Lopen Pemala describes in the same booklet how twelve miraculous or magical episodes in the life of Guru Rinpoche became the twelve themes of the Bhutanese festivals known as tshechus. Because the Guru is the unseen guest at these religious celebrations, held on the tenth day of each month, when the Guru takes the form of the waxing moon, certain prayers must be said to him. Guru Rinpoche was supposed to have assured his followers of his continuing presence in this world by these lines: “Every morning, every evening, I will come for the salvation of all sentient beings. I will come as a rider mounted on the crown of rays of the rising sun.”
To me and perhaps many other outsiders, the spirit of Guru Rinpoche dwells most powerfully around the temples at Kurjey Lhakhang, near Bumthang. In a dark grotto in one of the shrines, the faithful say, the outline of his body is imprinted on a rock, now all but obscured from view by a large likeness of the saint. Near the temple grows a giant evergreen, sprung from his walking stick. The miracles that Guru Rinpoche performed at Kurjey are important because the events, enshrined in legends, are keys to understanding how Buddhism meshes with spirit worship in the Bhutanese psychology, and how a Buddhist more often than not prefers to coopt an enemy rather than destroy him.
As one widely heard version of the story goes, the Guru Rinpoche arrived in Bumthang at the desperate call of Sendhaka after a troublesome neighborhood deity, Shelging Karpo, had stolen the ruler’s “vital principle” and rendered him seriously ill. Sendhaka, who was reputed to live in Jakar castle, now the hilltop administrative headquarters of Bumthang, gave his daughter to Guru Rinpoche either before or after the saint rendered assistance; accounts vary. John Claude White was told in 1905 that the woman was named Menmo Jashi Kyeden, that she “possessed the twenty-one marks of fairy beauty,” and that she and the Guru together were able to save the king’s soul with their effortless goodness.
In a longer version of the tale, the Guru thought up a few tricks to draw the attention of the demon Shelging Karpo, hoping to surprise and overpower him. First, the Guru sent the king’s daughter into a meadow to draw water in a golden vessel. While she was on this errand, he turned himself into his Eight Manifestations (a few of them certainly scary) and drew an audience of rapt deities from their natural hiding places all around the nearby valleys—save one, Shelging Karpo himself, who refused to be tempted or tricked. Upping the ante, the Guru turned the king’s daughter into five women, each with a golden pitcher that reflected the sun toward the absent deity’s sanctuary. This was too dazzling to ignore. Shelging Karpo crept out in the form of a lion to have a surreptitious look at the source of the golden glow. The Guru struck. He turned himself into a mythological bird, the garuda (or griffin), and grabbed the demon-as-lion and made him say uncle. To regain his freedom, Shelging Karpo was forced to renounce all threats to Buddhists and Buddhism and to take up residence as a guardian deity of the place. According to the monks at Kurjey, Shelging Karpo, who was never obliged to become a Buddhist, is still the monastery’s protector. The demon-turned-deity is immortalized in paintings in several places within the temple complex, as are other local gods who tangled with and were outwitted by the Guru.
As for Guru Rinpoche, he went on to meditate at Taktsang, now a monastery on a cliff above Paro, where a temple safeguards an image of him riding a flaming tiger. In time he vanished from the earth, but he lives on in unending reincarnations. Before his departure, he asked his disciples (five women, according to Rigzin Dorji) to collect his teachings and hide them in various places, to be found after the passing of time by tertons, the discoverers of treasure. The terton phenomenon, says Michael Aris, remained very much a hallmark of the Nyingmapa or “old order” Buddhists. The discoverers of written treasures were busiest making finds all over the Himalayas from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. In studying the “text discoverers,” Aris made an interesting discovery of his own: that some of the works found were Bon texts. He agrees with those other scholars that as the Bon religion was integrated with Buddhism in Tibet and elsewhere, a largely animist faith took on the trappings of a Buddhist sect or school, a trend clearly discernible by the tenth century. In everyday storytelling in Bhutan, Sikkim, and elsewhere, tales of tertons are invariably stories of those who found texts hidden at the bidding of Guru Rinpoche, not of a Bonpo.
