Everyone with experience in Bhutan seems to have a wonderful story or two to illustrate the Bhutanese nonchalance about taking on the world single-handed. Apart from Ugyen Dorji—the baker in Thimphu who walked out of an impoverished life in the hills and a few years later was training with an Austrian pastry chef in Bregenz—my favorite character is Phuntso, a Bhutanese monk of about thirty whom I met in Kathmandu. In 1990, he told me, he left Bhutan to visit America. In Kathmandu, with the help of some Bhutanese with the funds to assist him as an act of faith, he got an American visa and a ticket to Bangkok. There he managed somehow to get a Thai International flight to Seattle. Monks always receive a great deal of deference and help from Thai airlines, though Phuntso wasn’t too clear about how the flight was paid for. Anyway, he arrived in Seattle with no money and in debt for his tickets. He did have one phone number belonging to an American Buddhist in Los Angeles. Immigration officials must have been aghast at this slender, single-minded man in dark crimson robes with almost no possessions. They questioned him for three hours in Seattle and then gambled and sent him on to southern California, where someone from a Buddhist center was summoned to meet him and give him a place to stay for a week while he looked for his Los Angeles contact, whom he identified as Arthur Schanche or “Dr. Aht.” According to Phuntso, this generous benefactor enrolled him in an English-language school and gave him a place to stay for two years, strictly as an act of devotion.
Free of material cares, Phuntso had a good deal of time to size up American Buddhists. “Some were good and some not so good,” he said. “Some seem to be looking for something for themselves, not for mankind.” He was most impressed with Chinese-American Buddhists, he said, because they seemed the most genuine. Thai-American Buddhists were too clannish to penetrate, however. Thais had their own temples, he said, which were Theravada Buddhist, not Mahayana, in any case. And New York, he decided, was too cold to visit when a trip became possible. For these and other reasons, he was unable to see nearly as much as he would have liked of America and its Buddhist communities. Back in Kathmandu at the small Nyingma Institute, Phuntso was pondering his next move. He was due to undertake the traditional three years and three months of meditation in retreat. He couldn’t decide where to go.
Once on a visit to the Bumthang district in central Bhutan, I went looking for something like a model village, to see what improvements rural Bhutanese families would make if they wanted to live better lives by earning money in farming or business, but on a smaller scale than the new capitalists of Thimphu. I was sent to Jalikhar, close to Jakar town, where a gentleman named Ap Singye owns one of the grandest houses. At its back, the house overlooks one of Bhutan’s most bucolic scenes, a broad expanse of meadow along the aquamarine waters of the Tang Chhu, where horses grazed among the willows. In front are more pastures on gently sloping hills. The ground is so good here that a little farther down the road environment and agriculture specialists were able to restore a deforested hill in a few decades through natural regeneration. That taught them to fence off other land to stop the free grazing of cattle.
Ap Singye’s house is a two-story affair that we entered from the back, through a farmyard. Singye has done well in farming and from dabbling in other businesses locally. In fact, he wasn’t home when we arrived, so someone sent to town for him. Singye was conversant with the world. A relative—I seem to recall it was his son—had gone to study in Hong Kong. He was eager to show me his house. The ground floor, as always in rural Bhutan, was left unfinished for storage space. The main rooms were on the floor above. We tarried longest in two of them, the kitchen and the family prayer room. The kitchen’s centerpiece was a large smokeless stove made of clay, which dominated a corner of the room. This luxury gave the family clean air to breathe indoors, a marked improvement over traditional smoke-filled kitchens. Next to the kitchen was an empty room, with only a few long wooden poles suspended on ropes from the ceiling “to dry things,” Singye explained. Later in another home, someone explained that the empty room would be given to a visiting monk or other distinguished guest. Monks are regularly invited into Bhutanese homes to perform special ceremonies for a family, not all of the rites strictly Buddhist. Monks can be called to cleanse a home of troublesome spirits or illness. They may be specialists in building talismans to ward off evil. They are there in birth, illness, and death.
