by Pico Iyer
In front of the Jokhang are two stupa-shaped white furnaces, and as the sun began to rise above the distant mountains, and light to leak into the sky behind the temple, old women, often, would push cyprus or juniper branches into one of these caverns, and pour gasoline all around. The temple was soon flanked by two burning fires, and much of the square became a juniper-scented mist out of which pilgrims and visitors appeared, and then disappeared as abruptly. Somebody put on a radio—a crackle of folk songs came on—and even the little stall that called itself the “Jokhang Square Control Office” was shuttered in the early morning.
Immediately in front of the temple is one little chamber reached by descending a few steps slippery with melted butter. In it were just lines of lamps with tiny candles inside. As the sun appeared above the temple, the door to this underground place opened, and a few Tibetans went in and began slowly, patiently, putting a light to each in the long row of lamps, the lights casting an unearthly glow back into their faces. From afar the temple began to seem a fortress with small, flickering candles lined up in front of it.
From farther back, one could see the billboard that had been erected in the square, saying, pointedly, in English, NATIONAL CULTURE ALSO BELONGS TO THE WORLD. Next door, one of the only guest houses run (for many years) by Tibetans had a gold plaque at its entrance: EXEMPLARY SITE OF SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT IN TOURIST INDUSTRY. In front of me, the rows of candles flickering in the near-dark.
The single item that has done most to fix in the world’s mind the notion of a magical, and indestructible, Tibet, not subject to the laws of other countries, is of course Lost Horizon. “Welcome to Shangri-La,” announces the paperback copy that I picked up in Lhasa (THE FIRST PAPERBACK EVER PUBLISHED! the cover also says), and on the back I read of a place “high in the distant reaches of the Tibetan mountains where a group of worldly men and women have stumbled upon a land of mystery and matchless beauty, where life is lived in tranquil wonder, beyond the grasp of a doomed world.” In Frank Capra’s movie of 1937, this faraway kingdom, which seems to be a corruption of the legendary Tibetan sanctuary of Shambhala, is described, in an opening storybook frame, as “a place where there was peace and security, where living was not a struggle but a lasting delight,” and one so far from our notion of civilization that it remains nothing but “a blank on the map.”
In both the movie and the book, the creators of Shangri-La take pains to make their vision concrete with wry and ingenious details. A bathtub in the never-never land features the trademark “Akron, Ohio,” and the mysterious lama Chang, in James Hilton’s account, “observed the social formalities of Bond Street.” The hero, Robert Conway, is a sometime Oxford don (another “disciple of Descartes,” perhaps, and a classic British gentleman who has always been drawn to “the other side of the hill”), who, trying to find ways to explain Shangri-La, even to himself, confesses that it’s “a bit like Oxford.” All five of the newcomers arriving in Shangri-La have good reason to want to settle down there, and one (a former criminal) actually comes up with a scheme to introduce plumbing to the benighted people.
The author is also careful to frame the story of Conway’s flight into the Himalayas with accounts of the men he’d left behind him sitting in their London club, discussing him. The last words of the book, pinning down the very earthly time and place of its composition, are “Woodford Green / April 1933.”
And yet the most bewildering thing about Lost Horizon may be that this syrupy romance, loved and derided by generations in all its incarnations (the book, the movie, the restored Capra movie, and then a remake, starring Liv Ullman) proved, in fact, more clairvoyant than any of its makers had a right to expect. In the movie, the High Lama—living in a Tibetan palace that looks suspiciously like a movie mogul’s mansion in Bel-Air (and is now, in part, a luxury spa not far from my home in Santa Barbara)—prophesies a dreadful war and a man equipped with unprecedented weapons of destruction. Four years after the movie came out, America was at war, and eight years later Oppenheimer and his colleagues launched an atomic bomb upon the world. The High Lama’s repeated motto is, simply, “Be kind,” a slogan that would seem simplistic indeed were it not the same concrete, easy-to-remember message that the current Dalai Lama takes around the world to people from cultures very different from his own (“My religion is kindness”). The governing principle of Shangri-La is “moderation,” even to the point of forbidding “the excess of virtue itself,” and that sounds too good to be true until you remember the Middle Way that is the talisman of many a Western Buddhist today.
