The Bhutanese, not alone among Asians, love numbered categories. Among my favorites are Buddhism’s “five nonretentions” and the “eight conditions of nonleisure.” These are described by Khetsun Sangpo Rinbochay in his Tantric Practice in Nying-ma (translated by the Buddhist scholar Jeffrey Hopkins). As I tried to grasp even the outlines of Himalayan Buddhism, I identified immediately with the nonretentions: retaining the words but not the meaning, retaining the meaning but not the words, retaining the meaning without identifying it, retaining the meaning but confusing the order, and retaining the wrong meaning. As for the eight conditions of nonleisure—birth as a hell-being, as a hungry ghost, as an animal, as a god of long life, in an uncultured area, as a person possessed of erroneous views, in a land where Buddha has not been, or as a stupid person—I found not just a couple that fit.
But despite the twos (or fours or fives) of this and the eights of that, there is a certain marvelous flexibility to the Bhutanese mind when it comes to the quantification of phenomena—brass bowls, kilometers, or whatever—and to the application of universally accepted ordinal or chronological concepts. The calendar is an example. At the start of a public ceremony in eastern Bhutan, the presiding official began with a statement of that day’s date, according to Bhutanese reckoning. It was a wonderful poetic recitation that went something like “On this twenty-sixth day of the ninth month of the year of the Water Monkey …” Because I didn’t have a pencil and paper and the ceremony was long, the exact wording was gone from my head by the end of the event, but I wanted to make a note of it. That was on a Thursday. Only three days later, on Sunday, I remembered to ask a local administrator to recall Thursday’s date for me. He said he didn’t know. I replied that I would settle for today’s date on the Bhutanese calendar, and would work back to the one I had missed. He said that wasn’t so easy. “Sometimes we add extra days if they are auspicious, or drop one if it isn’t,” he said. “These things are never the same.” Fascinated, I asked other people in the small town where I was staying about the Bhutanese calendar. The question drew a lot of blank stares. Many people did not appear to know how to reckon months and days—although I have seen the Bhutanese calendar displayed in schools—or simply did not feel it was necessary to focus on what particular day it was, unless it was a festival date or other important event. Yet somehow it all comes together again early each year on Losar, the Himalayan Buddhist New Year, after which everyone is left to drift off again into his or her own time zone.
At the Memorial Chorten, Sangay Wangchuck and I were studying the sugary torma, which he said were of two kinds. The bigger elaborate ones, great sunbursts of overlapping colored petals radiating from a central circle, similar to some of those on display at the National Museum, were the work of monks, who had created them as acts of faith to be semipermanent altar ornaments. Nowhere in the Himalayas had I seen such exquisite constructions as those on the altars of Bhutan. These are both larger than average and far more elaborately and artistically formed than others. Smaller torma, some looking like crudely formed cookies, were offered by lay Bhutanese worshippers, who also brought modest gifts to leave under a nearby portrait of the late king. That day, the centerpiece among these gifts was a yellow plastic bucket with a few plastic flowers.
“The small torma is like a symbolic food offering,” Sangay Wangchuck was saying. “They make these traditional shapes themselves and bring. Or sweets they bring. Here is a dry flower, a special flower. It is traditional, but we can use any flower here.” Whatever else the faithful bring, water is still the most popular and sensible form of offering, given with the purest of intentions, he said. In Buddhist thinking (as in Christian parables and stories), the ideal attitude is that the simplest gift can have the most value. “So usually, we did water offering only,” Sangay Wangchuck said. “Easy. You don’t have any greed with that. Right? Water is everywhere available, so you can offer it without greediness—materialism. Some offerings may be more valuable. So maybe sometimes you think, well, this is too valuable, you cannot give that. Maybe you spend a lot of money, so there will be attachment there. But water doesn’t have any attachment, because you can offer as much as you can. So therefore maybe it is simple, but is accumulating a lot of merit, free of attachment. Anybody can do it. Anybody can offer it.”
