So Close to Heaven

by Barbara Crossette

  Because of the long years of rule by a family of Tibetan origins and the influence of the Himalayan Buddhist sects that inevitably entrenched themselves in Sikkim, with the Nyingmapa school becoming the state religion, the town of Gangtok and outlying monastic settlements in the hills and mountains are full of historical associations with the Namgyals and their faith. The ghosts of a kingdom hover around the Tsuklakhang, the old royal gompa on a hill above Gangtok, which is mostly closed to outsiders. Royal ceremonies once took place at Tsuklakhang, where the chogyal’s astrologer-advisers lived. Once a year, around September, monks still gather there to perform dances in honor of Kanchenjunga, the god-mountain guardian deity, which rises to a height of more than 28,000 feet along the border with Nepal. This dance to Kanchenjunga, called the pang lhabsol, also commemorates the pledge of a bond between Bhutias and Lepchas, who called themselves Rong-folk, or “valley people.” (That name is a little confusing, because the Lepchas are Buddhists, and, especially in Nepal, the term “rong-folk” or rong-pa would be applied to lowlanders, who are more likely to be Hindus and Nepali-speakers.)

  As in Bhutan now, Himalayan Tantric Buddhism was the state religion and the private faith of the Tibetan-Bhutia people and their kings. Most of the Lepchas who preceded them here were in the course of time converted from pure spirit worship and joined the Buddhist community, while also accepting a Buddhist king. Some Nepali-Sikkimese, members of tribes or clans outside the otherwise dominant Hindu world, are also Buddhist, among them the Rai, Gurung, Limbu, and Tamang people. But as in Nepal, Hindus and Buddhists in Sikkim often did and still do take part in each other’s festivals and join in celebrations that are thought of more as Sikkimese than belonging to any individual community.

  Because visits to Tsuklakhang, the palace (still in the Namgyal family’s possession), and most other sites closely associated with Sikkimese royalty are barred to foreigners by skittish Indian officials, I went instead to Dodrul Chorten and the monastery at Enchey for a glimpse of Sikkimese Buddhism. Dodrul, on the airy crown of a wooded hill near the Institute of Tibetology at Deorali, can be identified miles away by its soaring white central chorten capped in gold with the omnipresent symbols of Buddhism—thirteen parasols representing the Thirteen Stages Toward Enlightenment, fire, a sun cradled in a crescent moon for air and sky, and a small flame or orb signifying ether, an element believed to be found in the upper reaches of space. The ground around the base of the chorten is all but enclosed by walls of prayer wheels. A temple nearby is the base of Sikkim’s highest lama, the Dodrup Chen Rinpoche. When I reached the chorten, at the top of a steep path lined with prayer flags, the scene was alive with dozens of novices clowning around on a cool spring day. Two were launching paper airplanes with gleeful shrieks. A dozen or more raced each other up and down a driveway. Others climbed balustrades and threw stones into the trees, I imagined at birds.

  At Dodrul, the Guru Rinpoche reappeared in all his glory. There are two famous statues of him here. The Sikkimese, to claim a piece of the action surrounding this legendarily hyperactive guru who brought Tantric Buddhism to the Himalayas, believe that the saint buried some of his famous holy treasure for posterity in Sikkim centuries before this was a Buddhist kingdom. The sacred books were then duly discovered hundreds of years later by monks from Tibet who settled in Sikkim and founded its monasteries.

  Because of Sikkim’s small size, geographically and in population, and because there seemed to be no urge to build fortifications, despite invasions from Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan over the centuries, the Sikkimese centers of religion and government are more modest and accessible compared with their counterparts housed in the great dzongs of Bhutan. Rumtek, fourteen miles from Gangtok, is the exception, because it has been the international center of the Kagyupa Karmapa school of Buddhism since 1959, when the Chinese took military control of Tibet. Many thousands of Himalayan Buddhists and well-wishers overseas support Rumtek’s temples. Supporters are also helping to rebuild the former seat of the Karmapas at Tsurphu, near the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, which was sacked in the 1960s by the zealots of China’s Cultural Revolution. The Indian government takes justified pride in helping to upgrade and maintain Sikkimese temples and monasteries. There are several hundred of them, some of which officials in New Delhi say were in advanced disrepair in 1975.

