So Close to Heaven (35 page)

The history of the Paro Valley begins with the legendary origins of Buddhism in Bhutan. According to the Bhutanese, it was near here that the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo built a temple in the seventh century, one of 108 temples intended to pin down the extremities of the giant she-devil who had sprawled maliciously across the Himalayas. (The Bhutanese were nailing down demons with chortens well into the eighteenth century.) The Paro temple may have lured the Guru Rinpoche—the missionary Padmasambhava from the Swat Valley of Pakistan—to this sacred spot a century later. Bhutanese mythology says that when the Guru Rinpoche flew here on the back of his miraculous tiger, he landed at Taktsang, now a cliffside monastery more than 2,500 feet above the valley floor. Eight classes of evil spirits were subdued by the Guru before he went on to perform other stupendous feats elsewhere in the country. By the fifteenth century, the monastery was known across the Himalayas as a place of meditation for great Tibetan saints, including Milarepa. The monastery, fused to the sheer-rock cliff face, remains a very holy spot, barred to tourists, who nonetheless trek and climb hours to a nearby ledge just to get a closer view.

Beyond the approach to Taktsang, the paved road from Paro town comes to an end near Drukyel Dzong, the ruins of a seventeenth-century fortress that burned to a shell in 1951. “Pens,” said two little boys who had learned there may be rewards in scampering along with visitors who climb the steep hill to reach the skeletal dzong through a series of walled courtyards where wildflowers grow. This was the first time in several trips that anyone had asked me for anything in Bhutan, and I tried to ignore the request. The path passed a pocket-size monastery, where the chants of monks mingled with the scolding that a woman keeping house for them gave my two little hiking companions as they babbled their way up the trail. For the moment, the pens were forgotten.

Drukyel Dzong, within view of sacred Mount Jhomolhari, once guarded an approach from Tibet, one of four passes into Bhutan available to marauding Tibetan armies as well as to pilgrims and traders moving in both directions in the days, now gone, when the Bhutanese and
Tibetans of Aum Rinzi’s generation inhabited one cultural and spiritual world. From the ramparts of the ruined dzong, while the local boys ran here and there collecting flowers they now knew I seemed to like, I looked down to the road below, where a few horses were tethered outside a lazy trading post. It is not hard to imagine a scene of much more activity not many years ago when pack animals might have been forming up for an excursion. We can only mourn the rupture of daily human contact between Bhutan and Tibet.

A Bhutanese geography book for children of junior high school age—one of a series of innovative new texts that base learning on local themes and experiences—includes reminiscences of the Tibetan trade drawn from the memory of a retired
thrimpon
, or magistrate, Dasho Reddy. As a young man living in an age of barter, he and his companions traveled regularly from Paro to Phari, in eastern Tibet, to sell varieties of roasted or fried grains that are mixed with tea or other drinks in Himalayan homes, along with wood products from forested Bhutan that were scarce on large areas of the windblown Tibetan plateau. Tibetan and Bhutanese products could also be traded for manufactured goods along the border with India. This is Thrimpon Reddy’s story:

“We used to carry rice,
seap, zauw, kaapchhi
[roasted grains], dried fruits, and even wooden handles for axes, knives and spades. In return we used get brown salt, wool, silk, tea, and soda. Until the mid-1940s, salt was brought from Tibet. We used to bring the salt from Phari for sale in places like Phuntsholing, Pasakha, Dagana, and Samchi in exchange for cotton clothes, utensils, sugar, and tobacco. We used horses, particularly mules, to carry the loads to Phari. This was a hard five-day journey from Paro when we traveled with horses and luggage. Journeys had to be made during the dry seasons of spring and autumn. I think the worst thing, and most difficult part of the journey, used to be our fear of
amdos
, the Tibetan highwaymen. This seemed to happen around the 1920s onward for some reasons which I do not know. So we had to travel in groups for our protection. Traveling alone and without the support of able companions was out of the question.”

