But even without cataclysmic events, archaeologists and historians would have considerable problems with mountainous Bhutan, because people have always lived scattered across isolated valleys on one-family farms or in small hamlets, often with fewer than a dozen houses. Concentrations of artifacts or other records would at best be small and hard to find. Biodegradable homes made of mud, wood, and woven bamboo are simply abandoned to recycle themselves when no longer needed. Because there were far more trees in Bhutan than in, for example, Ladakh and most of Tibet, Bhutanese houses, while often more substantial and sophisticated than many in other Himalayan regions, were also more fragile or vulnerable. Near Wangdiphrodang, I saw the earthen remains of a hamlet deserted not very long ago after a flood or fire. It looked at first glance like a colony of giant anthills; the outer shells of the disintegrating buildings matched the reddish color of the ground under them. Inside, walls still bore the soot of cooking fires.
And then there are the problems of tying up the loose ends of the neighborhood histories of those people not rooted in the heartland of western Bhutan but living on the sidelines over the last three hundred years as Bhutan’s Drukpa rulers, ecclesiastical and temporal, gradually forged a nation across the sharply corrugated landscape from the Chumbi Valley of Tibet eastward to the border of what is now the Indian state of Arunachal, and from the glaciers and peaks of the high Himalayas down to the tropical zones abutting sultry West Bengal and Assam. A lot of people inevitably got left out of the political story line. To be fair to Bhutan’s leaders, some of them, including King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, are aware of this, and pledge to rectify the lapse with the promotion of regional scholarship. Bhutan’s first college was consecrated in the 1970s in eastern Bhutan, outside the traditional Drukpa world.
For centuries between the arrival of Buddhism and the introduction of secular education in the 1960s, Bhutan’s intellectual elite was found entirely within monastic walls, where writing was in choekey, an old ecclesiastical form of Tibetan. Teaching was the domain of monks and lamas. Again, the two are not synonymous: a monk, or gelong in Bhutan, is in holy orders and celibate; a lama may or may not be ordained. Lamas are teachers; monks, not necessarily so. A monk may be a lama, but a lama—who may lead a secular life and have a wife and family—is not by definition a monk. The Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, a towering religious as well as political leader, did not take monastic vows until he had produced a son. The Bhutanese also have gomchens, or unordained village priests, who are in fact laymen authorized to perform certain ceremonies, and a few clusters of nuns outside the traditional monasteries.
The establishment of Sherubtse College, Bhutan’s first institution of higher education, means that a secular environment for local scholarship has now been created on a spacious, sunburned campus at Kanglung in eastern Bhutan. Under Zangley Dukpa, Sherubtse’s first Bhutanese principal, students and faculty are being encouraged to write about their environment and culture for publication in newsletters, an academic journal, and locally produced books. Zangley Dukpa says he exhorts the college community rigorously to separate the sacred and secular in their studies and writings, though the lines will in a Bhutanese mind always be a little blurred. He has introduced courses in Bhutanese history and promotes the writing of short stories with Bhutanese themes. The principal, who was educated in Singapore and is fascinated by the evolution of education systems worldwide—he can talk with expertise about the Oxbridge model in England or American land grant colleges—says he looks for links between how nations educate their elite and how those societies develop. In talks with teachers at all levels of education in Bhutan, he tries to impress on them the need to differentiate between pure knowledge and culturally weighted instruction. This is a subject of critical debate as Bhutan moves out of a scholarly world enclosed in monastic walls and into a secular intellectual environment.
“What I tell my friends is that sometimes we tend to confuse the curriculum with indoctrination,” said the principal, a short, exuberant, generous man. “The distinction between scholarship and indoctrination has to be clear-cut. Take a boy fourteen years old—he may not have the ability to grasp the distinction. Our culture can be taught, but what you have to keep in mind is how to make a lasting impact. This can be done through the story form. For example, I went to see the teachers of Dzongkha, who had been teaching about lighting butter lamps and offering water to the monks. I said: No, that is indoctrination. At eleven, twelve years old, the students are being told, Do this, do that. The teachers asked, Then how? And I said: Once upon a time, there was an old man and an old woman, and early in the morning they would wake up, brush their teeth—teaching hygiene also—then they would go to the temple altar with butter lamps and water. Then they would go to the fields. The religion, the culture, is part of the story.
“You may ask, Then why do you need these cultural aspects at all?” the principal went on. “The answer, as sociologists proclaim, is that you and I may have very different perceptions, but in a society we have to live comfortably, and there are cultural strengths that bind us together. The structure of a society includes cultural aspects, and that is how we live, and what we believe. To be peaceful, to make our society stable, that culture is a stabilizer—and that is important.” Half conviction, half plea, this observation is heard all over Bhutan in these troubled times. The troublesome question to Hindu Bhutanese is, whose culture?
The principal and I were talking over tea in the waning light of a golden afternoon in the eastern town of Tashigang. It was the eve of Sherubste College’s fourth convocation, and the principal was excited about what his college was struggling to achieve in shaping a modern culture for Bhutan as it prepared to graduate a new batch of educated young men and women from all over the country. (As prizes were awarded, I noticed that some of the highest achievers came from the restless south.) He invited me to sit with the faculty during the convocation as an official guest. I told him that this was embarrassing. He pressed. We compromised: I would go (in academic regalia) as a representative of Columbia University’s Southern Asian Institute, of which I was a research associate. Miraculously, they found me a Master of Arts hood, cap, and gown in less than a day.
