So Close to Heaven

by Barbara Crossette

  Newars believe that one of their own, the young Princess Bhrikuti, carried a civilized form of Buddhism with her to Tibet when she became one of two wives of the Tibetan king-emperor Songsten Gampo in the seventh century. Indeed, Newars say that she took with her to Lhasa a statue of the Lord Buddha so valuable and exceptional in its execution that the famous Jokhang temple was built (by Newar craftsmen) to house it. Purna Harsha says that Newari women have always taken important parts in religious ceremonies and family affairs. They were traditionally free to move around the town and sometimes took lessons from monks—at least until the Rana period, when they became the targets of licentious officials whose militant Hindu upbringing conveyed little understanding of the Buddhist social order. A kind of self-imposed purdah set in, and is only now being broken down.

  That the Newars’ Tibeto-Burman language became Sanskritized, and that the Newars were apparently forced beginning in the fourteenth century under the Malla dynasty to adopt a Hindu caste system completely alien to Buddhist teaching, did not diminish their firm commitment to Buddhism, even after the Gorkhas, Hindus of Indian origin from the Terai, took over the Nepali monarchy in the eighteenth century. Purna Harsha Bajracharya argues that the caste system was forced on Newars out of necessity by the Malla kings, some of them Buddhists or sympathetic to Buddhism, who feared Newari solidarity. “When the rulers found everyone united among us, they were angry. The caste system became useful to divide us.” It was enforced more rigorously after the end of Malla rule by Gorkha rulers, who also imposed caste on the Tibetan-speaking people of the north and assigned most of them a low status.

  Purna Harsha says again and again that the Newars never had a quarrel with Hinduism, which some of them adopted. The problems were political. He adds that in any case the term “Hindu” is too broad to apply to most Nepalis, who concentrate their devotion on one god in the Hindu pantheon, Shiva, and should rightly be called Shivaites. “In the histories of Nepal you won’t even find the word ‘Hinduism,’ ” he said. “Buddhism and Shivaism grew side by side here. Both hold each other in great respect. We speak of the Shiva-dharma and the Buddha-dhartna.”

  Purna Harsha Bajracharya, now retired, talked about how the persecution of Newar Buddhists during the century dominated by the Rana dynasty of hereditary prime ministers had inevitably led to a lack of self-assertion and a paucity of research into their own history and culture. He tells of scholars unable to publish or forced into exile because they did. Newar Buddhist culture can never really be obscured, however, because of the extraordinary public architecture and religious institutions it contributed to Nepali life. The child goddess Kumari, whose temple in Kathmandu’s Durbar Square draws sightseers hoping to catch a glimpse of the living deity, is a Newari ingredient in the Nepali cultural mix. The prepubescent Kumari, to whom by legend the valley belongs and to whom, therefore, everyone, including the king, must pay tribute once a year, is one of several such goddesses; Newar temples once had many more.

  News of the vigor of Buddhism in Nepal is fast spreading beyond the Himalayas. Because Nepal, once closed to outsiders, has in recent decades become one of South Asia’s most open societies, easily accessible by air from both Western nations and East Asia, Kathmandu is attracting more international scholars and new believers from several continents. Go to prayers at almost any gompa around Kathmandu and there is likely to be, in addition to a few American or European voices, a handful of respectful Japanese, Thai, Malaysian, or Singaporean worshippers. The Westerners are no longer the stock characters who once drifted in from the fringes of the drug-taking, hippie Freak Street culture that was prepared to get high on just about anything the Nepalis could offer in the 1960s and ’70s, including the erotic Tantric Buddhist art whose proliferation a nineteenth-century Englishman had labeled a “filthy custom.” That carefree scene bottomed out sometime in the 1980s after the overland route from Europe was closed by war in Afghanistan and by a Nepali decision to raise the costs of travel in Nepal and to reorient tourism toward more affluent visitors and serious trekkers. The casual age has not entirely passed, of course. In a Kathmandu garden café I heard two backpacking Americans discuss what to do with their day. “Let’s go to Swayambhunath,” one said. “A lot of really cool things go on there.”