Getting a handle on the three-dimensional mandala in front of us—one of the chorten’s three levels of monumental constructions of carved and painted images climbing toward a pinnacle crowned by a deity—was a lot more difficult than understanding the purity of spirit required for making a meaningful offering. Sangay Wangchuck, a tall, easygoing, but erudite man with a cosmopolitan frame of mind after stints as a monk in Sri Lanka and as an adviser to a Tibetan Buddhist temple in Woodstock, New York, spoke English in his own way but certainly meant to speak clearly. Yet here was what he considered a simple explanation of what we were looking at on the chorten’s ground floor: “So this is the mandala of the Dorji Phurba. Its main feature, we call in Sanskrit Vajrakila. Vajra means thunderbolt, or indestructible symbol, and the kila means ‘nail’ something, symbolizing ’subdue all the negativities.’ The Vajrakila has many retinues, mainly four. Each one has the other retinues. So they will be called the mandala. ‘Mandala’ means an assembly of that particular deity. Especially you find in the Buddhism they use ‘mandala’ for two things: one a symbol of that particular deity, one an offering. That mandala offering is a universal offering, offering to the object all the universe, that is mandala offering. If you say ‘mandala,’ that is an assembly of that particular deity. But then you can see the diagram, flat that is, that is actually their palace, or something like that.”
After a few hours in Sangay Wangchuck’s company, if much remained murky because of my ignorance, what actually became reasonably clear to me, never a student of Buddhism, was that many of the terms we understand to represent only one object or aspect of a multifaceted religion like this may have many meanings and usages. I had raised the definition of the term “mandala” with him because in my mind the word had always meant a two-dimensional mystical graphic of circles and squares—whether schematic “paintings” in colored sand or the floor plan of the stupendous Javanese temple at Borobudur. Here in Thimphu I faced a larger-than-life jumbled pyramid of earth beings (some with animal faces) and demigods scrambling or struggling or getting tramped underfoot (“pressing out the negatives,” Sangay Wangchuck volunteered) as they groped upward toward the commanding visage of their deity in the upper reaches of their world. At the top, the deity was locked in sexual embrace with his consort, an erotic pose that Himalayan Buddhists are taught is the interaction of compassion and wisdom, or means and wisdom, with wisdom represented by the female form. Some of the powerful faces on the way up the mandala were terrifying. Sangay Wangchuck explained that this was because the more intractable negatives didn’t respond to a placid Buddha, and so there had to be “semiwrathful or very wrathful emanations.”
Those who are tempted to dabble in Tibetan Buddhism are repeatedly reminded that such a quest is not a part-time occupation satisfied by occasional bouts of concentration. Among Tantric communities, the monks and scholars of the faith kindly but firmly deflected all but the most basic of questions about a very complex and often secretive religion with sexual rituals and intimations of the supernatural they could not or would not describe in detail. I acquiesced willingly because I was not seeking instruction or enlightenment, though it was frustrating to know that there would be much I would never comprehend. “You have to go through the practice,” a Bhutanese monk told me. “Then you will understand.” I came to learn that even in quests for what seemed like basic information, it was necessary to be patient and let knowledge come in its own time.
But on the ground in Bhutan, as elsewhere in these mountain realms, Himalayan Buddhism seems a much less esoteric way of life than its sophisticated theology would suggest. Early in the morning in Thimphu, I would sometimes go to the Memorial Chorten to watch the faithful
at prayer from the distance of a park bench. It was a scene repeated with variations at temples as diverse as the high-tech (by Tibetan standards), Western-financed Rumtek monastery in Sikkim or at numerous small shrines in offtrack Buddhist enclaves in Nepal. In Thimphu, old women and men, well-dressed young professionals—probably civil servants or the vanguard of the new business class—and schoolchildren in uniform all turned up at the chorten before the workday began to spin the prayer wheels near the gate and take in a few circumambulations, clockwise walks around the shrine, while chanting mantras with the help of prayer beads and now and then pausing before images placed in niches on the four outer walls.