Most of all, the central action of Lost Horizon, in which some fallen, squabbling souls end up, because of war, in a long-unvisited kingdom run by lamas, actually came to life ten years after the book was written, when a rough-and-ready Austrian mountaineer named Heinrich Harrer escaped from a POW camp in India, with his friend Peter Aufschnaiter, and stumbled by mistake into Tibet, where he fell into an idyllic world out of time, as it seemed, and became a close friend of the teenage Dalai Lama. Five years after the movie was shot, a U.S. Air Force plane really did crash in Tibet. One of the only foreigners the book imagines as stealing into Shangri-La is, as it happens, an Austrian soldier who keeps the lonely holy man company. Even the details in the film that seem most purely (impurely) Hollywood—flocks of children, surrounded by deer, singing Brahms’s “Lullaby”—aren’t entirely absurd when you remember that pipers in Tibet in the old days played “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” and four Tibetan boys, early in the last century, were sent to be educated at Rugby, in England.
When two Hollywood movies recently told the true story of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (re-creating Lhasa and the Potala Palace in Argentina and Morocco), Lost Horizon was mocked as a quaintly naive vision of Tibet from a time when almost no foreigner had been there (its High Lama, famously, a European priest, more than two hundred years old, who is hoping for “the Christian ethic” to prevail). And yet the world in some ways has begun to catch up with Hollywood’s much discredited vision. In 1987, the Dalai Lama suggested Tibet be protected as a “Zone of Peace.” (In the book, Shangri-La functions as a zone of peace in which people are free to “stay with our books and our music and our meditations.”) In exile, the Tibetan leader has also said that China’s occupation has reminded Tibet that it cannot afford to ignore the present. (“We must move with the times, you know, even in Shangri-La,” says Hilton’s Lama.) When Hilton’s hero hears the great man expound the history of Shangri-La, he is moved, for the first time in his life, to fall to his knees; one turn of the Tibetan (or the Chinese) calendar later, when Heinrich Harrer and Aufschnaiter really did stumble upon the prospect of the Potala, “we felt inclined to go down on our knees like the pilgrims,” Harrer wrote, “and touch the ground with our foreheads.”
As Lord Gainsford, in the St. George Club, says at the end of the movie, after having spent ten months trying to keep Conway from returning to his dream, “I believe it because I want to believe it.”
My very last morning in Tibet, just hours before going to the airport, I suddenly awoke violently. It was still dark outside—the prayer-flags that crisscrossed the space around my room were just triangles fluttering in the blackness. The rain had subsided an hour or two before, but when I looked out of the window to the soldier sleeping at his guard post, I could see it was still misty and damp, very close to rain. I sat against the pillows in my bed, and, anxious to go to sleep, began to write. Page after page, unstoppably, though writing was the last thing I wanted to do at 4:00 a.m., before a long day of traveling that would take me to Chengdu, then Guangzhou, then Osaka, then Los Angeles.
I thought of the temple I had visited off the dirt road—the monk sitting stock-still, in his cupped glow (I can see him even now), so much like a statue of a Buddha that he seemed a symbolic representation of sorts. I thought of the light fading over Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Shigatse, the last few monks returning to their rooms, the sound of chants from an upstairs room, a lone elderly monk, like a po
liceman, walking up and down the lanes to make sure that everyone was home now, and safely behind locked doors.
I thought back to all the moments that had most haunted me in Tibet, and started writing about winter afternoons at my school in England when the lights would come on in the little cobbled lanes, and one could hear boys reciting their verses for chapel, or class in the morning, and the black-robed forms disappearing in the mist or suddenly materializing, in a town that had not changed, one could imagine, for centuries. Soon there would be prayers—all of us lined up in our unbroken rows—and not long after, at dawn, more prayers, and old monks, as they seemed, watching over us. Now there was just the cold of evening, and unheated rooms, and the damp, the chill, that still prevailed in all the fifteenth-century rooms.
