So Close to Heaven (24 page)

Khenpo Rigzin has turned down many offers to teach in the West, because he believes the Himalayan milieu is important to him. “I know that the standard of life is very good in America. But we need something different. According to our philosophy, we must realize the dharma. The way of living must be there. It is good for monks to stay in a group, to practice prayer together. Here I feel sure, secure. It’s easier to live as lama in Nepal.”

If anything, Nepal is already becoming spoiled by success, Khenpo Rigzin said, reflecting the burgeoning sense among some leading Buddhist lamas that too much luxury is creeping into monastic life. In some cases, that is already an understatement. A Kathmandu businessman told me how when he tried to sell a Mercedes-Benz, he got no takers in the royal family or among wealthy houses, but found a Tibetan rinpoche ready and willing to pay cash for the car. One day, leaving a Kathmandu restaurant after lunch, I saw two monks head toward a new Hyundai parked out front. The older one got into the back; the younger one (wearing a cowboy hat) folded his robes, slid into the driver’s seat, and sped away. The ideal life of a monk, Khenpo Rigzin said, is to follow the Lord Buddha’s own advice to avoid cities, corrupting influences, distraction. He said that only the greatest of lamas would be able to concentrate in the busy atmosphere of some gompas these days.

His Holiness Ngawang Tenzing Zangbo, the Sherpas’ Tengboche abbot and overseer of all Buddhist gompas in Nepal when I met him, said pithily that these days too many monks “prefer electricity to butter lamps.” He expanded on this to say that there was nothing inherently bad about new inventions and modern life in general. The problem came when these things became preoccupations. “Good clothing, for instance,” he said. “In other times, lamas never wanted the best garments. They could go barefoot and possess nothing. Now they are asking for better robes. At Tengboche, I am trying my level best to keep things as traditional as possible. I want to improve life a little bit, make it more comfortable, but stay always within tradition. I believe that when
you learn the harder way, when you experience hardship, this means more and is closer to our teaching.”

He said that he is not surprised to see Westerners flocking to Tibetan monasteries in Nepal. “In the West, there are too many distractions,” he said. “People long to come to these mountains. Here you can learn things through your heart.” He noted that Kathmandu also drew many Himalayan people because of its proximity to sacred places, but was confident that many lamas among them would return to remote areas and practice a wholesome religion, free of urban temptations. He hopes that the spiritual boom will result in higher levels of religious life all around the region and not the further degradation of monastic life through materialism. He sounded as if it might be touch-and-go in some places.

Almost all Buddhists in the Himalayas, not just lamas, are coming into frequent contact with wealthier Buddhists, both Mahayana and Theravada, from Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and farther east. A glimpse of their obvious affluence has a powerful effect. Bhikku Nirmala Nanda, one of a small number of impoverished Theravada monks in Nepal and the abbot of a temple in Lumbini, is grateful for the gifts brought by Thai pilgrims, but alarmed at their materialism. “They come with so many baggages full of things,” he told me as we shared tea, he in his chair of honor near the altar and I on the steps nearby that led to his mango grove in the sunny courtyard. “I have to tell them, ‘If you carry so much heavy baggage, it will be very difficult to get to Nirvana. Reaching enlightenment will take a longer time than if you are free of this weight.’ ” I told him the biblical story in which Jesus declared that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich man to enter heaven. He said he hadn’t heard that one, and chuckled at the symmetry.

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DISCUSSING
theology, Khenpo Rigzin and Ngawang Tenzing Zangpo both dared to venture the opinion that because of the political nature of the Tibetan exile movement, the Dalai Lama’s base in the northern Indian mountain town of Dharamsala, harder to get to than Kathmandu, is no longer a universally accepted center of the Tibetan Buddhist universe in scholarly and spiritual terms. The Dalai Lama is a Gelugpa reincarnate, and much of the activity in Kathmandu is associated
with other Buddhist orders, but that is not the issue. “His Holiness has one foot in the dharma and one in politics,” Khenpo Rigzin said. “He can’t move on either side. We Tibetans have to be militant, but I don’t believe my religion should bring me into politics. The political activity has weakened the Dalai Lama as a religious teacher.”