As we talked over tea in a small screened pavilion on the guesthouse lawn, about half a dozen young men suddenly appeared on the grass and broke into an extraordinary dance to the accompaniment of a strange song, a plaintive chant in a musical language of its own. The principal said that the dancing and singing were in celebration of a great victory in a kuru competition. Kuru is a game of darts—but what darts! In this game, players throw larger-than-average feathered missiles at small targets placed scores of meters away. The strength of the players’ arms, the speed of the darts, and the precision with which they reach their targets is astonishing. The whole operation is so improbable that a spectator seeing kuru played for the first time thinks it must be an illusion or trickery. No dart should go so far so fast, with just the power of an arm, even helped by a few quick steps into the throw. The young men on the lawn were also dancing in the hope of cajoling donations from the principal’s aides, who had come up to Tashigang from Kanglung to check on the accommodation of convocation guests, including Prince Namgyal Wangchuck, an uncle of the king and one of the royal family’s most popular members. They were spending the night in Tashigang’s two official guesthouses before proceeding to the campus the next day. A gaggle of small boys, standing at a respectable distance, had followed the kuru heroes to our lodge as a kind of cheering section. Theatricality had overtaken a lazy afternoon.
In Thimphu a week later, I watched a kuru match that produced much more graceful yet muscular dancing. When one of two competing teams performed after scoring a bull’s-eye, the victory dance was an entertainment in its own right. Spectators pointed out that the effortless choreography was understandable, since this was the National Dance Company’s kuru squad, and the player-dancers were apparently trouncing a less nimble-footed team from the Ministry of Agric
ulture. The dancers in Thimphu were obviously more polished than their country counterparts. But the rustic enthusiasm of the barefoot Tashigang squad, performing in the hope of a windfall to sustain their team through another season, was more touching in its earnestness. I saw a couple of the Tashigang kuru heroes later that day telling tall tales to an admiring group of little children on a path near my guesthouse window.
The dancers gone from the lawn, the principal returned to his discourse. “We bifurcate the subjects we teach, international subjects and noninternational subjects,” he said as his aides drifted into snoozes on lawn chairs. “Take a subject like history. We don’t mean to say that we don’t want to learn the history of other countries. But the problem is, first let us know about ourselves before we learn about others.”
The next morning, under a brilliant winter sun, I went to see the past and future come together in Bhutan at the Sherubtse convocation. The day began with a traditional procession called a chhipdrel. Monks and students in classical dance costumes and masks, barefoot young men dressed as ancient warriors, and an orchestra of temple instruments greeted Prince Namgyal Wangchuck at the gateway to the college, perhaps a quarter of a mile from the auditorium where the ceremonies were to be held. They led him toward the campus assembly hall in a glorious procession of sound and color. The abbot of Tashigang Dzong, a gentle monk with a cherubic smile, waited at the door to chant an invocation. The faculty was drawn up in ranks on the edge of the path along which walked the prince and the prochancellor of Delhi University, Sherubtse’s parent institution. After the taking of many photographs, we were ready to form up to enter the dark assembly hall. More blasts from temple horns, the beating of drums, and the clanging of cymbals reverberated through the crowded auditorium to announce the start of the ceremonies. A low rumble of monks responded from the back of the platform, behind the rows of guests and officials, but not until there had been a sharp exchange among them over whether it was time to start the chants or not. A quick glance from the abbot fixed that. They chanted.
I was assigned Seat 13 in the section reserved for faculty and government officials. I remarked that I seemed to have drawn an unlucky number. Oh, no, my neighbor in the gallery assured me. To the Bhutanese, thirteen is a very auspicious number, as are several other odd numbers, and I should feel honored. Mostly I felt like a bird in the wrong nest, sitting there behind Prince Namgyal, facing students who had never seen me before and must have wondered where I came from and what I was doing there among the dzongdas and professors. The event progressed, or rather swung back and forth between the Middle Ages and contemporary life, for a couple of hours. The awarding of degrees in the arts, sciences, and business was interspersed with more prayers, chants, gongs, and trumpets. There were students who wanted to be engineers or scientists as well as scholars of the humanities. The graduates came robed in silk to collect their degrees; one young man was wearing a dazzling gho in black-and-gold Chinese brocade.
When it ended, we decamped to the gardens for sweetened rice, hot butter tea, and a tour of the school, then moved to a magnificent enclosure of decorated tents for a lunchtime feast. Someone pulled me forward to present me to Prince Namgyal Wangchuck, a tall, handsome man of breathtaking presence and exuberant personality. I thought how corny but true it was that the Bhutanese aristocracy really did look like the fairy-tale royalty of childhood story books. The introduction gave me the opportunity to apologize for crashing Sherubtse’s party, since I certainly stuck out as an unknown foreigner. He laughed away the apology. Later, full of vitality and enthusiasm for the day’s festivities, he would lead a mass folk dance around a playing field, drawing in well-dressed invited guests and village people in threadbare ghos and kiras who had inched down a grassy bank from the road that traversed the campus to watch the fun.