The next day, when I was gone from Tibet, I dreamed I was back in Oxford, the town of my birth, and boarding a bus I lost my wallet, all tokens of my identity. I opened a book to learn more of the monastery I had seen, but I could find no mention of it anywhere. It wasn’t included by name in Magic and Mystery in Tibet, though it seemed home to precisely the esoteric practices celebrated in that book; it wasn’t listed even in The Tibet Guide, a compendious description of Tibet’s temples and their icons compiled by the scholar Stephen Batchelor. I sat in my room at home, and thought back to the signs for a “Lhasa Satellite Conference,” and the banners across the street (often obscuring the Potala) that said PARADISE OF DREAM SEEKERS. Then I thought back to a shaven-headed young monk, eyes closed, utterly unmoved by everything around him, and I wondered if the “real Tibet” could ever be destroyed, insofar as it is something, for resident, exile, and visitor, that lives mostly in a place that can’t be seen.
2002
GRANDMOTHERS
Sometimes, from my desk here in Japan, I see boys in the park across from me, hitting and hitting a ball with a large blue baseball bat. Their grandmothers sit in the sun, on benches, the leaves turning gold, russet, above them, and then coming down around them like confetti. A woman sits by herself on another bench, sketching the colors in front of her, and a flock of Boy Scouts is sent to gather all the trash (nonexistent, as far as I’m concerned), their yellow shirts fluttering across the clean green spaces.
I walk across the park, on a narrow path at its edge, in the autumn sunlight, and feel a foreigner’s sense of wonder: the convenience stores placed along the small, shiny road, as if they were just more vending machines; the two-story houses, tidily guarded by their walls, lined up along the narrow streets like salarymen in their business suits waiting in a receiving line for the future. Every trace of the old expunged as efficiently as once the trees and the rice paddies were, here in this place where hope means the West, and tomorrow.
All this, I know, is foreign only for a foreigner: the kids around me, in their hip-hop gear and surfer shorts, regard baseball as a Japanese invention, as Japanese as that McDonald’s outlet down the street. (“Did you see cannibals?” Africans ask one another when they come back from Europe, Ryszard Kapuściński writes.) Yet just a little behind the sleek new stores, at the edge of the neighborhood, where the streets run out, there is a deeper foreignness that is foreign even to the native: deep gulleys, often, or slopes of trees uncut. The visitor steps up to the wild space, and then steps back, and retreats to the shiny machines he knows and trusts.
I go sometimes to the local train station—banks of TV sets broadcasting all the cable channels of the world onto its platforms—and take a ten-minute train ride. When I get out, at the final stop, I step into the celebrated Deer Park, an open space so large and wild it takes up the entire center of the ancient capital, much as the Imperial Palace does in Tokyo, and its ghostly predecessor still does in Kyoto. A large silent space that exists near the center of the place the way something may be just near the heart of a person, seldom seen, but still essential. In its absence, there’d be nothing.
By day the park, running all the way from the station, the noisy arcades, the high-rising department stores, to the hills, is generally full of tour buses, schoolchildren brought here on a tour of their collective past, foreigners anxious to see the last untouched part of old Japan. But as soon as dusk descends, the place empties out, and, walking towards the hills, I can feel as if I’m the only person in the world.
A couple, perhaps, is peeping through a fence at the great Buddha temple, said to be the largest wooden structure in the world. A salaryman is walking, jacket over his shoulder, past the white-globe lanterns, home. A foreigner extends his arms, a temporary king, under the high ceremonial orange torii gate, built for ghosts and giants.
Otherwise, there is not a trace of anyone. I follow a stone path deep, deeper into the woods, the dark, and all noises, all commotion fall away. There are only deer, on every side, coming out onto the path after nightfall, as if to reclaim their territory. Ears cocked, noses alert, standing, stock-still, amidst the trees to see where I am going. Occasionally, a great gust of them—thirty or forty or more—takes off in a silent canter, then disappears into that farther darkness.
