So Close to Heaven

by Barbara Crossette

  Much of this history can be politically inconvenient not only in Nepal, where most of the kings and all the hereditary Rana prime ministers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were Hindus, but also in India, where upper-caste Hindus have dominated politics since independence and Buddhism is more coopted as part of history than honored as a living religion. Not a few Indians argue that Buddhism is no more than an offshoot of Hinduism; Hindu priests have control over some of Buddhism’s holiest places, including the temple at Bodhgaya, where Buddha reached enlightenment.

  Back in Chaurikarka, Lakpa Nuru had invited me to visit his Iheng, or prayer room—in effect, half his house—where he had constructed a traditional bookcase of deep cubbyholes beside the family altar to house his new library. He was wearing a trekker’s abandoned T-shirt that read “Enjoy Victoria B.C.” and a woolen stocking cap that said “Aspire” as he sat down behind a rough reading desk to unwrap a sacred volume. His altar was a wondrous thing, covered in part with aluminum foil and festooned with paper chains, gauzy white khata scarves, a peacock feather, more than a dozen Buddha images, statues of the much-traveled Guru Rinpoche and the goddess Tara, incense burners, butter lamps, and offering bowls. A photograph of the Dalai Lama shared a large picture frame (its glass cracked) with various postcards of people and places important to his faith. Though his small house, built of stone and wood, was roughly finished elsewhere, the prayer room had religious paintings on two walls; these were inherited from his father and grandfather, who had lived in the house before him and employed an itinerant artist to do the work. The room next door, where his family lived, ate, and slept, was a much more spartan place, except for a collection of Chinese ceramic rice bowls and copper plates displayed (along with two Chinese thermos flasks and two glass tumblers) on shelves along one wall. The family cooked on a stove made of stone and fueled by a wood fire. There was no running water.

  Chaurikarka is a small hamlet with a few dozen houses, almost all built of stone, their roofs of loose wooden shingles held down by more rocks. In simple villages like this, Himalayan Buddhism is lived in its most down-to-earth form around countless family altars by people who speak Tibetan dialects, far away from the great lamas of their faith, who disdain their rustic ignorance and superstition. There are compensations, though, in a setting that is both physically magnificent and spiritually alive. In the center of Chaurikarka, a solid chorten sat astride the path leading away in the general direction of Khumbila, the Khumbu Sherpas’ sacred mountain, whose distant presence bestowed blessings on those within its view.

  This path toward the distant holy landmark is also Chaurikarka’s main street, a porters’ highway from the last market town—several days’ walk back down the trail—into vast alpine regions without roads or airstrips. In a patch of open space near the chorten and a cubbyhole general store with very little for sale, about a dozen porters, Tamang people from farther west, plodded into town and paused to rest along a stone wall just high enough to serve as a shelf for the huge woven backpack baskets of consumer goods they were hauling to the storeless interior. The porters backed wearily toward the stone ledge and eased the weight of their burdens onto it without having to unstrap from their shoulders the cargo of blankets, small jute rugs, at least one bolt of cloth, tins of oil, boxes of crackers, sacks of rice, instant noodles, and a few plastic utensils and toys. The loads, most of them extremely heavy, were borne by young men, some still in their teens, and by one or two white-haired porters in faded, shredded clothes, too old to be doing this job but too poor to stop. Tamangs from north-central Nepal, who are also Buddhists, are a cut below Sherpas in the world of mountain people. Sherpas are the guides and mountaineers, talents they have developed to an art in recent decades of climbing Mount Everest—called Chomolungma by the Sherpas and Sagarmatha by other Nepalis—and the Tamangs are the heavy lifters.

  Later, on another trail leading to Namche Bazaar from Lukla, a Tamang porter passed by carrying a thick plate-glass window four or five feet square roped to his back in a wooden frame; he had to turn sideways to let others on the route go by. His face was a portrait of strain as he shouldered this piece of air freight, yet he was barely out of Lukla, with its crazy little grass-and-gravel ski-slope airstrip, and had at least another day to march, most of it uphill. Porters have delivered all kinds of cargo to Namche, including a whole dental clinic, disassembled. They also serve in emergencies as human ambulances, rushing trekkers stricken with altitude sickness to lower levels or ferrying their own lame or elderly up steep and rocky tracks.