Foremost among the tertons who discovered treasured teachings of the Guru was Pema Lingpa, a rather more down-to-earth saint who was born in Bumthang in the middle of the fifteenth century and who began his career as a blacksmith or metalworker. Aris calls him the “discoverer par excellence” of the Bhutanese, who moreover wrote in language that was “simple, direct, and untutored” as befit a village lad of limited formal learning. If Guru Rinpoche, whose name literally means “the precious teacher,” exists as much in mythology as fact, Pema Lingpa was without doubt a real being. His story in children’s schoolbooks comes complete with a family tree that links him to the royal family of Bhutan through one of three consorts. He was also an ancestor of the sixth Dalai Lama, who lived in Tibet at the end of the seventeenth century.
A very short fellow reared on two well-known Bumthang products, flour and honey, when his mother’s milk ran dry, Pema Lingpa built the doorways of his temples low, using his own stature as a guide, or at least that’s what the monks say as we dip to enter the sanctuaries associated with him. Always at heart the metalsmith, Pema Lingpa crafted a cape of chains to be worn by worshippers with strong backs as they circumambulate the altars (preferably three times) at Tamshing Lhakhang, a monastery in Bumthang built by the great terton somewhere around the turn of the sixteenth century. Pema Lingpa’s craftsmanship must have been born as much out of his own creative genius as from the lessons he received as the childhood ward of a blacksmith, because he also composed marvelous classical dance sequences to tell religious and mythological stories. The dances are still performed according to his stage directions.
The presence of Pema Lingpa is very real at Tamshing, because the monastery has escaped the Bhutanese urge to refurbish periodically by painting over old works of art, and therefore has been changed very little in five hundred years. Again, the atmosphere is medieval, or what we imagine medieval to be. No motorized vehicle can reach the portals of the monastic walls. The last few miles of stony track leading in the general direction of the monastery are about as much as a Land Cruiser can manage. We—a young civil servant deputed to introduce me to the chief monk, and I—dismount and walk atop a shifting bed of roundish river rocks that have been used to form a path as we approach the monastery, set in a vast meadow not far from the Bumthang Chhu, with Kurjey Lhakhang on the opposite bank. The rocky walkway looks suspiciously like the work of Pem Dorji, the Bumthang dzongda, who is dedicated to abolishing mud paths. Near the outer gateway to the monastery grounds, a weaver is working. In the next courtyard, monks and lamas rest on the porches of their cloister, chatting and drinking tea an old woman serves from a teapot so big she struggles to carry it. There are stray cats, and knots of children. Tamshing is a religious school, and so there seem to be more than the usual complement of novices for such a small monastery. In the next, innermost courtyard, boys are horsing around as they sew and fill chalkbags for writing. These are little pouches of sturdy cloth stuffed with white powder that is squeezed out through a small hole in one corner. The boys write with the little hand-held bag, forcing the chalk dust onto slates.
Inside the temple, a series of priceless paintings are blackened by age and the fingerprints of the faithful, but are still thrilling links to a barely understood age. One was described to me as the image of the founder and great terton. I wanted to take his picture, but that was out of the question. My photography permit from the royal government, always politely examined, was again rejected by an independent monk, probably (but not necessarily) because the official I had with me was not of the sword-bearing rank. As I stood before a monk in a dimly lit corner of the sixteenth century, it seemed both crass and foolish to whine, “But the king said …”
> Late on the same afternoon of my visit to Tamshing Lhakhang, we found a monk from Pema Lingpa’s monastery resting at the small shop next to the Swiss Dairy’s cheese-and-wine factory across the river from Jakar, where a few benches and tables serve to turn the general store into a rustic coffee shop. Over a plate of fresh cheese and biscuits, ordered by the dzongda, an official before whom everyone quailed, or at least thought twice about making a contrarian decision, the monk was easily persuaded to tell me the legends of his monastery and its founder. He spoke in a kind of stream-of-consciousness style, almost a recitation, as Pem Dorji translated sotto voce. When he had run out of stories, the monk suddenly stopped, gathered his things into a cloth bundle, and took his leave, heading back in the fading light to his distant home.