Himalayan Buddhist lamas and abbots are now free to return to Tibet, where most of them were born or studied, and many are making the spiritual journey. They help restore monastic links and sometimes support the rebuilding of shattered gompas. His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was among those who returned to Tibet in peace in the 1980s. He led an international campaign to restore the original Shechen monastery in Kham, in eastern Tibet, one of the six leading Nyingmapa centers. The monastery, where the rinpoche had gone as an incarnate tulku at the age of eleven, was ruined like many others in China’s Cultural Revolution. Such a trip for the Dalai Lama would be all but impossible short of a significant change of heart in Beijing. And so Dharamsala grows ever more remote from the Tibetan Buddhist mainstream.

Robert Thurman, a Columbia University Buddhist scholar who was ordained as a monk in his youth, agrees that Tibetan Buddhists are making a big impact on Nepal in both economic and religious spheres, though he deplores the damage the chemical dyes of the Tibetan carpet industry, now Nepal’s largest foreign-currency earner, have done to the environment of the Kathmandu Valley. Buddhists should be protectors of nature, he says. But Thurman, who has known the Dalai Lama for many years, gave a sympathetic accounting of the exile leader’s predicament when we met in Bumthang, in Bhutan.

“His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the only one who has had to combine intellectual and religious leadership with responsibility for a community,” he said. “He had to oversee the setting up of a curriculum for schoolchildren in exile that would give them both some preparation for the modern world and would restore their culture; give them some sense of pride in a situation where they had nothing. They literally came out of Tibet in rags, and barely survived. Many family members died in the exodus. And so that experience has made His Holiness very practical and very firm about certain things. He has constructed large monasteries. He also supported technical education and innovation. He’s had to really think through a lot of these things. I don’t think he’s done a perfect job,
and I don’t think he thinks he’s done a perfect job. I don’t think he has been able to implement everything he’s wanted to implement.

“Around him and the various ministries, one of his problems now is that a lot of the more capable Tibetans—amongst the Tibetan refugees it’s considered a kind of patriotic duty to serve the government in exile—put in their years of service, then take off into business or go abroad. They can’t really earn any money—or hardly a living wage if they have children they want to put into school—by working there. It’s become such a meager government in exile. So there is a little bit of mediocrity there. However, there is a very good spirit, and His Holiness himself sort of keeps after them, and he manages to do a good job.”

Furthermore, the Dalai Lama, winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, has periodically had to deal with pressure from younger Tibetans who want Buddhists to be more militant in efforts to regain their lost homeland from the Chinese, a course of action His Holiness described in an interview with me in Delhi as “suicidal,” given the might of Beijing’s army and the hostility of the Han Chinese. The battle to keep the Free Tibet campaign on a nonviolent course has consumed a lot more of the Dalai Lama’s already stretched time and energy. “The Dalai Lama feels militancy is immoral from a Buddhist point of view, and he’s not a militarist,” Thurman said. “He worries about militancy among his followers. I think the Nobel Prize postponed more militancy, violent militancy, among the young, both outside and inside Tibet. It gave the young Tibetans the view that maybe there was a way out through a kind of Gandhian militancy, a nonviolent militancy.”

While Tibetans have raised awareness of Himalayan Buddhism internationally, Sherpas have been contributing significantly to what an American anthropologist calls the mainstreaming of Buddhist culture within Nepali society. James F. Fisher, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal who occasionally returns to live for spells in the region, said in his 1990 book
Sherpas: Reflections on Change in Himalayan Nepal
that religion is intensifying, not fading, among the newly rich Sherpas. Fisher recounts how in 1981 the Tengboche monastery was able to raise twenty thousand dollars in two days to open a gompa in Kathmandu, where many Sherpas were living.

Although the Tengboche abbot, Ngawang Tenzing Zangpo, doesn’t always share Fisher’s optimism that Sherpa culture can survive affluence,
Fisher is convinced that Sherpa men and women are proud of their community, a pride reinforced by foreign climbers and trekkers who come in contact with them in the hardworking hamlets of Solu-Khumbu. “Sherpas are so massively reinforced at every point for being Sherpas,” he wrote, “that they have every reason not only to ‘stay’ Sherpa but even to flaunt their Sherpahood.” Poorer Tamangs, impressed by Sherpa success, often try to pose as Sherpas, Fisher says. “This process of ‘Sherpaization’ counters the momentum of the much-vaunted Sanskritization (emulation of high Hindu caste behavior) that has absorbed the upwardly mobilizing energies of the subcontinent for centuries,” he wrote.