  The porters pausing in Chaurikarka had thin, sinewy legs from years of walking. Some didn’t own shoes, but maneuvered along the stony trail in rubber sandals or the remains of flimsy Chinese sneakers. They spoke little as they paused to stretch and relieve the weight they bore, except to exchange a few pleasantries with Sherpa women bent over their short hoes planting potatoes in a small walled field beside the trail. Each porter carried a walking stick with a T-shaped top, which could be used (when there wasn’t a handy wall) to rest the large basket long enough for a breather. They were dressed in tatters, the shoulder seams of their thin cotton shirts lacerated by the straps of their baskets despite the thicker sleeveless vests most of them wore to protect their skin. These men are the human trucks and freight cars of Nepal. They are not the porters who work for trekkers and have the down vests, baseball caps, satin team jackets, and English, Italian, German, French, or Japanese phrases to show for it. These are the long-distance haulers, passing through a landscape hardly changed since ancient times—instant noodles notwithstanding. Chaurikarka is like that: no bicycles or other wheeled vehicles make movement easier (the mountainsides are too steep for bikes or carts), no electricity lights the houses, no cooking gas or kerosene eases the burden of gathering firewood.

  On the climb out of the hamlet toward Lukla on the ridge above, the hiker is struck by the deathly silence of the forest. It is forbidden to cut most trees in Nepal—a desperate measure, patchily enforced, intended to hold back rampant deforestation—so people unwilling or afraid to break the law scavenge for anything else that will burn. The wooded slope I climbed exuded a strange unreality: there were no leaves or twigs on the ground, no small animals or birds to be seen or heard. The trees stood alone, as if constructed for a natural history museum diorama; a stuffed squirrel would not have been out of place. The contrast to the teeming woodlands of Bhutan or Sikkim could not have been more stark. Nepal is one of the world’s most densely populated countries, and even here, in the shadow of holy mountains, life illustrates the statistics. A lack of environmental consciousness has no religious connection when people need fuel to cook their meals or warm their houses. It would have been lunatic to run around Chaurikarka pressing people to explain how Buddhists, protectors of nature, could allow this vacuuming of the woodlands to take place.

  Not too long ago, Lakpa Nuru’s devotion to Buddhism, and moreover his hope that his offspring would follow his example, might have seemed pitiable, given the headlong rush of young Nepalis, including Sherpas, into urbanization and a taste for the material goods foreigners tote casually into Himalayan villages for all to admire. Before the Chinese suppression of a Tibetan uprising closed the Nepali-Tibetan border in 1959, Sherpas had been the Solu-Khumbu region’s commodity traders, bringing salt and wool from Tibet to barter for manufactured goods from Kathmandu and India. Nowadays they run teahouses, trail lodges, trekking and mountaineering services, and shops where trekkers’ castoffs may be sold along with a variety of unexpected imported goods shopkeepers have been quick to realize there is profit in stocking: toilet paper, track suits, canned beer, scented soap, and trail mix. Rustic cafés in Lukla serve French toast and muesli.

  Some Sherpas who don’t succeed turn to job-hunting in Kathmandu (where richer Sherpas are investing in hotels) and run into competition with other Nepali Buddhists from the hills also searching for an income. Over the course of not very many years, Kathmandu has turned from a dozy, slightly
ethereal town left over from a distant century into a warren of exhaust-choked, garbage-strewn streets and byways where thousands of shops tumble over one another, pouring out into the patchily paved lanes the cheap clothes, sweaters, and jewelry (almost none of it Nepali) bought by bargain-hunting backpackers, the descendants of the hippies who once made this town the narcotics nirvana of the Eastern world. More than a million residents scramble for space in hives and warrens above stinking gutter-sewers which foster the spread of epidemic diseases; the warnings were out for cholera and encephalitis on my last visit. Low-budget tourists, charmed by small lodges where a few dollars will still buy room and board, succumb with increasing frequency to gut-wrenching maladies. Japanese tourists and some international aid workers ride or pedal around wearing masks to filter the particle-heavy air. Oddly, a lot of us still love the place, though affection is tested a little more each year.