“At the age of twenty-five, when Pema Lingpa came to Bumthang, he thought about how the foundation stones of the monastery should be laid,” said the monk. (Never mind that I had been told Pema Lingpa was as much as six or eight years younger at the time. By this point I had stopped fretting over details.) “When Pema Lingpa was in this process of thinking, a pig appeared. On the four sides of the site, the pig came and with his nose he made four holes, and that’s where Pema Lingpa decided to lay the foundation stones of the present monastery. The land was given to him by Chokoteba, the deity of that place. All that land used to be the field where he trained his horse to gallop, this guardian deity of Tamshing. Inside the shrine, the main statue is Guru. It was built by one hundred thousand kendums, angels. The painters from Tamshing asked Pema Lingpa for work in the monastery. Pema Lingpa said, ’You painters cannot enter this temple, because the Guru inside was built by the angels.’ And they were wondering why is it so. These local painters and sculptors were curious, and they went in the temple and all the angels disappeared. So when the angels flew away, the Guru from inside the statue—you know the face of the statue is facing up in the sky—so he was watching the angels disappearing and flying away. The hat on Guru’s head was made by Pema Lingpa himself.
“If you look, when you enter inside our temple, you see the height of the ceiling is very low. That is the exact height of Pema Lingpa. When you enter the main gate, in the courtyard on the left-hand side, there is a prayer wheel. This prayer wheel was made later on, over the seat where Pema Lingpa sat. When he used to give preachings, he used to sit where the present prayer wheel is. The foundation stone is his seat. This also was made by the angels. Outside the temple in the compound, you can see on the paving the footmark of the pig, and some of the hand and forehead of Pema Lingpa, where he used to do his prostrations. Did you see the deer mask inside the temple? Pema Lingpa made the face of the deer, and at night in his dream, an angel told him that there were a pair of antlers waiting on a hill, waiting to be put on this mask. So Pema Lingpa sent his attendant up there and the deer horns were there. So that’s how the mask was made. That is another one of the treasures made by Pema Lingpa himself.
“After he constructed the temple, then he went to Mebartsho to bring the treasure back.” In other words, his base secure, Pema Lingpa took up the duties of terton.
Mebartsho, the Burning Lake, is no more than a shaded grotto over a bottomless pool deep in a forest glen not far from Jakar on the way out of Bumthang to lira. It is a powerfully holy spot to the Bhutanese and a place of almost supernatural enchantment to the curious outsider who goes there and listens to its story. You walk to Mebartsho, a good thing. People should approach places of religious or mythological drama softly, cut down to human size. The path follows the rim of a gorge, since Mebartsho is a pool formed by the Tang River. Near the end of the walk, the path begins to descend, passing shallow caves in the rocky wall of the glen where faithful Bhutanese have placed dozens of tiny clay tsha-tshas or chaityas, miniature stupas, as sort of material prayers for forgiveness, better health, or other crucial needs. Then comes the stairway down to the deep, dark well of water where the miracle took place. Here is how a Bhutanese schoolbook explains what happened:
“When Pema Lingpa was around twenty-three years old,” it says (there we go again with a relative number), “he had a vision of the Guru Rinpoche giving him a scroll of prophecies for discovering hidden treasures. Following the directions given in the scroll, he went to the gorge of Tang Chhu below his village with some of his friends. He appeared to be somewhat strange to his friends. Immediately on their arrival at the gorge, he jumped into the pool in the river. He clambered out of the river clutching a box containing several religious texts. People were surprised and amazed when they heard about the incident and began to doubt the truth. On the next auspicious day, when he was about to jump into the lake, a crowd gathered on the rock to witness the sight. He held a butter lamp in his hand and prayed: ’If I am a demon, I will die. If I am the spiritual heir to Guru Rinpoche, I will fetch the treasures and come back with the lamp still lit.’ At this, he jumped into the lake. He reappeared after some time holding a ritual skull, a statue of Buddha, and the lamp, which was still burning. The lake came to be known as Mebartsho (Burning Lake). People’s faith in him began to grow and his fame as a terton began to spread.”
