So Close to Heaven

by Barbara Crossette

  While Tibetans have raised awareness of Himalayan Buddhism internationally, Sherpas have been contributing significantly to what an American anthropologist calls the mainstreaming of Buddhist culture within Nepali society. James F. Fisher, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal who occasionally returns to live for spells in the region, said in his 1990 book Sherpas: Reflections on Change in Himalayan Nepal that religion is intensifying, not fading, among the newly rich Sherpas. Fisher recounts how in 1981 the Tengboche monastery was able to raise twenty thousand dollars in two days to open a gompa in Kathmandu, where many Sherpas were living.

  Although the Tengboche abbot, Ngawang Tenzing Zangpo, doesn’t always share Fisher’s optimism that Sherpa culture can survive affluence, Fisher is convinced that Sherpa men and women are proud of their community, a pride reinforced by foreign climbers and trekkers who come in contact with them in the hardworking hamlets of Solu-Khumbu. “Sherpas are so massively reinforced at every point for being Sherpas,” he wrote, “that they have every reason not only to ‘stay’ Sherpa but even to flaunt their Sherpahood.” Poorer Tamangs, impressed by Sherpa success, often try to pose as Sherpas, Fisher says. “This process of ‘Sherpaization’ counters the momentum of the much-vaunted Sanskritization (emulation of high Hindu caste behavior) that has absorbed the upwardly mobilizing energies of the subcontinent for centuries,” he wrote.

  This is an intriguing observation. If the trend persists, it would have implications throughout the Himalayas as small nations feel a need to define themselves against the wave of Hindu revivalism rising in India or the outbursts of Hindu Gorkha nationalism within their own borders. Hope Cooke seems to have sensed the need for Himalayan Buddhists (and Tibeto-Burman people) to form a closer inner Asian community. This kind of thinking added to her troubles with India. Visions of a pan-Himalayan Buddhism with political overtones are consequently held at arm’s length in other places, notably Bhutan, for fear of Indian reactions. But if the sense of community were to surge upward from a more prosperous, better-educated grassroots Buddhist society, who’s to tell what the results might be?

  Charles Ramble, a British anthropologist who speaks and reads Tibetan and who had been studying the Tibetan people of northern and western Nepal for more than a decade when I met him in Kathmandu, interjects a cautionary note when the subject turns to the glorification of Sherpahood and other forms of Tibetanization. He thinks that in the rush to retrieve, enhance, and promote a Tibetan-Buddhist culture there is always the danger of invention. From Ladakh to Sikkim and Bhutan, he sees arcane and sometimes completely artificial rites or “traditions” being introduced in the name of cultural restoration. But he says there is little doubt that Tibetanization has a wide appeal.

  SHERPAS and other northern Nepali people inhabit a region that is more Tibetan in culture than South Asian. Himalayan Buddhist legends have resonance here. This is where the fabled saint Milarepa, who was born about 1050, was supposed to have meditated on numerous occasions. Though large areas of the Tibetan border regions of Nepal are still very isolated and difficult to reach, there is a good Chinese-built road from Kathmandu to the border hamlet of Kodari, the first leg of the overland route to Lhasa. It passes through glorious green valleys with terraced fields and warm red-brick Nepali homesteads. Though the going gets tougher on the other side of the border, the easy trip to Kodari leaves a lasting impression of how close Nepal, more than any other Himalayan nation, feels to Tibet. Geographically, the exception to that observation would have to be Ladakh because of its location on the Tibetan plateau. But the state of military readiness around the edges of Ladakh creates a certain psychological barrier. In Bhutan, where there are numerous passes and some vestiges of trade, one nevertheless gets the feeling that these gates through the high Himalayas have been walled shut since 1959, and that Tibet could be somewhere else on earth.

  It was while meditating in a cave near Nyanam on the Nepali-Tibetan border that Milarepa was supposed to have told the story of his life to disciples, who passed it on to posterity. The tale reveals that Milarepa, a great traveler, had more than a few Nepali acquaintances. (Not to be outdone, the Bhutanese believe he may also have meditated in their country, and Tibetans naturally have a long list of places associated with his long and pious life, long stretches of it spent in hermitages.) Milarepa’s story, incidentally, is peppered with references to strong and clever women who could apparently read and write, a hint that in some circumstances the status of women may have been reasonably high in Himalayan Buddhist societies, even in ancient times, even though women were generally barred from monasteries.