  The mountain people are a particularly sad sight as they hang around the capital looking for work or for a foreign woman with a hankering to try some exotic Eastern sex. On a winter evening over dinner in a guesthouse in the capital, the French Tibetologist Françoise Pommaret pointed out several of her compatriots who had stayed behind to marry porters or trail guides, only to discover they didn’t quite belong in Nepal. They drift into budget restaurants to drink a good deal and find European company. On their laps they hold the tiny children who have given them a stake in trying to make life work here despite disappointments. At night, during one of the frequent power cuts, they stumble out into the potholed streets or the few treacherous patchwork sidewalks to bump into knots of young men lurking around some of the better-known nightspots—usually small restaurants of indifferent upkeep but reasonably safe and tasty food. All of this teeming world, it should be noted, exists outside the cocoons of the major hotels that shelter the higher-priced crowd. It is possible to spend days in Kathmandu and never have to walk its noisome streets; the sellers of wares and services will come to your gate, and air-conditioned vans do the rest.

  The prosperous Sherpas—more than other Buddhists from the mountainous north who still struggle for a livelihood—are one of the engines pushing a Buddhist revival in Nepal, though Buddhism itself took root here long before the Sherpas were a significant presence. The Kathmandu Valley’s creation myth (or at least the most popular one) tells of a turquoise sea where the capital now stands. Out of the water grew a magnificent phosphorescent lotus recognized as a manifestation of Swayambhu, yet another form of Buddha. The Boddhisattva Manjushri, wishing to reach the flower, which radiated an entrancing light, grabbed his sword and sliced through the valley wall to drain the lake. When the water had receded, he built a stupa on the hill where Swayambhunath’s cluster of shrines now stands, capped by a golden spire with an eye on all four sides of its base to watch over the valley. No one knows exactly how old the first buildings at Swayambhunath are, but an ethnic Gurung Buddhist happily and ecumenically named Krishna Lama assured me as we walked around the main stupa that it had been there at least three thousand years.

  Though the borders of Nepal encompass the birthplace of the historical Buddha, this is a nation where Buddhism and Hinduism—much of the worship of Shiva and his omnipresent phallus, the shivalinga—coexist to an often confusing degree. Bodhnath seems to nurture a rigorously Buddhist milieu, yet Hindus come to worship and leave offerings there as well as at Swayambhunath, where it is not uncommon to find a nearly naked sadhu daubed in vermilion sitting cross-legged in front of a side altar. In the Durbar squares of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur, Buddhist and Hindu shrines and iconography mingle in endlessly fascinating ways and places.

  In a Kathmandu neighborhood where I once stayed for a month, every morning began with Buddhists igniting fires in bowls of incense on their rooftops and the Hindus pausing at a small crossroads shrine to pray, light a candle, or leave an offering. Then Buddhists and Hindus (and their Muslim neighbors) merged and mingled on the dusty lanes on the way to work, school, or the daily shopping. The scholar David Snellgrove, whose Indo-Tibetan Buddhism provides the most exhaustive and lucid early history of this region, thinks that Nepal’s Buddhist-Hindu symbiosis provides the last living example of what religious life in northern India must have been like before aggressive Hindu Brahminism and the Muslim conquests changed the landscape forever. “One realizes,” he wrote, “how much has been lost in India, and how fortunate we are to have a small surviving replica in Nepal.”

