So Close to Heaven (27 page)

With a college and many new schools to attend, Bhutanese are eager to learn more about their own country, but new teaching materials have to be created to fill big gaps. The earliest written accounts of Bhutan
have been found in texts from Tibet, in which scholars refer to the country by various names, all related to its geographical or botanical distinctions—as, for example, Lho Jong, meaning “Valleys of the South,” and Lho Mon Kha Shi, “Southern Mon Country of Four Approaches.” Scholars say “Mon” was the Tibetans’ general designation for all non-Buddhist Mongoloid people on the southern side of the Himalayas. As in Tibet, the early people of Bhutan were practitioners of spirit worship with propitiatory ceremonies and superstitions. The term “Mon” also appears in other names for what we now call Bhutan: Lho Mon Tsenden Jong, “the Southern Mon Valleys Where Sandalwood Grows,” or Lho Jong Mon Jong, “Southern Valleys of Medicinal Herbs.” The last description is still particularly apt.

In the Bhutanese monastic tradition, the earliest authenticated manifestation of Buddhist civilization in the country came with the construction of two temples, Kyichu in Paro and Jampa in Bumthang, in the seventh century. The temples are believed to be the work of Songsten Gampo, one of the greatest of Tibetan kings. It was a century later, in
A.D
. 747, that the Guru Rinpoche arrived from Nepal to aid a king in trouble with the gods, school textbooks say. The Guru was then on his way either to or from Tibet; like many other stories from Bhutanese mythological history, this one has variations. Some historians, for example, say he came to the Himalayas through what is now the Indian state of Assam; others trace his trip through Kashmir, at the other end of the Himalayan world. There are many legends about the Guru Rinpoche; and some accounts of his travels, if taken literally and collectively, would make him an exceptionally long-lived and extraordinarily peripatetic man.

A modest booklet published by the royal government under the title
The Guru Rinpoche, the Great Culture Hero
, takes the view that the Guru, a saint whose appearance had been foreordained by the Buddha himself, arrived via India at the invitation of a King Sendhaka of Bumthang. He later went on to Tibet, where he spent a mere 111 years. (By which time, according to another story, he was well over a thousand years old, having been born a reincarnate of the historical Buddha sometime not long after the founder’s death early in the sixth century
B.C
.) In both Bhutan and Tibet, this Himalayan Methuselah battled and vanquished demons and shamans and spread the Nyingmapa interpretations of Mahayana Buddhism, which consolidated in Tibet. “As a direct result of
Padmasambhava’s efforts,” says the booklet, “the people of Tibet were elevated from a state of barbarism to a state of unsurpassed spiritual culture. He is therefore truly one of the greatest of the world’s culture heroes.”

Lopen Pemala describes in the same booklet how twelve miraculous or magical episodes in the life of Guru Rinpoche became the twelve themes of the Bhutanese festivals known as
tshechus.
Because the Guru is the unseen guest at these religious celebrations, held on the tenth day of each month, when the Guru takes the form of the waxing moon, certain prayers must be said to him. Guru Rinpoche was supposed to have assured his followers of his continuing presence in this world by these lines: “Every morning, every evening, I will come for the salvation of all sentient beings. I will come as a rider mounted on the crown of rays of the rising sun.”

To me and perhaps many other outsiders, the spirit of Guru Rinpoche dwells most powerfully around the temples at Kurjey Lhakhang, near Bumthang. In a dark grotto in one of the shrines, the faithful say, the outline of his body is imprinted on a rock, now all but obscured from view by a large likeness of the saint. Near the temple grows a giant evergreen, sprung from his walking stick. The miracles that Guru Rinpoche performed at Kurjey are important because the events, enshrined in legends, are keys to understanding how Buddhism meshes with spirit worship in the Bhutanese psychology, and how a Buddhist more often than not prefers to coopt an enemy rather than destroy him.

As one widely heard version of the story goes, the Guru Rinpoche arrived in Bumthang at the desperate call of Sendhaka after a troublesome neighborhood deity, Shelging Karpo, had stolen the ruler’s “vital principle” and rendered him seriously ill. Sendhaka, who was reputed to live in Jakar castle, now the hilltop administrative headquarters of Bumthang, gave his daughter to Guru Rinpoche either before or after the saint rendered assistance; accounts vary. John Claude White was told in 1905 that the woman was named Menmo Jashi Kyeden, that she “possessed the twenty-one marks of fairy beauty,” and that she and the Guru together were able to save the king’s soul with their effortless goodness.

