Blue Sky Kingdom

by Bruce Kirkby

  Monasticism and polyandry both act as natural regulators of growth, and for more than a thousand years, Zanskar’s population remained perfectly stable—critical in a land of such meager carrying capacity.

  But for Tsering Wangyal it meant he had to make a difficult choice. And at the age of fifteen, after milking the cows on a chilly fall morning, he set off toward Karsha Gompa without so much as a word of farewell to his parents.

  “Too little food. Too many brothers. Better me going.”

  On the other side of the world, Richard Nixon had been elected president; the Vietnam War continued to escalate; the first 747 jumbo jet was being constructed. And in the snowy suburbs of Toronto, I had just been born.

  Karsha Gompa, the most prestigious monastery in Zanskar, was home to more than two hundred lamas at the time. It lay within sight of Neyrok village—just three kilometers as the crow flies—but to get there, Wangyal had to walk far downstream, to a bridge of woven twigs. It was dark by the time he started climbing the steep trails toward whitewashed temples.

  Upon taking the vows of genyen—refrain from killing, lying, stealing, sexual misconduct and intoxicating substances—Wangyal was housed and tutored by senior lama Meme Stanzin. In the monastery school, he displayed an uncanny aptitude for memorizing Sutras, and within a year he’d taken the thirty-six vows of getsul and become a full novice.VI

  “School very happy time,” Lama Wangyal recounted. “With my teacher, and blessing of six-armed Mahakala, I understood quick and fast all the hard book,” referring to the 108 volumes of Kangyur.

  By the age of twenty-one—considered early, even in those years—Wangyal ascended to gelong, or fully ordained monk, submitting to 253 vows which include such odd-seeming admonishments as not transporting wool, not tickling, not eating in big gulps, not sitting down heavily and not leaning to one side like an elephant’s trunk.

  It was at the same time that modernity began seeping into Zanskar.

  During the summer of 1976, twenty-three-year-old Lama Wangyal was dispatched to the Pensi La pass, one hundred kilometers to the northwest, where he joined a crew of monks from other monasteries supporting the Indian government’s construction of a road. That August, the monks paused and leaned against their tools, watching a vehicle creep over the rugged track. It was a police jeep, carrying two officers from Kargil, sent to investigate a riot in Padum. Two days later the men motored back, carrying several prominent community members with them for questioning.

  For millennia, reaching the hidden valley of Zanskar had demanded, at minimum, a seven-day, 235-kilometer trek. That seclusion had been pierced, and the effect was like the bursting of a dike. A century of technological advances flooded into the valley. Tractors thundered over the pass, soon crushing precious topsoil in the irrigated fields. Foreign labor arrived. A diesel generating station was built. Transistor radios brought news from Delhi. Stores sprang up, selling flashlights, concrete blocks and booze.

  The young welcomed such change, but as James Crowden, a British geographer and among the first academic visitors to Zanskar, reported, “Older men and some of the more intelligent lamas foresaw problems. One man in particular summed it up neatly. ‘Today we are happy, we have enough food. When the road comes, young people will want money, and we will lose our peace of mind.’ ”

  And via the road, Lama Wangyal left Zanskar for the first time, two years later. Until that moment, his entire world—every person he knew, every home he’d visited, every path he’d walked—could all be surveyed from the airy perch of the monastery. It was a physically tangible life unlike anything we know today.

  Traveling with a group of senior monks, he visited the distant Ladakhi capital of Leh, where the men attended a seven-day Kalachakra initiation hosted by the Dalai Lama.VII In that time, Lama Wangyal saw his first car, heard his first foreign language, ate his first banana and watched a person speaking into what he thought was a shoe—a telephone.

  Returning to the monastery, after a decade of living under his teacher’s roof, Lama Wangyal began building his own home. Felling poplar trees by axe and forming mud bricks by hand, it took three months to complete the structure we now lived in: three storeys tall, connected by a labyrinth of passageways.

  In the ensuing years, Lama Wangyal continued a meteoric ascendency at Karsha Gompa. By the age of forty, he became ohm-zet, or chant master. Three years after that, he was instated as ghe-gheu, or monastery disciplinarian. Then he became lopon, or leader-in-waiting. Finally, in 2009, at the age of fifty-six, Lama Wangyal was installed as Head Lama of Karsha Gompa, the youngest monk to hold the prominent position in over a thousand years of monastic tradition.