The deer, aggressive in their demands for food by day, are perfect Japanese hosts at night. They don’t come close to me, they don’t step away. I walk towards the flight of wooden steps that leads up to a temple on the hill, and they simply stand on every side of me, attentive. On the gravel path, amidst the trees, behind me in the dark: waiting for the trespasser to leave them to their home.
A few months from now, a festival will be held that dates, they say, from the time when Nara was the Buddhist capital, thirteen centuries ago. Men in white robes run along the terrace of the great temple on the hill, which overlooks the city, and the torches they carry shake in the night, and make the wooden building seem to tremble. The runners place, with great fanfare, the torches on the edges of the terrace, and sparks rain down on all the beings who have collected below, many of whom scramble in the darkness for auspicious ashes. Again and again, silently, the men carry their torches across the platform—gold streaks across the blackness—and send stars scattering below.
The deer stay quiet for the duration of the festival, wait patiently in the trees for the crowds to pass. After ten or fifteen minutes of gold-running, the crowds disperse, back to the station, hugging themselves in the cold, rubbing mittened hands together. You know, the old ladies tell the smaller beings beside them, that the deer are sacred messengers; they bring us news of the gods, who live somewhere in the hills.
An automated voice announces the next express train, and the teenagers with yellow hair pour in from the pachinko parlors and the bars. The visitors go back to their homes, and the deer step out again in the dark.
The people all around me on this shiny autumn morning, refulgent and cloudless—though the trees are beginning to turn, and today, for the first time, we put on thicker sweaters—are the very old, the very young; the others are off tending the fires of official Japan. I walk across the path in midmorning, and see old ladies walking with canes, out to get exercise as the leaves come down, or, as often, with tiny creatures by their sides, pointing out to them the cosmos flowers, that dog in winter coat. The very old and the very young live on the edge of things—though they’re central in Japan—and are closer to the woods; they don’t have to go and check in on the daylight world. They can talk, or make up stories, about the creatures still known as kamisama here, or nature’s gods.
The grandparents weren’t such good parents themselves, perhaps, when they were young; but nature is affording them a second chance. They have time now—in the short term—and freedom, while it lasts, to pass on whatever their grandparents passed on to them. To tell the toddlers at their side that the fox who waits at the edge of the trees isn’t really a fox at all; to say that that stranger who sits in a frame on the shrine isn’t a stranger at all, but their grandmother’s grandmother. The children, lost in their own games, don’t bother to say that there isn’t a picture of any old woman on the shrine at home, and they know the foxes they see on TV aren’t
real. That’s what makes them special.
They listen, because that’s what they’re supposed to do; perhaps they nod. And, being natural lawbreakers, they tell their grandparents a thing or two, about what that animal is saying to its owner, and what the secret name of that tree is. Their fathers are seldom visible, and their mothers are chafing against the uncertainties of a world of 7-Elevens and feudal rites; but the deer, the badgers stay the same.
When I was the same age as the children in the park, innocent of school (innocent, as it happened, of ghosts, though not of autumn leaves), I was asked to take a small part in a local production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Oxford is often known as the center of England’s largest motor works—Great Britain’s Detroit, if you like—but in one corner of the industrial city, Neville Coghill, the distinguished scholar of Chaucer, and friend to C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, summoned the dormant spirits of the soil to life and asked them to resume their pagan duties. Spirits flitted through the trees of Worcester College, and the Queen of the Fairies took her leave of men by drifting across the college lake. Puck danced from corner of the night to distant corner, and the ghosts of ancient Greece, which Shakespeare had brought into a sylvan evening in Elizabethan England, jumped across the centuries again and walked among us.
I saw the Dream again last night, in Nara, on a rented video from the Tsutaya Culture Convenience Club, and wondered if the scenes would seem strange to my neighbors in the park. Even the young, in their backwards baseball caps or their Chanel, go to shrines here where the temple charms are sold to them by women dressed in white, as vestal virgins. They walk around the pond and look at the O-tsuki-sama, or—in the kind of honorific translation that used to make us laugh when we were young— the “Most Honored and Godlike Moon.” They address the heavenly body, in fact, almost as Pyramus and Thisbe might in the Shakespeare play.