  At the well-heeled Orgyen Tolku Gompa at Bodhnath, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche said he had noticed a continuing evolution of tourism in recent years. “Before, tourists came to look at the mountains. Then some started coming to see the monasteries. They see Kathmandu is a special place. Very holy. Tourists changed. Some began wanting to hear some teaching, to study with us,” he said. With new interest obviously came money. The rinpoche’s private quarters include a private chapel of evident affluence, decorated in the brilliant colors traditionally favored by Tibetans. The high ceiling was painted a bright aquamarine, with rafters lacquered red. Stylized paintings of religious motifs covered the walls, along which six brass and crystal sconces had been installed for light. From the rafters hung two large crystal chandeliers. At the altar, dominated by a larger-than-life image of Buddha, there was a collection of gold statues and fine ceramic temple guardian lions. The floor was carpeted in Tibetan rugs. The one unharmonious note was the hideous three-tiered plastic waterfall with a trick faucet and plastic flowers installed on a corner table. The faucet seemed to be suspended miraculously in midair, producing a stream of water from no visible source. (The water was being pumped up to the shiny golden tap from the bottom collection dish, through an unseen clear tube obscured by the stream flowing back down around it.) Incongruous kitsch though it was, it certainly caught the attention of disciples. Two boys sat riveted in front of it.

  One of the most powerful and beloved of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist lamas, the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, established his base in Kathmandu, where he and his followers built the impressive Shechen temple and monastery. His Holiness, who had at one time instructed and inspired the Dalai Lama and served as a personal guru to members of Bhutan’s royal family, was the internationally recognized ranking lama of the Nyingmapa school and one of the last—if not the last—of the great Tibetan-born teacher-saints and tertons, discoverers or revealers of holy treasures. Twenty-two years of his life were spent in meditation, some of them in isolated caves in the manner of the great lamas of the past. He established and consecrated temples in Bhutan, India, and the West as well as in Nepal and set up a school of classical studies at Bhutan’s Simtokha Dzong. (His daughter Chhirni Wangmo is assistant director of Bhutan’s National Museum.) Though rooted in the Nyingmapa school, the rinpoche devoted much of his later life—he fled Tibet for Bhutan in 1959—to preaching a nonsectarian Buddhism, drawing on the holy writings and philosophies of all schools.

  I had often heard in Bhutan about the blurring of sectarian divisions. I remember in particular what the abbot of Tashigang Dzong told me as we stood by a huge, complicated, multifaceted sculpture in one of his temples that looked at first sight like a confusing jumble of images piled on a giant plant. “This is the holy tree,” he said. “Here is the lotus grown from the lake. On the leaves the different Buddha scholars are. We have different sects. Here is the leader of Nyingma and how he achieved enlightenment. And next is another sect called Karmapa, and this is its lineage. And this is Guru, and this is the sect that was followed by Shabdrung. Up there at the top is Buddha himself. So you see no matter what denomination or what sect, the root is same, the body same, and ultimate truth is one. Root is same, ultimate goal is same. Only approach is different.”

  In poems, essays, and talks in Asia and the West, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche went beyond mere nonsectarianism. He gave the religion that recognized him as a leader in 1910, while he was still in his mother’s womb, a true sense of universality. After he died in September 1991, Bhutan spent more than a year praying and preparing for his final funeral rites. Present at the purjang or cremation ceremony in November 1992—during which, Bhutan’s weekly newspaper said, “the last mortal remains of His Holiness
dissolved into the state of luminosity”—were the Bhutanese royal family, more than fifty thousand monks and tulkus, and thousands of other followers and admirers from around the world. Many more would have come if Bhutan could have handled them. The cremation took place on a meadow in Paro, in view of the Taktsang monastery, where the Guru Rinpoche was believed to have descended on a flying tiger in the eighth century bearing the Nyingma Tantric teachings. The cremation pyre of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was a work of Bhutanese artisanship at its best: a carved, roofed pavilion bedecked in silk, with altars around the clay coffin overflowing with the finest offerings of food and religious objects. Tibetan Buddhism may never again see this exalted ceremony performed with such purity of ritual and in such an unspoiled cultural and natural environment. While Himalayan Buddhists await the rinpoche’s reincarnation, his legacy lives on in Kathmandu in the shadow of Bodhnath.