In a longer version of the tale, the Guru thought up a few tricks to draw the attention of the demon Shelging Karpo, hoping to surprise and overpower him. First, the Guru sent the king’s daughter into a meadow to draw water in a golden vessel. While she was on this errand, he turned
himself into his Eight Manifestations (a few of them certainly scary) and drew an audience of rapt deities from their natural hiding places all around the nearby valleys—save one, Shelging Karpo himself, who refused to be tempted or tricked. Upping the ante, the Guru turned the king’s daughter into five women, each with a golden pitcher that reflected the sun toward the absent deity’s sanctuary. This was too dazzling to ignore. Shelging Karpo crept out in the form of a lion to have a surreptitious look at the source of the golden glow. The Guru struck. He turned himself into a mythological bird, the
garuda
(or griffin), and grabbed the demon-as-lion and made him say uncle. To regain his freedom, Shelging Karpo was forced to renounce all threats to Buddhists and Buddhism and to take up residence as a guardian deity of the place. According to the monks at Kurjey, Shelging Karpo, who was never obliged to become a Buddhist, is still the monastery’s protector. The demon-turned-deity is immortalized in paintings in several places within the temple complex, as are other local gods who tangled with and were outwitted by the Guru.

As for Guru Rinpoche, he went on to meditate at Taktsang, now a monastery on a cliff above Paro, where a temple safeguards an image of him riding a flaming tiger. In time he vanished from the earth, but he lives on in unending reincarnations. Before his departure, he asked his disciples (five women, according to Rigzin Dorji) to collect his teachings and hide them in various places, to be found after the passing of time by tertons, the discoverers of treasure. The terton phenomenon, says Michael Aris, remained very much a hallmark of the Nyingmapa or “old order” Buddhists. The discoverers of written treasures were busiest making finds all over the Himalayas from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. In studying the “text discoverers,” Aris made an interesting discovery of his own: that some of the works found were Bon texts. He agrees with those other scholars that as the Bon religion was integrated with Buddhism in Tibet and elsewhere, a largely animist faith took on the trappings of a Buddhist sect or school, a trend clearly discernible by the tenth century. In everyday storytelling in Bhutan, Sikkim, and elsewhere, tales of tertons are invariably stories of those who found texts hidden at the bidding of Guru Rinpoche, not of a Bonpo.

Foremost among the tertons who discovered treasured teachings of the Guru was Pema Lingpa, a rather more down-to-earth saint who was born in Bumthang in the middle of the fifteenth century and who began
his career as a blacksmith or metalworker. Aris calls him the “discoverer par excellence” of the Bhutanese, who moreover wrote in language that was “simple, direct, and untutored” as befit a village lad of limited formal learning. If Guru Rinpoche, whose name literally means “the precious teacher,” exists as much in mythology as fact, Pema Lingpa was without doubt a real being. His story in children’s schoolbooks comes complete with a family tree that links him to the royal family of Bhutan through one of three consorts. He was also an ancestor of the sixth Dalai Lama, who lived in Tibet at the end of the seventeenth century.

A very short fellow reared on two well-known Bumthang products, flour and honey, when his mother’s milk ran dry, Pema Lingpa built the doorways of his temples low, using his own stature as a guide, or at least that’s what the monks say as we dip to enter the sanctuaries associated with him. Always at heart the metalsmith, Pema Lingpa crafted a cape of chains to be worn by worshippers with strong backs as they circumambulate the altars (preferably three times) at Tamshing Lhakhang, a monastery in Bumthang built by the great terton somewhere around the turn of the sixteenth century. Pema Lingpa’s craftsmanship must have been born as much out of his own creative genius as from the lessons he received as the childhood ward of a blacksmith, because he also composed marvelous classical dance sequences to tell religious and mythological stories. The dances are still performed according to his stage directions.