A door from Singye’s empty guest room toward the back of the house led to the family prayer room, which also served as the formal parlor. He ushered us to a rug-covered couch while his wife prepared hot buttered tea for us, with bowls of roasted grains to thicken the salty drink. While we waited, Singye talked about his family, and I had time to absorb the family altar opposite where we were seated. It was an exceptionally elaborate construction of wood, perhaps six feet wide, with gilded panels reaching to the ceiling. On the altar itself, there was an image of a sainted lama swathed in yellow silk, a silver pitcher of holy water topped by peacock feathers on its lid, a vase of cut grain, and a bowl of roasted cereals. There was also a stylized torma confection in gold or brass and the seven offering bowls filled symbolically with water. At the center of the assembly of religious objects was a sizable painting, about twelve by eighteen inches, of the Dalai Lama standing as if in a preaching pose, radiating light in rays above and around his head. It was framed in silver. Over the Dalai Lama’s shoulder, several gilded images of Buddha looked down from niches in the altar’s panels.
Singye and his family had most certainly invested a substantial part of their wealth in this altar. It stood alone in the sturdy but simple house as a kind of glittering chimera or a vision beheld in a dream of heaven. For Bhutanese of middle age, the advent of a cash economy and the chance to accumulate a disposable income has meant the opportunity to glorify their homes and lives with altars worthy of their gods and deities. It has provided the wherewithal to give more generously to monks and monasteries and to undertake pilgrimages. For this first generation of beneficiaries of development, religion and the more rapid salvation of the soul have been the highest priorities.
But now what?
The signs of the future are already evident in Thimphu and Phuntsholing, where members of the next generation, now in their teens and twenties, are spending more time in shops, cinemas, and cafés than in temples. At the Institute of Traditional Medicine, Dr. Morisco didn’t think anyone should be too complacent about Bhutan. “The Bhutanese face the same threats and dangers we have in the West,” he said. “I mean, many of them, if they had the chance, they would go straight to New York and live in New York as a probably one hundred percent New Yorker. I don’t think being Bhutanese there would make a difference. This is a society that has grown and formed itself over the centuries on the basis of Buddhist teachings, and that has given it special qualities. But the Bhutanese of today have inherited this without any merit of their own. Now they have to make their own choices. There is one good thing about the Bhutanese government, that is that it is an enlightened government, because it has an enlightened king. Definitely, the government is much more ahead than the people in controlling development. With more freedom, what choices would the people make? Like now there is a trend to go toward private businesses. That poses a lot of intrinsic problems because the government has been able to keep back all the negative development. Once the initiative goes to private business, I have serious doubts that many Bhutanese businessmen care a thing, for example, about nature.”
Sonam Gyatso is a young monk who also worries about the future of Bhutan. At the age of twenty-eight, he gave up his career as an accountant, still a new profession, and turned back to religion. “I changed my dress and became monk,” is how he described it. He had gone to Kathmandu to immerse himself in the study of classical Tibetan and the Buddhist philosophy, rejecting a chance to study in the South Indian city of Mysore, also a center of Buddhist scholarship, because it seemed too far away for him. He wanted to stay closer to Bhutan. In Kathmandu, he lived among other mountain peopl
e, mostly Ladakhis and Sherpas, while he studied and thought about how to help prop up his country’s spirit.
“I pray to see our country in peace,” he said. “There are so many struggles in Bhutan now. We are becoming unhappy people.”
