“But the dissident groups who are outside want to make very sure that the development plan fails, because only in the atmosphere of discontent and only in a situation where there is a lot of suffering and unhappiness and disgrundement in the south can they be successful in getting the support of the local people. So their objective and our objective are at opposite poles.”
As if the disruption of a southern rebellion cloaked in a democracy movement weren’t enough to keep a monarch busy, the king of Bhutan also feels pressure from various factions within his own Buddhist community. The new middle class, allowed in the early 1990s to privatize the previously government-run tourism industry, now wants to expand it to make investments—in hotels, restaurants, trekking and camping equipment, and imported vans and cars—pay off more expeditiously. With only a few thousand tourists (not counting Indians, over whom Bhutan has virtually no control) allowed to enter the country every year, profits are not large. Furthermore, dozens of small enterprises jumped into action when government ownership of tourism as well as national bus routes ended and services were sold into private hands. If tourist numbers remain small, there is bound to be a shakeout of unviable businesses, some of them operating more or less from the backseats of battered jeeps. When the consolidation comes, the already rich (who took to tourism with alacrity) will be richer and the poor entrepreneurs will be in another line of work—and resentful.
The infant tourism industry also wants more of Bhutan’s temples and monasteries opened to foreigners. That request provokes sharp counter-reactions from the religious leadership and monastic orders. Monks wield considerable power in Bhutanese society. They not only resist the further intrusion of tourists—saying that temple treasures will disappear and the sanctity of holy places will be irrevocably disturbed—but also quietly defy efforts to modernize monastic life and put thousands of state-supported monks into some form of public service.
“We have always had very close affinity, very close respect and cooperation and deep faith, with the clergy,” the king said. “There has always been total and complete harmony. One of the reasons is because the religious institutions in Bhutan do not interfere in the political aspects of the country, and the king does not interfere with religious affairs. In fact, I have emphasized to the government as well as to the religious community of Bhutan that it is important to give them more and more powers as far as religion is concerned. But even within Buddhism, changes have to take place, whereby the monks can no longer like in the past live in the four corners of the dzongs. They will have to go out and do social work. We would like them to be doctors, be health workers, help the farmers, help the poor people. I think that in this day and age, the Buddhist institutions in Bhutan will have to reach out to the people.”
Where the king and religious leaders seem to be in agreement is in their opposition to the creation of an urbanized plutocracy with only the thinnest of ties to traditional Bhutanese civilization. This, the king says, is why he has turned his attention to satellite dishes, which he has banned twice.
“In Bhutan, we don’t want several classes of people,” the king said, “a small number of people who are affluent, who are rich, who are prosperous, and a majority of our people who are poor and live on subsistence farming. A lot of journalists from outside incorrectly criticized us for not permitting satellite dishes to be installed by the rich and very affluent few. They didn’t bother to say that there were only twenty-nine satellite dishes, and eighty percent of them belonged to members of the royal family or rich business people. I don’t see why any individual should spend seventy or eighty thousand ngultrum [about $2,700–$3,100] to have a satellite dish installed for his or her personal entertainment when the majority of the people do not have safe drinking water, when they don’t have any proper sanitation facilities, when they have to walk days to get to their villages, when they don’t have the opportunity to see even one movie in a year.”
King Jigme Singye Wangchuck and his late father have, at some risk to the monarchy itself, given the Bhutanese one tool that makes the outside world truly accessible: a command of the English language, now the medium of instruction in all the country’s schools. “This is a decision that was made a long time back,” the king said. “If the government and the kings of Bhutan had wanted to keep Bhutan on a feudal basis, we would never have given priority to mass education—and certainly not in English.” The introduction of English as a medium of instruction minimizes clashes over the use of Dzongkha, Nepali, or any other regional language, and also shortens the route to high-quality education and vocational training. Bhutan does not have the resources to waste money sending students abroad on government scholarships if they are unable to work in an international language.
“Bhutan is a very small country and we need all the successes we can get,” the king says. “We cannot afford any failure at all. We want our people to be educated and highly productive. We want them to be professionals in every field they take up. If you are a sweeper, we want you to be a professional sweeper. If he is a mechanic, we want him to be the best mechanic he can be. This is why we have opened over two hundred schools in Bhutan, and one hundred fifty-eight health facilities.”
