So Close to Heaven (15 page)

If we wanted to travel with a ghost or, more likely, a still-living spirit, since his reincarnations are apparently unlimited, we could choose no better companion than Padmasambhava, the Guru Rinpoche, that almost universal spiritual ancestor of Himalayan Buddhists. Sooner or later, we would find him everywhere, recognizable by his distinctive attire. He wears a peaked red helmet, sometimes with upturned flaps or a wide brim in the shape of a crown, and cradles a magic staff topped with two miniature Buddha heads and a skull. His pierced earlobes hang heavy with rings of precious metals or luminous jewels set in gold. His bold eyes stare out of a smooth, squarish face marked by a wispy, curled mustache and the hint of a goatee. Padmasambhava—“the lotus-born”—did not appear until more than a thousand years after the Buddha Shakyamuni’s life on earth, but he brought Tantric Buddhism to the mountains and plateaus, where as the Guru Rinpoche his visage flutters from prayer flags and peers from dim recesses of old shrines. When the scholar David Snellgrove went on a seven-month trek through uncharted Buddhist territory in Nepal in the 1950s, he saw the Guru everywhere. Once, when all that could be discerned on a rock carving in the middle of nowhere was the shape of Padmasambhava’s hat, Snellgrove was moved to remark that “one is led to reflect once more on the ubiquity of this wonder-working master of religion, who is supposed to have passed along almost every route that connects Tibet with India.”

From peak to peak and valley to valley, there are crackling tales of the Guru Rinpoche’s show-stopping miracles to tell on snowbound nights, and fading paintings to admire by the dim glow of candles in dark monastery chapels. His legend is at home here. The Guru was a master of long meditations, often performed in caves, of which there are many in the mountainous terrain. So such stories about holy men in their hermitages come easily to the tongue and ear. His mythological exploits drew supporting casts from a familiar animal world. In one of his eight manifestations, as Dorje Drolo, the Guru Rinpoche rode a tiger, we are told. Tigers figure in many heroic legends hereabouts, and so it is only proper that he should have one at his disposal.

Like other stars in the Tibetan galaxy, he bears a legend far larger than life, and some secular scholars question whether any human could possibly have existed in such stupendous glory. His story is too good, too
seamless, to be literally true, they say. But that isn’t really the issue. The important thing is that the Guru Rinpoche becomes a comforting, familiar face as one travels among the countless gods, goddesses, reincarnations, and manifestations in Himalayan Buddhism. We can pick up his thread, his trail, and more or less follow it across countries and eras.

Historians debate, but may never know, whether he was a historical person, a politically useful composite of several saints, or perhaps the personification of myths that help root the origins of the Tantric Buddhist school in an earthly reality. Only the Bonpos, who claim a form of Buddhism that predates not only the Guru Rinpoche but also the Buddha Shakyamuni himself, reject his miraculous life, though not his existence. North Indians often claim him as one of theirs, but believers in the Himalayan kingdoms say he was native to the Swat Valley, in the shadow of the Hindu Kush in what is now northwestern Pakistan. Bonpos excepted, all agree he was a reincarnation of the Buddha himself. Bhutanese textbooks inform us that the kingdom of Swat was then called Ugyen—other sources name it Uddiyana, a variation—and that the Guru was born there in a lotus in the middle of a lake, as prophesied by the Lord Buddha. The lotus, with its ability to produce a bloom of purity and beauty from a watery medium seemingly free of earthly constraints, was the favored birth environment of Buddhist saints. The Guru Rinpoche, as babe-in-arms, was adopted by the Ugyen king, Indrabutti, who was childless.

There are other versions of the tale, but the Swat story is a good one, because Swat’s reputation as a cradle of Buddhist sainthood serves as a reminder that even before the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great marched into the Indian subcontinent in the fourth century
B.C.
(about two centuries after Buddha’s birth), the now-austere landscape of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan was familiar with Buddhist worship and learning. The era and the art this region produced are often described collectively though loosely as Gandhara for the domain of the Kushan dynasty, whose empire reached the height of its artistic and administrative achievements in the second century
A.D.
under a great Buddhist emperor, Kanishka. The winter capital of the Gandhara court was the frontier city of Purushapura, later named Peshawar, the subcontinent’s last outpost before the Khyber Pass.