  Until he gave up the black arts, Milarepa claimed to be able to inflict hailstorms on his enemies—causing, for example, much disarray, destruction, and terror among those who had wronged his mother and sister in the village of his youth. In later life, he calmed down and turned to poetry that is both pithy and instructive. In one hymn, dedicated to considering the usefulness of thoughts and actions, Milarepa wrote these stanzas, in a translation refined in the 1920s by W. Y. Evans-Wentz:

  Unless all selfishness be given up from the very heart’s depths,

  What gain is it to offer alms?

  and:

  Unless pure love and veneration be innate within one’s heart,

  What gain is it to build a stupa?

  Until the unification of Nepal by Gorkha kings in the eighteenth century, most Tibetan borderlands were not really a part of the country. Psychologically, many pockets still are not. The kingdom of Mustang, nearly 150 rugged miles from Kathmandu in a protuberance thrusting into Tibet, was one of them until Nepal opened the territory to development and trekking. In upper Mustang, the Buddhist kingdom of Lo, with its walled capital, Lo Manthang, broke free of Tibet in the fourteenth century, reached its height about a hundred years later on the strength and income of trade with Tibet, and enjoyed an independent existence for nearly four hundred years. During that time temples and a few palaces were built in what was called Mustang Bhot—Tibetan Mustang. “Bhot,” “Bhotia,” “Bhutia,” and other variations of the word often mean Tibetan to South Asians in the same way “Hellenistic” meant not quite Greek but within the influence of the Greek world. The word, probably a variation of “Bot,” originally meant Tibet in the Tibetan language.

  Although the kings of Mustang had lost all their residual powers and the formal use of titles in the 1950s, Mustang was a wild card as late as the 1960s, when Nepal was unable to do much to stop a Tibetan exile guerrilla force based there with what is widely assumed to be substantial help from the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The guerrillas, known in Nepal as Khampas because most were from the Kham region of eastern Tibet, obviously never stood much of a chance against the Chinese army in Lhasa, but they could serve as an annoyance to Beijing. Tibetan exiles in the Indian hill town of Darjeeling told me, with lingering bitterness, that American enthusiasm for their cause ended as suddenly as it had begun when President Richard M. Nixon recognized the Chinese Communist regime. Some Tibetans went on fighting until the mid-1970s, when Nepal sent soldiers to wipe out the bases of the rebellion. About the same time, the royal government of King Mahendra introduced some development to Mustang, which had lost its Tibetan trade.

  A fine account of the confusion Mustang experienced as tourism arrived is found in the journal of a long trek through the roadless region by an American-educated Nepali writer, Manjushree Thapa. She was discovering Mustang herself; she later became involved full-time with conservation and sustainable development in the old kingdom, working with the Annapurna Conservation Area Project. In her small book Mustang Bhot in Fragments, she tells of long days on the trail with a friend, an engineer who was checking on the progress of small electricity generators, and evenings in teashops, village halls, homes, and lodges with people who were her compatriots but thought she must be a foreigner. “You’re from Am’rica?” a little girl asked her, seeing her camera. She wrote of a fragile desert ecology in one place and a lush vall
ey in another, of people eager for tourism despite the damage it could do; life seemed to offer no other economic opportunities.

  She described the king’s palace in Lo Manthang, with linoleum on the floors and men who drank themselves into nightly stupors while rolling dice. But she also wrote of the piety and devotion of people who had maintained their Buddhist temples and monasteries undisturbed by politics over centuries. She sat down for tea with monks eating Chinese candy brought back from Tibet, where temples are once again open to them. One of their lamas made regular trips to Tibetan gompas, they said, where he was much in demand to say prayers. In return he brought back butter for the butter lamps of impoverished Lo Manthang. It was an interesting trade-off: the wisdom and piety of an unbroken Tibetan Buddhist tradition for the biscuits, sweets, and butter of soldier-rich, monk-poor Tibet. Tibetan gompas aren’t alone in looking toward Lo for a rare cultural purity, Thapa wrote. With the barriers to outsiders coming down, Mustang, like Bhutan, will draw a special breed of tourist. “Because it promises a Tibetan culture more pristine than in Chinese-occupied Tibet, Lo is the darling of discoverers, adventurers and Tibetophiles,” she said. But the outside world is alien, no matter what its motive for coming to Mustang. And outside influences were already making a mark before tourism began, as more people from this hidden kingdom traveled beyond its mountain walls.