The policy of aiming high in human development explains how Ugyen Dorji, the village lad from faraway Lhuntsi district, found himself in Bregenz, Austria, apprenticed to a pastry chef a decade ago. He tells the story as we sit over coffee in his Thimphu café, a sideline to the most popular bakery in town. He calls the bakeshop the Jichu Drake in honor of a sacred Bhutanese mountain. In the kitchen, burly men in clunky shoes, flour-splattered ghos, and sheepish looks were furiously stirring batter and dough, chocolate in one vat, white éclair paste in another. The ambience may have been small-town Bhutanese, with babies playing around the pastry counter, but the cream horns and vol-au-vents Ugyen Dorji produces are European in both inspiration and quality. They are served in all the best homes, in government offices, and at all kinds of parties. Business is good. Last time I saw the chef, he tooted as he passed by in a new imported car as I was walking back from a tour of the general hospital. Next time I came to town, he was off in India (or was it Bangkok or Singapore?) buying more kitchen equipment.
Ugyen Dorji began his education in the mountains of eastern Bhutan by trekking for several days to a distant school at the beginning of each term, a sack of rice on his back. The rice was all his widowed mother could afford to give him for the food he would need as a boarder. She had pleaded with local officials not to take her son away to school; they were insistent that he had ability and would benefit from education. From time to time, Ugyen Dorji said, she would take precious time to walk to his school to visit him and replenish his small stock of food. After completing a basic education, he drifted to Thimphu, where he eventually found a job in a government hotel, the Motithang. His knack with food got him noticed. The apprenticeship followed. He spent five years in Bregenz, and he returned a master, this mountain boy. But his mother, still living in a Lhuntsi village, has yet to make the trip to Thimphu to see her successful son at work. And he can’t spare the time very often for days of walking to his hometown.
There are other Ugyen Dorjis now, young men with scrubbed knees and new shoes or what are obviously their first pair of Western trousers, waiting at the Paro airport for a flight into the modern world to become engineers, doctors, business leaders, or maybe sanitation experts. Europeans welcome them as good investments in scholarship aid. They don’t seem to get homesick. They work hard. And when they come home, they make a difference, just as King Jigme Singye Wangchuck expects they always will. He takes a paternalistic pride in every Bhutanese achievement because they were born of royal policy, not public pressure—at least in the past.
“What most people don’t understand is that this development in Bhutan has not been asked for by the people; it was not thrust upon us,” he said of the monarchy. “We have done it because we believe that this will go a long way in educating our people in becoming
more politically conscious, and at the same time to be able to actively participate in the decision-making process in all forms of development programs, both in their districts as well as nationally. If democracy in essence means that the government has to be supported by the people, decision-making has to be shared by the people, then I feel that in essence we have a far more democratic system than practically all the developing countries and some of the developed countries.
“We want to develop as rapidly as possible, but nevertheless what is important to us is that the pace of development and the ability of Bhutanese people to stay abreast of that pace—the gap between our own ability to do development programs and the pace of development that we implement—should not be so wide that it can never be bridged,” he said. “We also at the same time do not believe that more money means more development. We don’t believe that unless the infrastructure is there it is not feasible for any developing country to achieve overnight economic prosperity and bring overnight changes, economically, socially, and politically.”
Though he wants more political participation, he returns repeatedly to his reservations about democracy. “In Bhutan, I myself feel disillusioned both about the democratic system of government as well as monarchy, because both have very serious flaws,” he said. “Like democracy, for instance, only works when you have a perfect society. You have to have a society which is highly literate, politically very conscious, and also enjoy a very high level of economic well-being and prosperity. Then at the same time, when it comes to monarchy, if you have a good king, he can do a lot of good. And if you don’t have a very good king, then he can do a lot of harm. The flaw with monarchy is that too much depends on one individual, and in Bhutan we cannot hope that for all time to come we will have a wise and good king.
“The king does not have a monopoly over what system of government we should have,” he said. Nor, he added, should anyone be making commitments about the future, when new generations may have different ideas. “Whatever changes we bring about in Bhutan, so long as it is in the best interest of the country, the final decision lies with the Bhutanese people. And that is how it should be.”
A few hours after the interview, when night had fallen over Thimphu’s small central square and I was back in the modest Druk Hotel, a car from the palace arrived and two men soon appeared at the door of my room bearing gifts: a thangka in brilliant embroidered silk, a ferocious ritual mask like those used in classical temple dances, and a tiny box made by Bhutanese silversmiths. I decided not to send them back. They live with me still, reminders of a culture on the edge.
“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.”
Chapter 3
BECOMING BUDDHA
ON 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 powerf
ul 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.
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