  Enchey monastery, which seems to have been restored recently, is on yet another isolated hilltop a few miles from town. The monks were at prayer, so I sat apart at the temple doorway, among heaps of worn little shoes belonging to the novices who were perched cross-legged and attentive in two rows leading away from the chief monk at his prayer table. Enchey is one of about half a dozen leading monasteries of Sikkim. Its site was chosen by a lama with the power of flight who descended from the sky to build himself a hermitage. The spot is now marked by a three-story, yellow-roofed temple that is something of a cross between a classic winged pagoda and a solid Himalayan gompa. Though its roofs soar, its base is planted solidly and heavily in the earth with that inward slant of its thick walls that Bhutanese architects tell me makes structures resistant to most earthquakes. The temple was built early in the twentieth century, of stone blocks now plastered white. Wide bands of bright red define the tops of the outer walls, a hallmark also of holy buildings in other Himalayan Buddhist lands. The elaborate windows on the ground floor are, to the unrefined eye, stunning works of art. Each window frame, easily six or eight feet tall and perhaps five or six feet wide and extravagantly ornamented in floral and other natural symbols drawn from the Buddhists’ artistic canon, is surrounded by a section of dark stone left unplastered and unpainted in roughly the form of a huge garment with short sleeves above an A-line robe, rather like a kimono hung splayed on a wall. The effect created is that of a traditional, irregularly shaped window, wider at the bottom, even though the three modern glass panels within are perfect rectangles. On the upper floors, windows are trimmed in bright yellow, giving the temple top a glittering golden look.

  Prayers ended, and novices poured over me and my doorstep to race into the corners of the courtyard. The boys whooped as if to welcome recess, shuffling impatiently into their shoes and tussling with each other as they ran. A monk appeared from the dim interior of the temple and offered to show me around. We walked past the monks’ living quarters, more a hostel than cells, to a pavilion filled with offerings and warmly glowing votive lamps. An annual festival is held in the monastic compound at Enchey at the end of the Sikkimese year, usually in December-January. Other monasteries concentrate their festivals around either the Sikkimese New Year, called Loosong, that soon follows, or the Himalayan Buddhist New Year, Losar, a movable holiday that normally falls around February.

  Like most Buddhist communities across the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau, the Sikkimese name their years for animals according to traditional cycles, then prefixed with one of the elements. There are twelve prescribed animals—rat (or mouse), bull (or ox), tiger, hare, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, bird, dog, and hog—and five elements—earth, water, fire, wood, and iron. Each element is good for two years, so that, for example, a Year of the Earth Rat would be followed by the Earth Bull before moving on to the Water Tiger and Water Hare. The combinations are obviously not the same in succeeding cycles, because repeating the names of elements still leaves us two units short of the number of animal names. This makes the calendar business tricky and, as I learned in Bhutan, best left to experts.

  The Rong-folk or Lepchas of Sikkim had calendars of their own. Though like many Himalayan people they combined Buddhism with their nature-based beliefs and the veneration and appeasement of local spirits, these indigenous calendars were based on the observation and interpretation of purely local natural signs. As in rural Bhutan and other places in the mountains of inner Asia, the Lepcha calendars illustrate why the foreigner’s measures of time and season may hold no particular attraction. The invention and use of calendars based on the blossoming of trees, the flight of birds, or the activit
ies of animals also demonstrates how deeply the patterns of life and livelihood are interwoven into the environment and, sadly, how much culture can be lost with the extinction of plants and animals. A. R. Foning, in Lepcha My Vanishing Tribe, recalls how his particular clan worked out what season it was and what tasks that season demanded.

  “Natural objects like the sun, the moon, and the stars, trees and plants, animals, birds and insects, act as our infallible calendars, time-keepers, direction-indicators and guides,” he wrote. “They tell us when to sow our seeds, when to harvest the crops, and what things to look for, and at what times, in forests and rivers. When we see the tuk-po pot boor, the peach blossoming, we know that our Nambum, our New Year’s Day celebration, is approaching and we look forward to it expectantly and start making preparations for it. Similarly, when we find the konkee boor, or cherry blossom, we know it proclaims to us that now, after the so sa, dry season lull, we have to get busy with the work of cultivation. Likewise, the flight of the pathetically wailing kurngok bird overhead, immediately after winter during starry nights, tells us that it is just the time for putting down cucumber, pumpkin and other such seeds. Likewise the advent of the ka-ku, the cuckoo, heralds the sowing time of the dry-land paddy, the dumbra and the ongray zo. We start preparing the field and depositing the seed in holes made with sticks. Some months later, the chyak-dun bird appears, giving a call telling us to ‘now hurry up’ for the harvesting of the paddy. In other words, our very existence is inextricably bound up and interwoven with these things, things that God has given us.”