  “People had gone the way of money, and whether that entailed Hinduizing or westernizing or Nepalizing mattered little,” she wrote. “Their travels and exposure brought back into the restricted area fragments of the world beyond: transistor radios, smokeless stoves, electricity, walking shoes, windbreakers and new languages. And through these imports, even those who remained in Mustang all year long took leave of their impossible, traditional way of life.” Is this good or bad for Mustang? Thapa wasn’t sure, but she had seen in village after village how hopes for rapid development had been dashed so often when projects went awry, and she agonized: “Must development come riddled with pain and contradictions and aborted opportunities? Is that the way change comes?”

  These are the questions that Bhutan, the last living kingdom, is now wrestling with.

  Chapter 9

  BUDDHA AND THE BHUTANESE STATE

  MAKING ANY SENSE of the fears Bhutanese hold for the future of their country requires a little knowledge of where Bhutan came from. Not so easy. Right away, we spin down the rabbit-hole of fantasy. The history of Bhutan begins in mythology and will probably end someday with more questions than answers, more legends than facts. Here is a land where children’s schoolbooks open not with accounts of explorers or emperors, but with tales of spirits, demons, and saints. This is a country where a founder of the faith traveled on the back of a marvelous flying tiger, temples were erected to pin down the extremities of a malevolent she-demon, and the unifier of the nation was believed to possess the power to scare away hostile armies with a show of terrifying magic. Through this history flow most of the shared legends and legendary characters of Himalayan Buddhism, but here no modern political superstructure has yet tinkered with this cosmos.

  When Lord Ronaldshay, the British colonial governor of Bengal, visited Paro in 1921 and inquired in passing who had built a chorten he saw along his route, he was told, matter-of-factly, a fantastic story. He recorded it in his book Himalayan Bhutan, Sikhim and Tibet: “The builder, a famous lama, on coming to Paro, found the hand of death heavy upon the valley. By virtue of his miraculous powers he divined the cause. A monster of the mountains, a ghoulish frog which battened on human blood, had made its abode in the valley. The monster’s mouth was detected by a hole in the ground, and was effectually stopped by the erection over it of a chorten. In later days, a rich man came along and protected the monument, whose preservation was of such vital importance to the people of Paro, by encasing it in an outer covering. And so, as the Elder naively remarked, the people of Paro were saved.”

  To travel in Bhutan is to suspend not only disbelief but also rationality, consistency, the comfort of an agreed chronology, and any tendency toward impatience. Historical dates become mere suggestions, along with certain definitive measurements like the distance to Ura (or anywhere else from where you are) and the height of Gankar Punsum (or most other mountains)—not to mention dates on the notorious calendar. Accounts of both ancient and contemporary events can vary wildly. Statistics gathered by worthy international agencies often seem weirdly out of sync with what one hears and sees. In one of the great understatements of recent scholarship, Leo Rose of the University of California at Berkeley wrote in The Politics of Bhutan that the country posed “a novel methodological problem.” Working in Bhutan in the 1970s, Professor Rose found the country “data-free,” lacking even rudimentary research facilities and all but devoid of the intense South Asian–style political gossip that often helps fill in the blanks of recent history. By the 1990s, he probably would notice a marked increase in gossip, a good deal of it political because it feeds sumptuously on the activities of the half-dozen or so extended families who have come to dominate public life and the economy.

  It is easy enough to trace the bare outlines of Bhutanese history as understood by the Bhutanese. Until perhaps the sixth or seventh century there is darkness—or, as the British political officer John Claude White wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, “the early history of this remarkable country is enveloped in great obscurity,” Then Buddhism arrives, and for nearly a thousand years, the legends of saints and philosophers, of miracles and manifestations, of theologians and marvelous discoveries of holy texts, dominate the story of Bhutan. Buddhism is written into the national anthem:

  As the doctrine of the Lord Buddha flourishes,

  May the sun of peace and happiness shine on the people.