  Stepping down after three years—as tradition dictates for all roles at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery—Lama Wangyal had settled into his role as lazur, recognized by every man, woman and child in the valley, when our family arrived.

  * * *

  When the movie ended, Lama Wangyal leapt up and disappeared into the adjoining puja room, soon returning with two wooden bowls.

  “For you,” he said, handing one to Christine and one to me. “Wanting?”

  Fashioned from fine-grained wood, the bowls were polished to the color of amber. Lined with silver, they appeared ancient. Lama Wangyal told us he bought them in Varanasi, eleven years earlier, while attending another Kalachakra teaching.

  “You keeping,” Lama Wangyal said. “No money.”

  They were gorgeous, and I imagined drinking tea from them at home in Canada: talismans of our time here. Desire swelled within.

  Faded price tags taped to the bases showed ten thousand rupees for one and eight thousand for the other—or roughly three hundred US dollars for both. Even in Canada, that would have seemed a lot of money for a pair of wooden bowls, but in Zanskar it represented a fortune. There was no way we could accept them as gifts.

  Glancing at Christine, I opened our duffel and dug out a wad of US cash, wondering if I was being rash. I handed Lama Wangyal three crisp hundred-dollar bills, and he inspected them carefully, turning each in the light.

  Then he leaned close and whispered, “Maybe me lucky man? Maybe me Canada coming?”

  I. Eighty-two monks were officially resident at Karsha Gompa, though many were not physically present. Some studied at the great Tibetan learning institutions of southern India. Others had been dispatched to manage land holdings in the Indian lowlands, near the village of Bodh Gaya, more than one thousand kilometers away.

  II. In Buddhist ceremony, the twin implements of bell and dorje symbolize the inseparability of wisdom and compassion, and their ritualized sweeping movements are meant to free the mind from distraction.

  III. A passage in The Yogins of Ladakh (John Crook and James Low) describes an identical Harvest Blessing puja at Karsha Gompa during the summer of 1974. In uncanny synchronicity, the text reports, “The ceremony had a marked effect on the weather! No sooner was it over, than a great sandstorm blew down the valley.”

  IV. A tulku, or reincarnate, is believed to embody a lineage of Buddhist teaching stretching all the way back to the original master. Roughly five hundred tulku lineages exist across the Himalaya today, the most famous being the Dalai Lamas, living incarnations of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.

  V. The Ear-Whispered lineage is an ancient line of wandering yogis and hermits, a secretive group with no written records of their teachings and practices, relying strictly on an oral tradition.

  VI. The boys in our class were all getsul—apart from the youngest five, who remained genyen.

  VII. The Kalachakra is an ancient teaching, typically offered to large public audiences and intended to empower initiates with tantric skills necessary on the journey to Buddhahood. After it faded into obscurity, the current Dalai Lama revitalized its popularity, presiding over thirty such ceremonies, many attended by two hundred thousand devotees or more.

  3 IN THE SKY, THERE IS NO DISTINCTION OF EAST AND WEST

  There is a special intensit
y of things at 12,000 feet in the Himalayas that brings out the gods within us.

  —Michel Peissel, Zanskar: The Hidden Kingdom

  10 SEAT OF THE KINGS

  I left the monastery after puja the next morning, bounding downhill toward the village, seeking a ride to Padum. The night before, Christine and I had stayed up late, whispering in darkness about Lama Wangyal’s suggestion—or request—that he return with our family to Canada, to visit with us for a few months.

  Years earlier, a young French woman had spent a winter living with the old monk, and his subsequent trip to France remained a highlight of his life. Photographs from that journey were plastered across the walls of our room: Lama Wangyal at Notre-Dame, at an outdoor café, in a patisserie.

  If Lama Wangyal wanted to join us in Canada, we both agreed that paying for his flights was the least we could do. We’d stayed under his roof for a month already, with two more to go.