  These seasons were then broken down into months they called lavo, based on the cycles of the moon (also the method of Tibetan Buddhists), and years, nam, composed of roughly twelve twenty-nine- or thirty-day lavos—with an extra one thrown in about every three years to even things up and not get ahead of the seasons. The Lepchas called the extra lavo a lavo shyoke, a “moon added on.” This does make Nambum, the New Year, mutable, but the celebration is, in any case, not begun until everyone agrees that many other tasks have been successfully performed, including the giving of varied offerings to deities and demons to keep them occupied. While the deities are busy scrambling for goodies, the humans can enter a new year unencumbered by busybody, troublemaking spirits.

  The natural world the Lepchas found here may be the lushest and botanically the most prolific in the Himalayas, similar to the environment of Bhutan. Crossing from West Bengal into Sikkim at Rangpo, the traveler feels that the subcontinent has been left behind and that some kind of rain forest has strayed here from its moorings in the Caribbean or the South China Sea. Flowering bushes and tree ferns droop over the embankments along narrow mountain roads, and groves of bamboo spring from the hollows. Farther north—or at higher altitudes—oak, walnut, and maple trees grow, with large rhododendrons plentiful above nine thousand feet. Birds are still in profusion, although Sikkimese say that their numbers are rapidly dwindling under the pressures of population. Sikkim once had 550 species of birds, some extremely exotic, and nearly 650 kinds of butterflies. More than four thousand species of plants have been identified in the former kingdom, including hundreds of varied types of orchids. I went to see the annual orchid show, held in a small park on a ridge above Gangtok. There seemed to be nobody there, except for the ladies selling tickets at the door and a young woman whose job it was to walk around the exhibits misting the waxy plants, so I wandered alone through skillfully re-created natural gardens with pools and trees festooned with only a sample of Sikkim’s orchid varieties and a wild bird or two. The birds may have come uninvited; it was hard to tell.

  The curse of reading too much history followed me around Gangtok, even to the flower show, which was held on a small exhibition ground called Whitehall, about midway between the palace and the old British Residency, seat of the Indian governor—two camps that fought for the soul of Sikkim. In between, geographically as well as psychologically, lived the dewan, the Indian who played the role of prime minister during the limbo period between the withdrawal of the British and the Indian annexation of Sikkim. This was the period of the scholar-civil servant—like John Lall, who took office in 1949—when dewans lived in a royal bungalow a stone’s throw from the orchid festival. Appointed by India but serving the chogyal, dewans had a disturbing tendency to side with the palace, doing so on enough occasions to make New Delhi rue the system. Worst of all, Indian officials noted in their reports, their dewans had taken to dressing in Sikkimese costume, which for men was an ankle-length Tibetan-style robe.

  There were more than just trace elements of cultural and racial prejudice in India’s relations with the Sikkimese and other Tibeto-Burman people. B. S. Das, who while dismantling Sikkimese independence in 1973–74 bore the title of chief executive of Sikkim, cited his earlier experiences in Bhutan as giving him the psychological wherewithal to deal with the Sikkimese as they tried to cling to their nationality. “Luckily, Bhutan had taught me enough patience to put up with the Mongoloid monologues without much damage,” he wrote. Sikkimese and Bhutanese students have told me how when they go to Indian universities—particularly Delhi University—they have to get used to being called Chinkies, a pejorative for those with East Asian or Southeast Asian features. Himalayan Buddhists and many of the ethnically similar people of India’s own northeast—Hindus, Christians, and Buddhists alike—find their tolerance and openness is often mistaken for licentiousness in India’s pathologically puritan society of arranged marriages and the near-absence of dating or casual sex—though not of sexual assault, which is the scourge of northern Indian campuses. Indian friends of Sikkim who try to understand these cultural differences often come away sympathetic to the mountain people and their ways.