Chapter 11
ALL SENTIENT BEINGS
THE MONKS at one of Bhutan’s most venerated temples were having a spat with the security officer assigned by the district’s civil administrator to guard the shrines and enforce new rules against littering and the harboring of stray dogs. On a winter morning when sunshine bathed the temple courtyard and glinted off the golden-brass butter lamps set out to dry after a scrubbing, the administrator had lined up the abbot and half a dozen monks like so many schoolboys for a dressing-down. The ineffectual security officer, standing a few feet away, head down almost to his chest, had reported that he was the victim of a monkish conspiracy. Nobody in holy robes obeyed him, he said, though at this temple they were wards of the state. Monks refused to tidy up their quarters. They gave leftovers to the pariah dogs. Worst of all, the caretaker-guard alleged, they threatened him.
The administrator was livid. Striding back and forth in front of the silent, expressionless monks in their maroon robes and assorted running shoes, he admonished them sternly, told them that their campaign of noncompliance was over and they would henceforth pick up their trash and stop feeding stray animals. He then turned sharply on his heel and strode out of the monastery yard. As he approached the gate of this sacred place, a tiny, velvety-brown puppy loped happily toward him out of curiosity, hunger, or a search for affection, as baby animals do. As their paths crossed, the administrator, without missing a step, kicked the little dog out of his way, sending it rolling and squealing in pain and fright across the stones.
“In this place, there will be no dogs and no pigs,” the administrator later explained calmly. “They are filthy and spread disease.”
Bhutan has a stray-dog crisis, and it goes to the heart of the conflict between piety and progress in a Buddhist universe, where sparing the life and sensibilities of an animal is supposed to be an act of faith. Not infrequently and in many realms of activity in Bhutan and elsewhere in the Himalayas, monks and lamas are running into conflict with an increasingly intrusive and scientific state. The argument may be over opposition to modern medicine or the growth of secular education outside the monasteries, the spread of tourism to holy sites, or the treatment of animals, domestic or wild. As Rigzin Dorji made clear time and again, some topics may be open to debate, but there is really no latitude on the issue of protecting nonhuman life. All of us, down to the smallest mouse or insignificant insect, are sentient beings and therefore sacred in Buddha’s eyes.
“Today my mother may be human,” Rigzin Dorji said. “But when I die, I may be reborn as a dog, and then my mother may be a bitch. So therefore, you have to think that all living beings are my parents. My parents are infinite. Let my parents not suffer.”
Carried to extremes, the rule defies reason and overrides instincts of human kindness, leading to cruelties no less painful than outright abuse. On a path to Sherubtse College, a dog had collapsed and was obviously dying slowly and agonizingly, its hairless body riddled with open abscesses. Why not put it to death? I asked. Buddhism tells us not to take life, was the reply. I heard that again when I encountered along the road a horse turned out of a village because it had broken a leg and could not work. The bone-thin animal was hobbling clumsily along the bed of a stream beyond the farmers’ fields, dragging a useless back leg as it hunted for anything green and succulent on which to graze. No one apparently wanted it, or could afford to feed it just for pity’s sake. Yet no villager dared risk the karmic consequences of an act of euthanasia.
Horses and ponies are having a tough time with modernization too. Twice on the stretch of road from Tongsa to Tashigang, we pulled over to help local people calm village horses that had been brought down to the paved road to shorten the route to market towns and were driven wild with fear as they encountered advancing buses and trucks for the first time. Bhutan had begun to join those developing nations where ruthless drivers, forgetting the rules about sentient beings, bully defenseless animals off the roads with misplaced bravado and even cruelty. We stopped because my Bhutanese companion on that trip was a village boy at heart and hated to see either farmers or animals suffer. First he ran to the assistance of a bewildered woman trying to recapture a crazed horse that had decided to escape the highway and run back to its village home after encountering a rattling, horn-blowing truck. That encounter passed off well: the horse recovered after the offending vehicle had disappeared around a bend. “Toot, toot!” the horse’s owner shouted venomously, shaking her fists at the back of the receding truck.