In summer, when Afghanistan’s ferocious winter weather subsided, the Kushana rulers decamped across the pass to take up residence not far
from Kabul. Incredible though it may seem now in the rough-and-ready towns of the Afghan-Pakistani border area, the serene and contemplative Buddhist world once stretched west from here to Persia and north into Central Asia. Some scholars believe that the first images of Buddha, sophisticated and finely wrought works, were created by religious artists in this wild region. Buddhism’s most lifelike, least stylized art was produced by the Gandhara school; it has never been equaled.

In years of travel on the subcontinent, I knew Afghanistan only as a battlefield, its fertile valleys seeded with mines, its towns in ruin. At the Afghan end of the Khyber Pass, near Torkham, travelers were stopped and warned not to enter a country in turmoil. Poor Afghanistan. It seems to have had a reputation for danger for as long as pilgrims have known it. In the seventh century
A.D.
the Chinese monk Hsuan Tsang, who made a trek of unprecedented proportions through the Buddhist world and kept extraordinarily revealing records, was told not to attempt a foray into the lands beyond the Khyber because the terrain was thick with brigands. Nearly a millennium and a half later, I could look down from the windy hills at the end of the pass to the eerily empty plain below and try to make sense of the notion that not so far away in the battle zone of Jalalabad, where fierce Islamic militants and Soviet troops had slaughtered each other before different Afghan factions chose to continue the carnage as a civil war, the land had once been blessed by a wealth of Buddhist stupas, sculptures, sacred caves, and stores of ancient writings produced by innumerable monks and saints. Pilgrims like Hsuan Tsang came here from the eastern reaches of Asia to revel in the atmosphere of piety and grace. Farther to the northwest there was Bamiyan, which boasted the tallest statue of Buddha built anywhere in the ancient world. And north of that is Balkh, the major town in ancient Bactria (now roughly northern Afghanistan), commanding the crossroads of two important silk routes. A story has been told there for centuries of two brothers who trekked across India to take a gift of sweets to the still-living Buddha as he meditated in Bodhgaya, in northern India. They returned with hair from his head to be enshrined at Balkh, thus certifying its antiquity in the Buddhist world.

The Guru Rinpoche’s Swat Valley, north of Peshawar, was an active part of this early West Asian Buddhist universe. Swat gloried in hundreds of Buddhist monasteries and temples, scattered among the steep hills and narrow gorges along the rushing Swat River, tumbling down from the
Hindu Kush. The monk-theologians of Swat, who are sometimes credited in legend with developing or perfecting the Tantric school and sending out its missionaries, also instilled in the valley a Buddhist influence that withstood centuries of Islamic onslaughts. Swat capitulated, finally, to the Moguls—eight centuries after Padmasambhava’s storied mission to the Himalayas. Today, a titular Muslim king of Swat remains all that is left of the valley’s long-lost independence of body and soul. Swat is Pakistani and Islamic, exemplified by the noisy bazaar in a town called Bahrain or the impressive new mosque in the mountain hamlet of Miandam. A local inkeeper there told me with pride that the people of Miandam, no more than a few dozen householders, had written away to Saudi Arabia for money to build their house of worship and were delighted to be showered with funds by a foundation eager to bolster the faith in this insignificant place.

“General Zia gave us the health center,” the innkeeper said, as we stood at the edge of the inn’s cliffside garden overlooking the village and talked about the legacy of Mohammad Zia-ul Haq, the military ruler of Pakistan who died in a mysterious plane crash in 1988 and who was thought of, more than a little erroneously, as primarily a champion of Islamic orthodoxy. “Zia also built a school,” he said, “but it was the Saudis who helped Miandam with the mosque.” Not even a memory of Tantric Buddhism remains here—certainly no hint of the brilliantly florid, extravagant style of image-making that would later define Buddhist temples in the Himalayas, where Chinese and Tibetan folk art influences were more powerful. Although the ruins of stupas and monasteries still draw pilgrims to the lower reaches of Swat, from the perspective of isolated towns like Miandam, in its own small tributary valley, the Buddhist era seems long ago and far away. Day to day, the people of Swat look south and west to the Arab world and Islam’s holiest places, not east and north to the world of Himalayan Buddhism.