  But beyond a sense of obligation, it also seemed to me like a possible way to bridge these two worlds and plant some seed of Zanskar’s peace in our frenetic, distracted lives at home. Already I could imagine the robed monk and myself sitting cross-legged beside the wood stove, chanting. Or walking hand in hand through the forest. Visiting the local supermarket. The first step would be obtaining a Canadian visa, and I wanted to begin the application process immediately.

  One dented car was parked in Karsha’s village square. Inside, a young man in a leather jacket was fussing over the stereo system. When I approached, he rolled up the window.

  So I set off by foot, intending to walk the ten kilometers to Padum. The skies were grey, and a biting wind swept down from the north. Puffy clouds stuck to mountainsides like cotton batting.

  Twenty minutes later, as I neared the rusty bridge across the Stod River, a Suzuki car pulled alongside. Two heavy-set men filled the front, as if they’d been poured in. The driver pointed a thumb to the rear, where a lean farmer sat with a propane tank on his lap, next to a young school girl in braids. I squeezed between the pair.

  Halfway across the barren plains, the Suzuki screeched to a halt and the young girl jumped out, skipping away across the desolation, presumably toward a distant farm. The driver popped the clutch and we roared on. We passed the Dalai Lama’s official residence in Zanskar: a humble, whitewashed building with gilt roof, standing alone. Upon first visiting the valley in 1980, His Holiness declared it a vital sanctuary for Tibetan Buddhism, and he has returned every summer since to hold public teachings.

  As we neared Padum, barley fields began to spring up from the rubble, which in turn gave way to a tangle of light industry: log peelers, furniture makers, propane-tank fillers and rock crushers. Beyond the carcass of a military helicopter—an Indian Mi-17 that crashed during the ’99 Kargil War with Pakistan—we entered a maze of narrow alleys. Once the seat of Zanskar’s king, the small town was now the valley’s administrative center, home to police, heliport, infirmary and a population of one thousand.

  I jumped out at the central square, where an Indian Army officer, in tan uniform and red beret, directed jeeps and tractors with a burnished baton. The milling crowds held farmers in puffy jackets, nuns in robes, teens wearing British football jerseys, dark-skinned laborers from Kerala, Kashmiri merchants and a sizable Muslim contingent, identifiable by head wraps and shalwar kameez, the baggy shirt and trousers of Pakistan.

  Padum’s Muslims had emigrated from Kargil generations earlier, and now comprised half of the local populace, which was an anomaly because elsewhere in Zanskar the population was almost exclusively Buddhist. For decades the two communities had enjoyed a comfortable coexistence, marked by friendship and even interfaith marriages. But in recent years, that peace had collapsed. While the origins of the dispute remain hazy—often traced to a quarrel over grazing rights—the effect had been shattering. Buddhists no longer ate at Muslim restaurants or shopped in Muslim stores. And vice versa.

  Half-constructed buildings rose above the crowds, echoing with the clatter of hammers and generators. The noise and press of people felt overwhelming—which was ironic, for Padum lies as far off the beaten track as a traveller can get. Here one finds none of the trinket vendors, banana pancakes, mixed-fruit lassis or neon massage signs ubiquitous across much of Asia. In fact, I saw no other Westerners at all. But already, I missed the monastery’s quiet isolation.

  Wandering the main street, I discovered two bakeries, a hardware store, a medical dispensary, four restaurants and a general store, which sold prayer flags, fish-shaped padlocks and incense. The butcher’s door was propped open by a severed calf’s head. Three fresh produce stands carried exactly the same hodgepodge of wilting fruits and vegetables—whatever the latest truck from Srinagar had brought.

  This relative abundance marked a staggering change from 1976, when visiting French ethnologist Michel Peissel reported not a single store. Instead he found a non-monetized, self-reliant society, where locals grew their own food, made their own clothes and even gathered their own herbal medicine on surrounding mountainsides. They appeared to have everything they needed, Piessel observed at the time, beyond salt, tea and metal cooking utensils—which they acquired from passing traders.I

  After cramming my backpack with a watermelon, apples, tomatoes, cashews, fresh peas, garlic, tomato sauce, and toilet paper, I bought a handful of Center Fruit gum for Bodi and Taj, a small jar of instant coffee for Christine and a tin of brown paint for Lama Wangyal.

