westerners repelled by materialism and a surfeit of industrial development have sought solace and reassurance in the Buddhist and Hindu East. In recent years, especially in India and Nepal, such sojourns have involved a certain measure of denial. Like writers looking for only those facts or quotes that will back a preconceived conclusion, spiritual tourists and other romantics who roam the Indian subcontinent and the Himalayas often bypass the worldly horrors around them: too many people, too little food, scant respect for nature, and a dearth of humane national policies to match professed beliefs and moral postures. To experience close-up the Eastern transcendence they extol from afar, outsiders must not look too closely at the commercialization of spirituality either—at the temple touts, the gold-plated gurus, the factory-wrapped loaves of sliced white bread left as offerings to the gods.
Denial, however, has never been demanded of visitors to Bhutan. In the increasingly choked and often turbulent regions of inner Asia, Bhutan—the nation known to its Buddhist majority as Druk Yul, the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon—stood alone as a nation unsullied. It was a place where, despite a punishing terrain, life was (and mostly still is) lived at a different pace and with attractive values, among them a strong sense of individual self-reliance within supportive communities, an openness of spirit, and a large measure of self-respect that makes people look foreigners in the eye as equals. Bhutanese live in sturdy houses of mud walls and wooden half-timbering below gently pitched roofs finished with rough shingles held down by rocks. Woodwork and sometimes outer walls are decorated by village craftsmen in gently muted colors with designs drawn from Buddhist iconography and folklore. There are towns—I think of Mongar, Tongsa, or Tashigang—where clusters of painted, ornamented buildings could have materialized from illustrations in old fairy tales.
So Close to Heaven Page 1