  With the arrival of many Tibetan exiles in the 1950s, especially after 1959, Buddhism got a critical if unexpected boost in the valley, where new religious centers sprang up, existing communities expanded, and monasteries proliferated. Tibetans, successful in a variety of businesses, most of all carpet-weaving, give generously to monks and shrines. An articulate and cosmopolitan Tibetan middle class, larger than that of any other Himalayan Buddhist community, has been successful at explaining and promoting Tibetan Buddhism internationally. So apparent was the resurgence by the 1980s that some influential Nepali Hindus sought to curb the growth of Buddhism. In the royal government of King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, the call resonated among those who saw the high profile of Tibetan Buddhists in Nepal as a potential irritant to China. Many Tibetans vow openly to see their homeland liberated from Chinese rule, a thorn if not the hoped-for dagger in Beijing’s side. Consequently, in deference to China, the Dalai Lama has never been able to make an official visit to Nepal, except for Lumbini, and public celebrations of his birthday are banned or severely restricted. For Nepal, good relations with the Chinese are a necessary balance against pressures from India, which is forever seeking a dominant role in Nepali affairs.

  Not long ago, Tibetan refugees in Nepal worried that their welcome was wearing thin. Searching for information on events in Lhasa, where an anti-Chinese movement is always rumbling beneath the surface, exploding now and then in demonstrations, I met new émigrés from Tibet nearly surreptitiously in the late 1980s, so great was the concern of host Tibetans who had established themselves in Nepal and did not want their livelihoods jeopardized. But in 1990, a Nepali democracy movement forced a change in the country’s constitution to reduce the power of the monarchy. New elections brought secular parties into office, and threats to Buddhism seemed to dissipate, just as they did when Nepal first tried democracy in the 1950s.

  The Buddhist renaissance has probably had the least effect on the Newars, despite long years of good relations with the Tibetans, says Purna Harsha Bajracharya, a Newar from a family of Buddhist scholars. Bajracharya was instrumental in beginning the Nepali Archaeology Department’s first excavations of Lord Buddha’s birthplace in Lumbini in the 1960s. His name, vajra-acarya in its Sanskrit form, literally means a Tantric master. I went to see him at his small home above a busy bazaar near the center of Kathmandu. The high-pitched product advertising of the street vendors and loud arguments of barter combined with bicycle bells and the horns of motorized rickshaws were so pervasive that Purna Harsha’s soft voice was hard to hear when I played back my tapes of our first talk that evening.

  But this cacophony was probably appropriate, for the Newars have always been Nepal’s most committed urbanites, thriving at the heart of commerce. For more than a thousand years, they dominated trade routes between India and China from their family bases in the Kathmandu Valley and their trading houses and mercantile associations in Lhasa. Wool, silk, tea, rice, precious corals, works of art, silver, and finally manufactured goods moved along Himalayan trails on pack animals. Along the same routes, Tibetan Buddhists came south to visit the great shrines of Nepal. Newar lamas, including Purna Harsha’s forebears, went to Lhasa to exchange learned opinions. The Newar trade monopoly was not broken until early in the twentieth century when the British encouraged the opening of new routes to Tibet from the northeastern Indian hill town of Kalimpong through Sikkim.

  Purna Harsha’s house backed onto a much quieter zone built around a Newari Buddhist vihara, a small temple-monastery marking the home of an impo
rtant family. This vihara was in a state of decline, its owner having died some years ago “without issue,” in Purna Harsha’s words. He has informally taken over responsibility for the small enclosed square with delicately carved wooden doors and lintels that enclosed the shrine to a god now gone. A tailor has moved in on one side; other families fill the rest of the space, using the pump that Purna Harsha’s family installed over a centuries-old well that still produces good water. In front of the shrine stands a chaitya, the Newar equivalent of a chorten or stupa. Purna Harsha, a man of great dignity and generosity, says that his duties amount to little more than “putting a few flowers there from time to time.” In truth, he seems to take pains to salvage this corner of history, abused as it is by newcomers without an appreciation of its value.

  Many other Newar compounds have suffered amid the general decay of old Kathmandu, where buildings collapse and mounds of fly-covered garbage fill once-sacred pools and pile up at many an intersection, repelling tourists. Newars, with their considerable intellectual and design skills, were responsible for the architecturally remarkable cores of the valley’s three magnificent medieval cities—Bhaktapur, Patan, and Kathmandu—and were sought after across the Himalayas and in Tibet as craftsmen for both Buddhist and Hindu buildings.