Like Guru Rinpoche and Pema Lingpa, the Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, the last of Bhutan’s three great historical figures, was a man of religion. But with the Shabdrung—literally, “the one at whose feet all submit”—we enter the kind of recorded time verifiable by reasonably good Bhutanese records and the relatively objective accounts of the first European visitors to Bhutan, two Portuguese Jesuits, João Cabral and Estevão Casella. The Jesuits were passing through on their way to Tibet in 1627 when they inadvertently got put under something close to house arrest for a number of months and had a lot of time on their hands to observe the daily life of the Shabdrung’s court. Casella’s written record of their “visit”—the Bhutanese regarded them as honored guests whose hosts just didn’t want them to move on—gave historians a benchmark by which to judge the later years of the Shabdrung’s rule and to measure the extent to which this exile from Tibet was able to consolidate his power while unifying the state. Still, the mysteries of Bhutan persisted. When the Shabdrung died in 1651, his death was kept a secret for exactly fifty-eight and a half years. Anyone who asked about him was told he was in retreat.
Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal had been a Drukpa abbot when he arrived in Bhutan in 1616, but his fame as a civil administrator in his adopted land soon outshone his religious reputation, save perhaps for his ability to call up magic and perform superhuman feats in tight spots. The Shabdrung had no sooner arrived in Bhutan than a series of six Tibetan invasions took place, all aimed at preventing him from establishing a power base so near the Tibetan border. In every case, the Tibetans went down to defeat, sooner or later. That left the Shabdrung free to begin organizing a kind of central government for Bhutan based on a division of labor between a desi, or secular head of state, and the je khenpo, or chief abbot, the national religious leader. Below the desi were three penlops or governors of large regions: the Paro penlop in the west and southwest, the Dagana penlop in the south-central area, and the Tongsa penlop in the east and southeast. A few semiautonomous subregions were left to the administration of dzongpons, local officials who like the penlops were based in the massive fortresses the Shabdrung constructed at strategic points around the country. Although there were fortified monasteries in Bhutan before the Shabdrung’s time, they were never on the scale of those he built, nor were they designed for so many secular and religious functions. In planning his mini-capitals, the Shabdrung sent word across the Himalayas, to Tibet, Nepal, and Ladakh, to find the finest craftspeople to construct and ornament the fortresses and the temples sheltered within their walls. These fortresses alone would demonstrate the genius of Ngawang Namgyal in pacifying, securing, and uplifting the country and its people. To be sure, there continued to be regional feuds and battles after his death, but the system held. The dzongs remain a unique Bhutanese institution architecturally, socially, and administratively.
The S
habdrung didn’t stop at desis and dzongs. He also codified laws and established an ethical system for officials, the spirit of which Bhutan may have to draw on heavily if it is to stay above the sea of corruption swamping the rest of South Asia. Under the Shabdrung’s rules, seventh-graders are taught by their history books, “no officials or priests are allowed to send out alms-begging parties.” Neither can any administrator “accept or demand any present for marriages or separations for which he is the civilian representative.” In short, anyone with power “should not give the subjects unnecessary trouble.”
The Shabdrung, while reputedly living a simple life, able to exist on a diet of fruit and milk, was not short of self-confidence. During his rule, he wrote a treatise extolling his strengths and virtues known as “The Sixteen I’s,” which was reproduced on his personal seal, a wheel with sixteen spokes. It goes like this in Bhutanese schoolbooks:
I am he who turns the wheel of the dual system.
I am everyone’s good refuge.
I am he who upholds the teachings of the glorious Drukpas.
I am the subduer of all who disguise themselves as Drukpas.
I achieve the realization of the Goddess of Compassion.
I am the pure source of moral sayings.
I am the possessor of an unlimited view.
I am he who refutes those with false views.
I am the possessor of great power in debate.
Who is the rival that does not tremble before me?
I am the hero who destroys the host of demons.
Who is the strong man that repulses my power?
I am mighty in speech that expounds religion.
I am wise in all the sciences.
I am the incarnation prophesied by the patriarchs.
I am the executioner of false incarnations.
When the Shabdrung died, or his death was finally acknowledged at the turn of the eighteenth century, three reincarnations of him began to appear more or less simultaneously, representing his body, speech, and mind. Over the two hundred years that followed, these reincarnations have been gradually downplayed and phased out. But the power of the Shabdrung lives on. When a rumor swept Thimphu in 1992 that a Bhutanese exile from India claiming to be a contemporary incarnate was about to pay a brief visit, crowds gathered outside a hotel where he was expected to stay, but the rumor was never more than that.
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