  “Kathmandu is developing into an important center for Buddhist study,” another Tibetan lama, Khenpo Rigzin, said during one of our conversations at the Nyingma Institute of Nepal, a new monastic school just outside Kathmandu memorable for its quiet, superserious atmosphere. The institute has a Tibetan-American patron, Tarthang Tulku, a publisher of Buddhist texts in Berkeley, California, Khenpo Rigzin said. Novice monks—still all boys, no girls—from across the Himalayan region and India come here to take a nine-year course that is heavy on Buddhist philosophy. So far, no Westerners had enrolled as students, Khenpo Rigzin said, though they are admitted for research. He added politely, even sweetly, that Western students might pose a problem, given the very different intellectual and spiritual environment that produced them. In his experience, he said, he found it took them a little longer to grasp things. A concept he could teach a Bhutanese, Sikkimese, or Sherpa in a week would take two or three weeks to penetrate the mind of an American, he thought.

  Khenpo Rigzin has turned down many offers to teach in the West, because he believes the Himalayan milieu is important to him. “I know that the standard of life is very good in America. But we need something different. According to our philosophy, we must realize the dharma. The way of living must be there. It is good for monks to stay in a group, to practice prayer together. Here I feel sure, secure. It’s easier to live as lama in Nepal.”

  If anything, Nepal is already becoming spoiled by success, Khenpo Rigzin said, reflecting the burgeoning sense among some leading Buddhist lamas that too much luxury is creeping into monastic life. In some cases, that is already an understatement. A Kathmandu businessman told me how when he tried to sell a Mercedes-Benz, he got no takers in the royal family or among wealthy houses, but found a Tibetan rinpoche ready and willing to pay cash for the car. One day, leaving a Kathmandu restaurant after lunch, I saw two monks head toward a new Hyundai parked out front. The older one got into the back; the younger one (wearing a cowboy hat) folded his robes, slid into the driver’s seat, and sped away. The ideal life of a monk, Khenpo Rigzin said, is to follow the Lord Buddha’s own advice to avoid cities, corrupting influences, distraction. He said that only the greatest of lamas would be able to concentrate in the busy atmosphere of some gompas these days.

  His Holiness Ngawang Tenzing Zangbo, the Sherpas’ Tengboche abbot and overseer of all Buddhist gompas in Nepal when I met him, said pithily that these days too many monks “prefer electricity to butter lamps.” He expanded on this to say that there was nothing inherently bad about new inventions and modern life in general. The problem came when these things became preoccupations. “Good clothing, for instance,” he said. “In other times, lamas never wanted the best garments. They could go barefoot and possess nothing. Now they are asking for better robes. At Tengboche, I am trying my level best to keep things as traditional as possible. I want to improve life a little bit, make it more comfortable, but stay always within tradition. I believe that when you learn the harder way, when you experience hardship, this means more and is closer to our teaching.”

  He said that he is not surprised to see Westerners flocking to Tibetan monasteries in Nepal. “In the West, there are too many distractions,” he said. “People long to come to these mountains. Here you can learn things through your heart.” He noted that Kathmandu also drew many Himalayan people because of its proximity to sacred places, but was confident that many lamas among them would return to remote areas and practice a wholesome religion, free of urban temptations. He hopes that the spiritual boom will result in higher levels of religious life all around the region and not the further degradation of monastic life through materialism. He sounded as if it might be touch-and-go in some places.

  Almost all Buddhists in the Himalayas, not just lamas, are coming into frequent contact with wealthier Buddhists, both Mahayana and Theravada, from Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and farther east. A glimpse of their obvious affluence has a powerful effect. Bhikku Nirmala Nanda, one of a small number of impoverished Theravada monks in Nepal and the abbot of a temple in Lumbini, is grateful for the gifts brought by Thai pilgrims, but alarmed at their materialism. “They come with so many baggages full of things,” he told me as we shared tea, he in his chair of honor near the altar and I on the steps nearby that led to his mango grove in the sunny courtyard. “I have to tell them, ‘If you carry so much heavy baggage, it will be very difficult to get to Nirvana. Reaching enlightenment will take a longer time than if you are free of this weight.’ ” I told him the biblical story in which Jesus declared that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich man to enter heaven. He said he hadn’t heard that one, and chuckled at the symmetry.