  A Kashmiri shoeshine, sitting beneath a dirty tarp and surrounded by scraps of leather, held out a handful of dried apricots. The wrinkled fruit was the color of amber and rattled like dice in my palm. Splitting one between my molars, I found it sweet, chewy and pleasantly tangy. After handing over a small wad of rupees, I filled my pockets with the exquisite treats.

  Down a nondescript dirt track, I found my objective: the Mont Blanc Cyber Cafe. A slim man named Lichten sat at the front desk, wearing aviator sunglasses and a satin jacket with Top Gun embroidered across the back, engrossed in a video game. Absently he motioned me through a curtained doorway to a darkened room, where five computers sat atop a sheet of plywood, connected by a bird’s nest of wiring.

  I flicked one dusty machine on. It took a long time to boot, and then web pages required minutes to load. The power failed, plunging the room into blackness. Lichten started a generator, but the internet was frozen, and the satellite link had to be reset.

  It took an hour to find a Canadian visa application form. When I clicked download, a blue bar began inching across the screen. Estimated time remaining: thirty-four minutes.

  To pass the time, I uploaded a photograph from my camera and posted it to Instagram, feeling mildly guilty for connecting to the world beyond. Almost immediately, a comment popped up, questioning the accuracy of my caption. It came from a friend, and while the intent was surely innocent, I felt tension wiggle in my brain.

  Eventually the download finished, but the computer was unable to open the file. Its software was outdated. When I asked Lichten if I could run an update, he shook his head.

  “Daytime no possible. Too slow.”

  Instead, he promised to download the necessary software that night, when fewer users clogged the satellite network, and suggested I come back the next day to print the form. I thanked him, paid for my time, then slipped out into knife-sharp sunlight.

  After waiting vainly on the edge of town for a ride back toward the monastery, I shouldered my pack and set off alone. Soon it began to drizzle. Yanking a garbage bag from my pack, I tore holes for arms and head, and pressed on.

  With every step, my friend’s Instagram comment wriggled in my mind. I knew it was pointless to dwell on the words, yet I seemed unable to push them aside. I tried to concentrate on my breathing, but that didn’t help. The worm inside my head was feeding. If one inconsequential social media comment could send me into such a tailspin, how could anything we learned in Zanskar endure upon our return to Canada? Pulling Lama Wangyal’s mala beads from my nec
k, I rolled them through my fingers, quietly repeating, Om mani padme heung.

  Twenty minutes later, I was still battling with my attention when two middle-aged women appeared on the rocky plains ahead. Goatskins were slung across their shoulders and they carried rope lassos in their hands. The pair scrambled onto the asphalt ribbon, a stone’s throw ahead of me, then turned to stare at the odd, garbage bag–clad foreigner.

  “Jullay!” I waved.

  “Jullay! Jullay!” they replied, waiting for me to catch up.

  “Where going you?” one asked.

  “Karsha Gompa.”

  “What doing you?”

  “Shopping in Padum.”

  “What name you?”

  “Tsering Mortub.”

  The women glanced at each other, then began shaking with laughter. “Tsering Mortub! Oh, Tsering Mortub!” they said over and over, until their eyes watered.

  Once they’d calmed down, they introduced themselves as Torje Palma and Sherup Dolma, hailing from the hamlet of Upti, six homes tucked in the shadow of Pipiting Monastery. I came from Canada, I explained, and was staying at Karsha Gompa with my family.

  “How long?”

  “Three months.”

  “Three months?” they exclaimed in surprise. “With who staying?”

  Lama Wangyal’s name brought approving nods. “Very, very good lama.”

  Torje reached up to examine a tangle of necklaces hanging from my neck. Pointing to a tattered piece of red string, she said, “Dalai Lama.”

  It seemed uncanny, but twenty years earlier, the uncle of a Sherpa teammate had indeed taken that very piece of string to Dharamsala, where it was blessed by the Dalai Lama.

  We walked on in silence, the women flanking me no taller than my elbows.

  “One biscuit?” Sherup abruptly asked.

  Rather than feeling slighted or infringed upon, I felt a pang of sadness, for I had none to share. Then I remembered the Center Fruit. Rummaging through my pockets, I held out the gum in an open palm. Sherup and Torje gingerly took one each, touching the candy first to foreheads and then hearts, before finally popping it in their mouths.