One morning, about two dozen people, alone or in small groups, were walking around the base of the chorten. There were old men and women in worn clothing and young executives in smartly tailored ghos in understated stripes or plaids, worn with silken knee socks, the best Western-style leather loafers or shoes, and sometimes stylish briefcases, which they put down on the grass to free both hands for worship. Most carried prayer beads. One elderly gentleman with a gigantic goiter and decrepit basketball shoes shuffled along alone, chanting, “Om mani padme hum”—“Hail to the jewel in the lotus”—the mantra of the mountains. The air was cool. Most people seemed to stop to pray before one niche bathed by warm sun. Each clasped two hands above the head, then before the face and again at chest level, all the movements in quick succession. This signifies mind-speech-body. Some then dropped to the ground and prostrated themselves. Others resumed walking.
The circumambulation routine seems to combine a morning constitutional with an act of devotion. People are ready then to face the day physically and spiritually refreshed. After an hour, as people came and went, several monks joined the procession, one leading a stately and very old woman in Tibetan dress. All gave the large prayer wheels near the gate the obligatory spin that rings a bell. At one point there was a constant clang of bells even when no one was entering the courtyard; an urchin had wandered in from the street and was spinning the prayer wheels for fun. He seemed to be Nepali or Indian, not Bhutanese, but no one chased him away. Another little boy arrived, ragged and piggybacking a baby. He stood and watched as luckier boys headed for school burst into the courtyard in a noisy pack, chewing bubble gum, to follow the daybreak ritual with about as much reverence as British schoolboys attacking compulsory morning prayers. The children’s school uniforms, boys’ and girls’, had been tailored into small versions of the national costume.
A young couple came to share breakfast on the grass. Their clothes said they were not Bhutanese, but possibly Indian or Nepali laborers from one of the construction projects; these laborers live in hovels on the edge of town. She carried a tiffin box and a thermos, and served him rice, lentils, and tea, waiting until he finished before she ate. They did not circumambulate or pray. No doubt they were Hindus. Hindus find peace here, too.
There is a good deal of unseen ritual attached to the ubiquitous prayer beads carried around the chorten and everywhere else a pious Buddhist goes, said the Rinpoche Mynar Trilku, a Tibetan scholar who is also curator of Bhutan’s National Museum. The beads are part of a good Buddhist’s basic kit, along with a prayer book and an amulet containing a holy relic or religious writing. “Normally in olden days when you traveled, you had an amulet,” he said. “Lamas have a bigger one, laymen a smaller one. Then maybe if the layman is a religious person who reads, he has his prayer book and his rosary. Other laymen, they have just the rosary. When you’re traveling and you sleep, you keep it normally above your head. You hang the rosary, prayer book, and amulet on the head of the bed.” To be effective, however, the amulet and beads must first be ritually prepared, the rinpoche said.
“Normally when a rosary you take, first you go to the lama to get the authorization, because in Buddhism the most important is you know how to read a mantra,” he explained. “Unless you have authorization from a lama, the effect is nil, or not much. So normally, they go to the lama to get the authorization for a particular mantra. It may be just syllables. Then once the authorization is done, they give the rosary to the lama to bless. So the lama takes the rosary, he may chant a few mantras on the rosary, and then he gives it back. And then they do their mantras on it.” A string of prayer beads may be custom-made to coincide in number with the syllables of an assigned mantra, though this is done less and less nowadays, the rinpoche said.
“Normally now the rosary has one hundred eleven or maybe one hundred eight beads. If somebody’s really religious, then they have got other beads, ten each, which are side-hangings to keep count.” The idea is to recite a mantra in multiples of one hundred; the extra eleven (or eight) beads on the main string are there for insurance. “We believe that when you do a mantra, you may make a mistake by finger or by mouth,” the rinpoche said. “So we give ten percent extra beads. The one hundred eleven or one hundred eight is counted as one hundred.” Each round of recitations can then be ticked off, abacus-fashion, by pushing aside one of the optional counting beads, if you have them. “Once you go around once, then you take out one on the side; that means you’ve done a hundred—though you’ve really done one hundred eleven,” the rinpoche said. Is this extra-bead insurance policy universal? When I got home I dug out a string of Burmese prayer beads from a pagoda in Mandalay. There were 109. Maybe the Burmese are slightly more attentive, but still not perfect.