This is an intriguing observation. If the trend persists, it would have implications throughout the Himalayas as small nations feel a need to define themselves against the wave of Hindu revivalism rising in India or the outbursts of Hindu Gorkha nationalism within their own borders. Hope Cooke seems to have sensed the need for Himalayan Buddhists (and Tibeto-Burman people) to form a closer inner Asian community. This kind of thinking added to her troubles with India. Visions of a pan-Himalayan Buddhism with political overtones are consequently held at arm’s length in other places, notably Bhutan, for fear of Indian reactions. But if the sense of community were to surge upward from a more prosperous, better-educated grassroots Buddhist society, who’s to tell what the results might be?

Charles Ramble, a British anthropologist who speaks and reads Tibetan and who had been studying the Tibetan people of northern and western Nepal for more than a decade when I met him in Kathmandu, interjects a cautionary note when the subject turns to the glorification of Sherpahood and other forms of Tibetanization. He thinks that in the rush to retrieve, enhance, and promote a Tibetan-Buddhist culture there is always the danger of invention. From Ladakh to Sikkim and Bhutan, he sees arcane and sometimes completely artificial rites or “traditions” being introduced in the name of cultural restoration. But he says there is little doubt that Tibetanization has a wide appeal.

S
HERPAS
and other northern Nepali people inhabit a region that is more Tibetan in culture than South Asian. Himalayan Buddhist legends have resonance here. This is where the fabled saint Milarepa, who was born about 1050, was supposed to have meditated on numerous occasions.
Though large areas of the Tibetan border regions of Nepal are still very isolated and difficult to reach, there is a good Chinese-built road from Kathmandu to the border hamlet of Kodari, the first leg of the overland route to Lhasa. It passes through glorious green valleys with terraced fields and warm red-brick Nepali homesteads. Though the going gets tougher on the other side of the border, the easy trip to Kodari leaves a lasting impression of how close Nepal, more than any other Himalayan nation, feels to Tibet. Geographically, the exception to that observation would have to be Ladakh because of its location on the Tibetan plateau. But the state of military readiness around the edges of Ladakh creates a certain psychological barrier. In Bhutan, where there are numerous passes and some vestiges of trade, one nevertheless gets the feeling that these gates through the high Himalayas have been walled shut since 1959, and that Tibet could be somewhere else on earth.

It was while meditating in a cave near Nyanam on the Nepali-Tibetan border that Milarepa was supposed to have told the story of his life to disciples, who passed it on to posterity. The tale reveals that Milarepa, a great traveler, had more than a few Nepali acquaintances. (Not to be outdone, the Bhutanese believe he may also have meditated in their country, and Tibetans naturally have a long list of places associated with his long and pious life, long stretches of it spent in hermitages.) Milarepa’s story, incidentally, is peppered with references to strong and clever women who could apparently read and write, a hint that in some circumstances the status of women may have been reasonably high in Himalayan Buddhist societies, even in ancient times, even though women were generally barred from monasteries.

Until he gave up the black arts, Milarepa claimed to be able to inflict hailstorms on his enemies—causing, for example, much disarray, destruction, and terror among those who had wronged his mother and sister in the village of his youth. In later life, he calmed down and turned to poetry that is both pithy and instructive. In one hymn, dedicated to considering the usefulness of thoughts and actions, Milarepa wrote these stanzas, in a translation refined in the 1920s by W. Y. Evans-Wentz:

and:

Until the unification of Nepal by Gorkha kings in the eighteenth century, most Tibetan borderlands were not really a part of the country. Psychologically, many pockets still are not. The kingdom of Mustang, nearly 150 rugged miles from Kathmandu in a protuberance thrusting into Tibet, was one of them until Nepal opened the territory to development and trekking. In upper Mustang, the Buddhist kingdom of Lo, with its walled capital, Lo Manthang, broke free of Tibet in the fourteenth century, reached its height about a hundred years later on the strength and income of trade with Tibet, and enjoyed an independent existence for nearly four hundred years. During that time temples and a few palaces were built in what was called Mustang Bhot—Tibetan Mustang. “Bhot,” “Bhotia,” “Bhutia,” and other variations of the word often mean Tibetan to South Asians in the same way “Hellenistic” meant not quite Greek but within the influence of the Greek world. The word, probably a variation of “Bot,” originally meant Tibet in the Tibetan language.