  At Rumtek monastery, I asked an Indian monk in residence what he thought of Sikkim and its tortured relations with India. The monk had come to Rumtek from Bihar, where, he said, despite his religion he would always be viewed as a Hindu outcaste because his ancestors were lowborn. He was what Indians call an Ambedkar Buddhist, a follower of the lowborn but highly educated legal scholar Bhimrao Ambedkar, who presided over the writing of the Indian constitution but who despaired of erasing the inequalities of caste in Hindu India and converted to Buddhism before his death. As the monk and I sat on a stone wall and talked, a procession of elderly Sikkimese women circumambulated the temple compound and its spacious, gleaming buildings in bright red and gold. The monk said he appreciated Sikkimese simplicity and lack of deviousness. He feared the intrusion of Indian-style politics, which he called “the playground of rogues and crooks and thieves.” He thought the Sikkimese may have been a little too relaxed, too transparent, too naive to see intrigue until it was too late. They were, he said, never a match for either the quick-witted Indians or the clever Chinese. He suspected Sikkimese were a little on the ethereal side, unwilling to get involved adequately in the world around them and too willing to accept feudalism, whether in monastic life or in government.

  He saw the state’s present Nepali-led administration playing on this, and dismissed Indian claims of having liberated and reformed Sikkim, making it democratic after centuries of monarchy and domination by a Tibetan Buddhist minority. “This so-called reform was done at the point of a stick, and by paramilitaries,” the monk said, eyeing me with a sidelong glance, as if I seemed to be arguing New Delhi’s case by suggesting positive motives for the annexation. Then he looked away and ruminated. “The Sikkimese may be wacky in many ways,” he said, “but they have one overwhelming saving grace, and that is Buddhism.”

  Chapter 8

  BUDDHIST NEPAL

  LAKPA NURU SHERPA was happy to be back in his two-room house in Chaurikarka, a hamlet deep in a sheltered valley a couple of thousand feet below the village of Lukla, a starting point for treks into the Mount Everest region of Nepal. The Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, nearly the size of Florida, must support a population of almost twenty million people scattered over difficult topography; life is hard for most. Lakpa Nuru, a mountain guide
like many of his fellow Sherpas, was lucky. Fit and healthy in middle age, when many other Nepali men are dead or spent beyond their years, he was able to retire from the trail and come home to tend a small plot of land. He sent his children to school. And then, with what money was left from his years of trekking and climbing, he went off to India, several hundred miles away, to buy books.

  The Sherpas are Buddhists, descendants of migrants from eastern Tibet who settled centuries ago in the Solu-Khumbu region of northeastern Nepal, the region best known to foreign trekkers. Before he died, Lakpa Nuru said, he wanted to own the most precious thing he could think of: a set of Lord Buddha’s teachings, produced in all their authenticity by Tibetan monks in the northern Indian hill town of Dharamsala, the headquarters of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile. Like all traditional Tibetan Buddhist books, these volumes are assemblages of narrow loose-leaf pages inserted between boards, wrapped in colorful cloth and secured by a bright ribbon. The script, read horizontally, is in a classical Tibetan language unknown to Lakpa Nuru. He spent his life savings knowingly on a set of books he will never read. That didn’t matter. “Maybe my children and grandchildren will read them one day, because they are more educated,” he said, as he asked to be photographed with his treasured library. When I told the story later to His Holiness Ngawang Tenzing Zangbo, abbot of Tengboche monastery, in the shadow of Mount Everest, he was not surprised. “Every Sherpa home is a cultural center,” he said. “How much so depends on each family’s means.”

  “The government may call us a Hindu kingdom and His Majesty may be an avatar of Vishnu,” a businessman once told me in Kathmandu, “but if you scratch the surface of Nepal almost anywhere, you’ll see how Buddhist we really are.” Buddhism came to Nepal early, as might be expected, given the religion’s origins in nearby northern India, and was soon adopted by the people called Newars, who are as close to an indigenous population in the Kathmandu Valley as anyone will probably ever find in the darkness of barely explored Nepali history and legend. The Newars were not alone in their faith. All over Nepal there were other Buddhist minorities, particularly along the Tibetan border. All or most of Nepal apparently fell under Tibetan dominance in the seventh and eighth centuries, but with or without conquest, Tibetans and Newaris cross-fertilized each other’s highly developed Buddhist cultures for hundreds of years.