  IN DISCUSSING theology, Khenpo Rigzin and Ngawang Tenzing Zangpo both dared to venture the opinion that because of the political nature of the Tibetan exile movement, the Dalai Lama’s base in the northern Indian mountain town of Dharamsala, harder to get to than Kathmandu, is no longer a universally accepted center of the Tibetan Buddhist universe in scholarly and spiritual terms. The Dalai Lama is a Gelugpa reincarnate, and much of the activity in Kathmandu is associated with other Buddhist orders, but that is not the issue. “His Holiness has one foot in the dharma and one in politics,” Khenpo Rigzin said. “He can’t move on either side. We Tibetans have to be militant, but I don’t believe my religion should bring me into politics. The political activity has weakened the Dalai Lama as a religious teacher.”

  Himalayan Buddhist lamas and abbots are now free to return to Tibet, where most of them were born or studied, and many are making the spiritual journey. They help restore monastic links and sometimes support the rebuilding of shattered gompas. His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was among those who returned to Tibet in peace in the 1980s. He led an international campaign to restore the original Shechen monastery in Kham, in eastern Tibet, one of the six leading Nyingmapa centers. The monastery, where the rinpoche had gone as an incarnate tulku at the age of eleven, was ruined like many others in China’s Cultural Revolution. Such a trip for the Dalai Lama would be all but impossible short of a significant change of heart in Beijing. And so Dharamsala grows ever more remote from the Tibetan Buddhist mainstream.

  Robert Thurman, a Columbia University Buddhist scholar who was ordained as a monk in his youth, agrees that Tibetan Buddhists are making a big impact on Nepal in both economic and religious spheres, though he deplores the damage the chemical dyes of the Tibetan carpet industry, now Nepal’s largest foreign-currency earner, have done to the environment of the Kathmandu Valley. Buddhists should be protectors of nature, he says. But Thurman, who has known the Dalai Lama for many years, gave a sympathetic accounting of the exile leader’s predicament when we met in Bumthang, in Bhutan.

  “His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the only one who has had to combine intellectual and religious leadership with responsibility for a community,” he said. “He had to oversee the setting up of a curriculum for schoolchildren in exile that would give them both some preparation for the modern world and would restore their culture; give them some sense of pride in a situation where they had nothing.
They literally came out of Tibet in rags, and barely survived. Many family members died in the exodus. And so that experience has made His Holiness very practical and very firm about certain things. He has constructed large monasteries. He also supported technical education and innovation. He’s had to really think through a lot of these things. I don’t think he’s done a perfect job, and I don’t think he thinks he’s done a perfect job. I don’t think he has been able to implement everything he’s wanted to implement.

  “Around him and the various ministries, one of his problems now is that a lot of the more capable Tibetans—amongst the Tibetan refugees it’s considered a kind of patriotic duty to serve the government in exile—put in their years of service, then take off into business or go abroad. They can’t really earn any money—or hardly a living wage if they have children they want to put into school—by working there. It’s become such a meager government in exile. So there is a little bit of mediocrity there. However, there is a very good spirit, and His Holiness himself sort of keeps after them, and he manages to do a good job.”

  Furthermore, the Dalai Lama, winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, has periodically had to deal with pressure from younger Tibetans who want Buddhists to be more militant in efforts to regain their lost homeland from the Chinese, a course of action His Holiness described in an interview with me in Delhi as “suicidal,” given the might of Beijing’s army and the hostility of the Han Chinese. The battle to keep the Free Tibet campaign on a nonviolent course has consumed a lot more of the Dalai Lama’s already stretched time and energy. “The Dalai Lama feels militancy is immoral from a Buddhist point of view, and he’s not a militarist,” Thurman said. “He worries about militancy among his followers. I think the Nobel Prize postponed more militancy, violent militancy, among the young, both outside and inside Tibet. It gave the young Tibetans the view that maybe there was a way out through a kind of Gandhian militancy, a nonviolent militancy.”