As we formed up into a buffet line, I attached myself to Father William Mackey, the Canadian-born Jesuit who is not only the founder of the high school that became Sherubtse College but also a Bhutanese citizen and therefore the country’s only Christian priest. He had been asked to set up Sherubtse as a high school in 1968 by the late King Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, who gave the institution its name: sherub tse means “peak of knowledge.” It became a college of higher education a decade later. As we entered the traditional banquet enclosure walled with fresh-cut evergreens, where bowls of hot food waited on a long table, Father Mackey stopped to greet the chief monk from Tashigang, who had led the convocation prayers. The abbot had come to lunch holding the hand of a little tulku, a shy boy of about five or six who had been identified as the incarnation of a departed monastic scholar. The boy never left the abbot’s side, occasionally burying his little face in the monk’s robes. Prince Namgyal, seeing Father Mackey and the abbot together, strode over and announced enthusiastically: “My two gurus!”
Father Mackey enjoys this. He has made his peace with Bhutanese Buddhism, and he says he tells his fellow Jesuits in Canada that he is a better Christian for it. He came to Bhutan in the early 1960s after running into trouble in India, where he taught in the hill stations of Darjeeling and Kurseong before foreign missionaries came under nationalist and Hindu chauvinist pressures. Christian missionaries were not encouraged by the Bhutanese either, but Father Mackey had come to know Bhutan’s late first prime minister, Jigme Dorji, who frequently visited young Bhutanese students in the Indian hill station schools. Bright children, mostly boys, were sent to these schools in an area of the Himalayan foothills that had once been Bhutanese or Sikkimese before falling under British rule. There were no high schools in Bhutan when Father Mackey arrived in Himalayan Asia, though many monasteries provided education to novice monks and occasionally other children. Jigme Dorji, who urged Father Mackey to move to Bhutan and help establish public schools there, was assassinated in 1964, a victim of what most think was internecine plotting among members of the ruling elite (possibly related to the perception that he was too close to India). Since his death, there has never been another prime minister. But Father Mackey stayed on, learning to speak Dzongkha and promising never to proselytize among the Buddhists or convert Bhutanese to his faith, a pledge he had not found it hard to make. Recalling that promise, he says with a chuckle that we would all be in spiritual trouble if we thought that “salvation comes from a little bit of water being poured over your head.”
With a college and many new schools to attend, Bhutanese are eager to learn more about their own country, but new teaching materials have to be created to fill big gaps. The earliest written accounts of Bhutan have been found in texts from Tibet, in which scholars refer to the country by various names, all related to its geographical or botanical distinctions—as, for example, Lho Jong, meaning “Valleys of the South,” and Lho Mon Kha Shi, “Southern Mon Country of Four Approaches.” Scholars say “Mon” was the Tibetans’ general designation for all non-Buddhist Mongoloid people on the southern side of the Himalayas. As in Tibet, the early people of Bhutan were practitioners of spirit worship with propitiatory ceremonies and superstitions. The term “Mon” also appears in other names for what we now call Bhutan: Lho Mon Tsenden Jong, “the Southern Mon Valleys Where Sandalwood Grows,” or Lho Jong Mon Jong, “Southern Valleys of Medicinal Herbs.” The last description is still particularly apt.
In the Bhutanese monastic tradition, the earliest authenticated manifestation of Buddhist civilization in the country came with the construction of two temples, Kyichu in Paro and Jampa in Bumthang, in the seventh century. The temples are believed to be the work of Songsten Gampo, one of the greatest of Tibetan kings. It was a century later, in A.D. 747, that the Guru Rinpoche arrived from Nepal to aid a king in trouble with the gods, school textbooks say. The Guru was then on his way either to or from Tibet; like many other stories from Bhutanese mythological history, this one has variations. Some historians, for example, say he came to the Himalayas through what is now the Indian state of Assam; others trace his trip through Kashmir, at the other end of the Himalayan world. There are many legends
about the Guru Rinpoche; and some accounts of his travels, if taken literally and collectively, would make him an exceptionally long-lived and extraordinarily peripatetic man.
A modest booklet published by the royal government under the title The Guru Rinpoche, the Great Culture Hero, takes the view that the Guru, a saint whose appearance had been foreordained by the Buddha himself, arrived via India at the invitation of a King Sendhaka of Bumthang. He later went on to Tibet, where he spent a mere 111 years. (By which time, according to another story, he was well over a thousand years old, having been born a reincarnate of the historical Buddha sometime not long after the founder’s death early in the sixth century B.C.) In both Bhutan and Tibet, this Himalayan Methuselah battled and vanquished demons and shamans and spread the Nyingmapa interpretations of Mahayana Buddhism, which consolidated in Tibet. “As a direct result of Padmasambhava’s efforts,” says the booklet, “the people of Tibet were elevated from a state of barbarism to a state of unsurpassed spiritual culture. He is therefore truly one of the greatest of the world’s culture heroes.”
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