When the worshipper has recited one hundred mantras ten times and used all appended scorekeeping beads, there may be additional counters in the shape of sacred symbols to move to next, each signifying a thousand prayer cycles. The repetition of acts of devotion is important to the Bhutanese. In several temples I was shown hollows in the polished floors where certain monks or abbots were reputed to have prostrated themselves so many times that they carved imprints of their feet on the wooden planks as they dug in their toes to raise and lower themselves again and again and again. Contemporary worshippers often choose to pray on those same spots, burnishing a continuity of grace and merit.
The obsession with repeated ritual worries some Bhutanese purists, among them Rigzin Dorji, the national culture czar who was in charge of safeguarding tradition as Bhutan was opening to the world. A sophisticated layman hip to the jargon of the international lending organizations that conservative Bhutan holds at arm’s length, Rigzin Dorji said he looked at ritual as the spiritual equivalent of “sustainable development”—enough grace to keep one afloat in this life and maybe to bank a little merit for the next. “Buddha said, Don’t accept me blindly,” Rigzin Dorji said. “He said, Test my teachings as you test for gold. Test the validity of my truth. Teaching should suit the changing times. Analyze my teachings, the Buddha said. But not everybody can analyze. Simple people can’t. So they do simple rituals. Ritual is just to make yourself okay. It has nothing to do with the salvation. For salvation, you have to perfect yourself, become yourself Buddha, because salvation lies in your own hand. Salvation doesn’t lie in the hands of the gods or deities. So therefore, they can just help you in removing temporary badness. Your problems are connected with past karma, and nobody else can help that.”
Bhutanese Buddhists take every opportunity to demonstrate their faith, especially on holy days, when circumambulators crowd the ground around sacred shrines and some other, unexpected places. Because Thimphu’s National Library has so many holy books, people come there to walk around the building, chanting mantras, as they also do at the National Museum. Indeed, the aura of sanctity around the National Library complicated a recent silverfish crisis, I was told by the deputy librarian, Gyonpo Tshering. We were looking out a window of the magnificent library building toward an incongruous squat log cabin that had sprung up just outside. It was the home of a newfangled fumigation machine.
Like silverfish anywhere, those in Bhutan love books—not for their tough, handmade Bhutanese paper, but for their tasty ink, made of natural products such as charcoal dust, plant extracts, and animal blood. The volumes in Bhutan’s Nationa
l Library are not ordinary library books. They are a rare collection of priceless little bundles of calligraphy, some of them hundreds of years old; each unbound “volume” consists of pages collected between carved boards, wrapped in silk, and tied with a silken ribbon. The classification system consists of tiny satin flaps in colors coded, more or less, to match subjects. The books, most of them devoted to the Buddhist canon—there are also some Western-style books on an upper floor—sit on open wooden shelves in dark, silent rooms that exude the atmosphere of a temple. In fact, an imposing altar with images of Bhutan’s most sacred legendary-historical figures—the Guru Rinpoche, Pema Lingpa, and the Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal—dominates the second-floor stacks.
Perhaps because a Japanese scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, Yoshiro Imaeda, had served as an adviser to the National Library for a number of years, or perhaps because the Japanese have lately taken a passionate interest in preserving the wellsprings of all things Buddhist in the Himalayas and South Asia, Japan offered to help remove the thousands of silverfish that had begun to romp cheekily through the priceless collection of books, boring holes in volume after volume. The answer, said the experts, was a fumigator, a wonderful machine into which the books would go, to emerge insect-free. They could then be placed in custom-made metal boxes and returned to sandalwood shelves, not so beautifully displayed but certainly better protected from the ravages of one of God’s least explicable creatures.
Gyonpo Tshering said that he had been assured that the fumigator could be tucked into the basement of the library. Anywhere else would have been offensive to the gods and spirits, not least of all because the fumigator had no other function but to destroy many small sentient beings. “Fumigation is some kind of poison, and we don’t want to disturb the spirits with it,” Gyonpo Tshering said. Apparently the librarians had come to terms with the need to take the lives of insects—or did the machine just chase them away?—in the interests of saving irreplaceable books. When the mechanical savior arrived, however, it was too big for the cellar door. Admitting it through an upper floor was simply unthinkable. So it got its own temporary little house on the ground between the main library building and its administration wing, while librarians went looking for money to build it a permanent residence.
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