Some of the most extensive excavations of Buddhist civilization in Pakistan have been made farther east, around Taxila, a fifty-five-square-mile valley between the Muree and Margala Hills only about twenty miles from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Several ancient cities were founded in this area of culturally diverse history. The most famous (though not the first) of them, Sirkap, was built in the second century
B.C.
and then rebuilt several times by later Central Asian conquerors. Through years of extensive turbulence, Sirkap apparently kept Buddhist
stupas intact, at least for a few centuries, augmenting them with a variety of temples to other religions. The stories of Sirkap and Taxila’s other ruins have been well told for lay travelers by Hilary Adamson and Isobel Shaw in their 1981
Traveller’s Guide to Pakistan
, a little-known book with a handmade look (wobbly maps, wrinkly paste-it-yourself endpapers) that never got the circulation inside or outside Pakistan that it deserves. But then Pakistan does not get much attention either. That’s a pity: there is an abundance of history crumbling or already buried along the Indus and on the windswept edge of what for a mere flicker of centuries later was British India. Contemporary India also has roots here. Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor who in the third century
B.C.
became disgusted with the excesses of his own militarism, converted to Buddhism, and propagated rules for a humane civil society, was, according to some accounts, assigned in his youth to service in the Taxila area, the widely recognized intellectual center of early Buddhism. Other accounts say that he promoted Buddhism here with a missionary zeal.

Adamson and Shaw warn us that those who revel in climbing around archaeological sites may be disappointed at first with the ruins at Taxila. The visitor must look beyond the “meaningless jumble” of stones and picture instead golden domes, colorfully robed monks, and camel caravans—the rich mixture of images conjured up by a place where trade routes from China, India, Europe, and Central Asia converged. Good advice, I thought, when I first climbed the steep hill to the Jaulian monastery, Taxila’s most intriguing site. Crossing the irrigation canal at the foot of the hill, or looking down from its three-hundred-foot-high crest over miles of grazing land, sometimes enlivened by an encampment of nomadic herdsmen and their families, I was forced to consider Buddhism in a setting and society unlike any experienced in other Buddhist lands from Indochina to Thailand and Burma, Sri Lanka, or Bhutan. I remembered how as a young child I had similarly to confront some essential truths of the Christmas story, primarily that Jesus was born not amid a glistening blanket of snow with reindeer in the sky above, but in a little town in the arid Middle East without Christmas trees as we knew them. My father was a Christian by faith but a historian and geographer by avocation; romantic images of far-off places had to check out or be abandoned.

Jaulian was a thriving Buddhist “university” in the third century, about five hundred years before the Guru Rinpoche vanquished unruly
Himalayan deities and made them guardians of the Buddhist faith. Built in the second century and sacked a few hundred years later by conquerors from the north, Jaulian lay in ruins until the British archaeologist Sir John Marshall began to excavate the site just before World War I. He worked at Taxila for nearly twenty years, and he was followed by other archaeologists, the most recent from Pakistani institutions. Now cleared of debris and partially restored, Jaulian looms over terrain populated mostly by poor villagers, whose low-slung, walled farmhouse compounds reflect the rural Islamic life of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is an introverted culture all but devoid of decorative arts (if you don’t count the garish urns for sale to tourists along the roadside) and a society in which women are kept safely behind walls, unlike their free-spirited Buddhist contemporaries elsewhere. At the Jaulian monastery ruins, friendly but indifferent Pakistani men in their baggy
shalwar
trousers and long
kamiz
shirts (topped often with the distinctive woolen Pathan cap with rolled brim) guide the infrequent visitor around the artifacts of a civilization that was never theirs.

Despite the forewarnings that some imagination has to be called into play here, I have never been able to re-create on several tramps around Jaulian a satisfactorily vivid picture of daily life as it might have been lived around the now-bare ruins of monks’ cells, domeless stupas, kitchens, stairwells, baths, and drains. The artifacts don’t help much, though simple shelters protect the extant and often exquisite (if mutilated) statues of Buddha, boddhisattvas, and various animal images. Buddhism hums and drones and tinkles; here drums and chants and temple bells have been forever silenced. On the plains below, we who have scaled this small peak of history and returned thirsty sit on the ubiquitous charpoy and drink Coke to the blaring music of a South Asian film. Local hustlers accost us with fake coins and images, some of them so skillfully reproduced, however, that, bargained down to a bazaar price, they are fun to buy and own. The people who make and sell them are, oddly, one real link between this Pakistani world and Taxila as it was.