The second case nearly ended in tragedy. An overloaded bus with a thoughtless driver honking his horn and screeching his brakes as he came toward us had no sooner passed by than we drove into the chaos he had left in his wake. A horse was rearing and whinnying in the middle of the road, its baskets of produce overturned and emptying in the dust and exhaust. A woman near tears was nearby, watching her son try to rein in the frantic animal. The boy soon lost control, and the horse began to gallop away senselessly, with the wild eyes of a beast possessed by demons. We crept along behind them in our car and asked the young man if he wanted to ride with us, thinking we could catch up with the horse and persuade it to stop. “No!” he said decisively. “It will surely throw itself into the ravine and die.” We pulled off into a shallow ditch to wait out the drama.
My companion was off and running again, although the horse had a very long lead and might soon be out of sight. Suddenly a young woman appeared at a bend in the road ahead, and, sizing up the situation quickly, she walked slowly into the path of the terrified animal. She began speaking. The horse slowed for just a second, long enough for her to lunge for the reins. She clung to the still-skittish animal and was dragged for a few yards. Then it was all over. The horse stopped and let her stroke its head.
“You see,” my Bhutanese companion explained, “that horse was cared for by a woman in his village. So when he heard the voice of a girl, he felt safe.” The son took the reins and led the panting but footsure animal almost straight up the steep canyon beside the road, and fastened it to a tree out of sight of traffic, where it would be left to rest. He told us that the horse had never been out of its village on anything but a dirt trail; this was its first trip to town along the highway. The driver of the noisy bus had blasted his horn at an already wary animal on a road cut into a rocky hillside with no spare land left for refuge on either side. If a second bus jockey had come along, the horse might have chosen to plunge to its death. Fortunately, traffic is still light in Bhutan’s farther reaches.
For the devout Buddhist, shouldering the burden of responsibility for animals can sometimes take tragicomic turns. In Nepal, where Hinduism and Buddhism coexist and sometimes overlap, Buddhists run from temple to temple in Kathmandu on certain Hindu festival days to pray for the souls of goats or other animals served up for ritual slaughter. In Bhutan, where Buddhists believe they can eat meat but not butcher animals, a farmer will bring fresh yak flesh to market but never admit to killing the yak. He will say that the yak, a surefooted, high-altitude animal, fell off a rock or met some other unlikely accident. Strips of meat are cured in the winter—sun-dried on the ground or air-dried on clotheslines—to make a delicacy appreciated everywhere in Bhutan. But I never saw a butcher shop. The only animal I saw butchered, in the privacy of someone’s home, was a pig being cut up for the winter larder at the headquarters of a joint Bhutanese-European agriculture project. The pig, however, has very low status.
A seller’s coyness about the origins of meat or the circumstances surrounding the death of the animal whose parts are for sale pose special problems for someone like Kelzang Tenzin, who struggled for years to make a modest success of the first European-style demi-haute-cuisine restaurant on a back alley in Thimphu, the Bhutanese capital. Op
timistically, he called his bistro The Rendezvous, but it never quite lived up to its name. It was shrouded in gloom and empty last time I saw it, shortly before it closed, and its owner moved on to try his luck at the golf course café. Kelzang Tenzin trained as a chef at Holiday Inns in Hong Kong and Singapore and came back to Bhutan in the late 1980s determined to open a kitchen of international standards that would both educate Bhutanese and attract affluent foreigners from the offices of international development agencies and the handful of tourist hotels. He acknowledged when I met him over coffee that he was more or less done in early into the experiment by the absence of culinary herbs—and, more important, high-quality meat. Without good ingredients, his recipes were not very useful.
“Cooking in Bhutan has never been an important thing in life,” he said. “People eat at home, and they eat simply. Religion has a lot to do with it. Because killing animals is not acceptable, a lot of our meat comes from India. It is of very poor quality, because animals there are not fed well and they are slaughtered too old, by primitive slaughtering methods. People in Bhutan don’t want to catch fish, either, so I can’t concentrate on that. We have very good, excellent rainbow trout, but I can’t get enough of it. People don’t want jobs that take life.”
So Close to Heaven Page 23