The presence of Pema Lingpa is very real at Tamshing, because the monastery has escaped the Bhutanese urge to refurbish periodically by painting over old works of art, and therefore has been changed very little in five hundred years. Again, the atmosphere is medieval, or what we imagine medieval to be. No motorized vehicle can reach the portals of the monastic walls. The last few miles of stony track leading in the general direction of the monastery are about as much as a Land Cruiser can manage. We—a young civil servant deputed to introduce me to the chief monk, and I—dismount and walk atop a shifting bed of roundish river rocks that have been used to form a path as we approach the monastery, set in a vast meadow not far from the Bumthang Chhu, with Kurjey Lhakhang on the opposite bank. The rocky walkway looks suspiciously like the work of Pem Dorji, the Bumthang dzongda, who is dedicated to abolishing mud paths. Near the outer gateway to the monastery grounds, a weaver is working. In the next courtyard, monks and
lamas rest on the porches of their cloister, chatting and drinking tea an old woman serves from a teapot so big she struggles to carry it. There are stray cats, and knots of children. Tamshing is a religious school, and so there seem to be more than the usual complement of novices for such a small monastery. In the next, innermost courtyard, boys are horsing around as they sew and fill chalkbags for writing. These are little pouches of sturdy cloth stuffed with white powder that is squeezed out through a small hole in one corner. The boys write with the little hand-held bag, forcing the chalk dust onto slates.

Inside the temple, a series of priceless paintings are blackened by age and the fingerprints of the faithful, but are still thrilling links to a barely understood age. One was described to me as the image of the founder and great terton. I wanted to take his picture, but that was out of the question. My photography permit from the royal government, always politely examined, was again rejected by an independent monk, probably (but not necessarily) because the official I had with me was not of the sword-bearing rank. As I stood before a monk in a dimly lit corner of the sixteenth century, it seemed both crass and foolish to whine, “But the king said …”

Late on the same afternoon of my visit to Tamshing Lhakhang, we found a monk from Pema Lingpa’s monastery resting at the small shop next to the Swiss Dairy’s cheese-and-wine factory across the river from Jakar, where a few benches and tables serve to turn the general store into a rustic coffee shop. Over a plate of fresh cheese and biscuits, ordered by the dzongda, an official before whom everyone quailed, or at least thought twice about making a contrarian decision, the monk was easily persuaded to tell me the legends of his monastery and its founder. He spoke in a kind of stream-of-consciousness style, almost a recitation, as Pem Dorji translated
sotto voce.
When he had run out of stories, the monk suddenly stopped, gathered his things into a cloth bundle, and took his leave, heading back in the fading light to his distant home.

“At the age of twenty-five, when Pema Lingpa came to Bumthang, he thought about how the foundation stones of the monastery should be laid,” said the monk. (Never mind that I had been told Pema Lingpa was as much as six or eight years younger at the time. By this point I had stopped fretting over details.) “When Pema Lingpa was in this process of thinking, a pig appeared. On the four sides of the site, the pig came and with his nose he made four holes, and that’s where Pema Lingpa decided
to lay the foundation stones of the present monastery. The land was given to him by Chokoteba, the deity of that place. All that land used to be the field where he trained his horse to gallop, this guardian deity of Tamshing. Inside the shrine, the main statue is Guru. It was built by one hundred thousand
kendums
, angels. The painters from Tamshing asked Pema Lingpa for work in the monastery. Pema Lingpa said, ’You painters cannot enter this temple, because the Guru inside was built by the angels.’ And they were wondering why is it so. These local painters and sculptors were curious, and they went in the temple and all the angels disappeared. So when the angels flew away, the Guru from inside the statue—you know the face of the statue is facing up in the sky—so he was watching the angels disappearing and flying away. The hat on Guru’s head was made by Pema Lingpa himself.

“If you look, when you enter inside our temple, you see the height of the ceiling is very low. That is the exact height of Pema Lingpa. When you enter the main gate, in the courtyard on the left-hand side, there is a prayer wheel. This prayer wheel was made later on, over the seat where Pema Lingpa sat. When he used to give preachings, he used to sit where the present prayer wheel is. The foundation stone is his seat. This also was made by the angels. Outside the temple in the compound, you can see on the paving the footmark of the pig, and some of the hand and forehead of Pema Lingpa, where he used to do his prostrations. Did you see the deer mask inside the temple? Pema Lingpa made the face of the deer, and at night in his dream, an angel told him that there were a pair of antlers waiting on a hill, waiting to be put on this mask. So Pema Lingpa sent his attendant up there and the deer horns were there. So that’s how the mask was made. That is another one of the treasures made by Pema Lingpa himself.