  Three names dominate Bhutan’s formative early years: the ubiquitous Guru Rinpoche; Pema Lingpa, a native saint; and Ngawang Namgyal, the seventeenth-century unifier of Bhutan known to most Bhutanese as the Shabdrung. Their images in statuary, portraits, and murals dominate many a temple and shrine at the expense of more familiar images of Buddha—with whom in the Bhutanese mind they are one.

  Bhutan has a holistic history in which religious legend and political reality are tightly interwoven, and what historical records survive were written in the dzongs and safeguarded mostly by monks. Furthermore, because at least some of the oft-told stories serve to buttress the reputations of cherished heroes, the monarchy, or the contemporary monastic hierarchy, there has been little to gain from revisionism or intensive historical research. The best foreign historians know when to back away from pointless controversy. Michael Aris, the Oxford University scholar who probably knows more than any other Westerner about the early years of Bhutan’s recorded history, having discovered some of its documentation himself in unexplored archives, considered the available evidence about the Guru Rinpoche, with whom history begins in a serious way in Bhutan, and came up short on most of the Guru’s numerous manifestations. “For this reason it has been thought best to leave him mostly in the heaven from whence he came,” Aris wrote in Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom.

  The Guru Rinpoche, whose image in paintings and statues can be either benign or terrifying depending on what he was up to at the moment being portrayed, is credited with bringing the Nyingmapa school of Tibetan Buddhism to Bhutan in the eighth century, although other Buddhists from Tibet had taken up residence at least a hundred years earlier. The country’s name, Druk Yul, and its state religion, the Drukpa order of Tantric Buddhism, a branch of the Kagyupa school, took root in the seventeenth century when the Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, packing his fear-inspiring magic powers, fled to Bhutan from the Ralung monastery in eastern Tibet under pressure from competing Gelugpa monks.

  Druk means thunder in Tibetan, and thunder was widely imagined to be the voice of a dragon. The Drukpa order apparently got its name because at the moment of the consecration of one of its earliest monasteries in Tibet, the monks heard auspicious rumbling in the he
avens. (Or by another account, the founder of the new monastery, at Namgyi Phu, saw nine dragons flying in the sky.) Thus by extension Druk Yul, the Land of the Drukpas, is also the Land of the Dragon or, more poetically, the Land, or Kingdom, of the Thunder Dragon. Bhutan’s religious minorities—read “Hindus”—refer loosely to all Bhutanese Buddhists as Drukpas, though they are not. Several schools of Buddhism flourish in Bhutan, with the Nyingmapa perhaps the most popular, spread over a number of ethnic and linguistic groups. There is much overlapping of ritual and devotion among followers of various schools, even within the extended royal family.

  Bhutan—earlier rendered Bootan, Boutan or sometimes Bhotana—is another extension of that Tibetan word bot, which became Indianized to refer variously to highlanders or anything Tibetan or on the fringes of the Tibetan world, a usage that was picked up by the British and other Europeans. The Bhutanese would prefer not to call the country Bhutan, but the name has stuck internationally, so there it is. Arguably, Bhutan is a less troublesome name for the country’s non-Drukpa people in the south and eastern regions, who are collectively actually the majority (though there is no immediate chance of them finding common cause). Bhutan’s major official language, Dzongkha, is drawn from the modified Tibetan spoken in the dzongs, within whose walls religious orders and civil administrators still work side by side. The country’s other official languages are now Nepali and English.

  There are almost no universally accepted facts about the earliest human life in Bhutan, only stories and conjecture. The cultural historian Françoise Pommeret says that the country was probably inhabited by about 2000 B.C., a date deduced from the examination of stone implements found on the surface of the ground in several places. There has been no extensive archaeological research in Bhutan. The British colonial agent John Claude White was told a hazy, uncorroborated story of a seventh-century-B.C. Bhutanese king who was the terror of the neighborhood until he fell afoul of a Tartar warrior. Government publications say that many of the historical manuscripts called namthar, which tell of early events, were lost in fires at a printing works in Sonagatsel in 1828, in the old capital of Punakha in 1832, and in Paro Dzong at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, an earthquake shattered many buildings in 1897, destroying more records.