Bhutanese and Tibetans, once linked by monastic orders and trading caravans, are today divided by geopolitics into two antagonistic spheres. After Beijing began to suppress Tibetan nationalism and dilute Tibet’s ethnic composition and its Tantric Buddhist culture following the 1959 rebellion against Communist Chinese rule, and after China’s attacks on
India in 1962, Bhutan had little option but to cast its lot with New Delhi, whose army regards these hills as part of its own frontier. To do otherwise would have put Bhutanese independence in jeopardy. Thus, open borders and overland journeys to the great Tibetan temples at Lhasa, Ralung, or elsewhere are only memories among elderly Bhutanese and those Tibetan exiles who fled here before the borders closed.

“In olden days, many Bhutanese people used to go to Tibet for higher education,” Rinpoche Mynar Trilku told me. The rinpoche, who was born in Tibet but fled the year the Dalai Lama went into exile, is now the curator of Bhutan’s National Museum. “Many of the most learned Bhutanese monks we have here, who are called as
gyshye
—which means professor or doctor of divinity—took all their degrees and studies in Tibet.” Because of the tradition of sending monks to Tibetan monastic institutions, the Bhutanese clergy never established major centers of learning or religious publication in their own country. That is not to say that Bhutanese monasteries did not produce great scholars or commentators, the rinpoche hastened to add. It’s only that the pinnacle of Tibet was so high, its lights so bright, and its influence so wide that all others stood in its shadow.

Still, the dzong named Drukyel—“Victory of the Druk People”—is a reminder that life next door to Tibet had its downs as well as its better moments. Historical records say that the fortress was built by Ngawang Namgyal, the seventeenth-century unifier of Bhutan, to celebrate the 1644 defeat of a Tibetan army apparently bent on taking Paro, about fifteen miles away, one of more than half a dozen Tibetan attacks over several decades. About the same time that Drukyel Dzong was being constructed, another large fortress was going up in Paro, the Rinpung Dzong. This solid, square fortress-monastery, though periodically ravaged by fire over the years, remains the capital of Paro district and the site of one of Bhutan’s best-known religious-folk festivals of music and dance, the Paro Tshechu, held each spring. The fortress, which most people call Paro Dzong, has all the local history. The dzong’s old watch-tower, Ta Dzong, several miles up the hill above the fortress, houses the National Museum.

I was in one of the museum’s upper galleries, sneaking another look at Bhutan’s brief but wildly eccentric postal history—stamps in honor of Walt Disney, mushrooms, and a classic Rolls-Royce—when Rinpoche Mynar Trilku came along to answer some of my questions about more
serious exhibits of thangkas, images, and objects used in worship. Some of the items displayed are so sacred that all visitors to the museum must circumambulate the galleries in a clockwise direction, as if all the rooms were temples. The rinpoche, who was wearing a giant plastic wristwatch with a bright orange face, is a genial monk with a ready smile who radiates enthusiasm when he talks about his collection. His lively discourse brings the chilly and dimly lit galleries to life and gives them meaning. Though a scholar of renown, he revels in the thought that in Bhutan the past is not confined to artifacts and academics but is still alive and all around us.

“I think that in many of the European countries a museum is where you go to see something of the past—unless it is a modern art museum,” he said. “Normally you try to learn there what people have forgotten. But here this is a living museum. On auspicious days, we have lots of local visitors. They are corning to the museum not really to see the collection. They come here to take the blessings from the images. As a result you see that in two galleries we always burn the butter lamp and bring the waters, and put incense and everything, which sometimes may be against the conservation rules. International conservation rules don’t allow that because of the precious thangkas.”

Bhutan resists demands from grant-giving foreigners that its museum be sanitized. The rinpoche has taken his persuasive case for keeping this a living museum to the doors of international art experts raised on more orthodox galleries, places where people would not feel at home as they do here padding around with prayer beads, mumbling mantras. He scents victory.

“Recently when I have attended some of the conservation meetings, they note it may not be really bad to do what we do. They are now saying: Suppose an image in a monastery for three-four hundred years has been exposed to that kind of heat with the butter lamps, that kind of smoke. If you take it out and keep it in a museum without this environment surrounding it, the decay of that piece may be worse.”

From the rinpoche’s viewpoint, a visit to this museum may be educational but should never be merely an intellectual exercise. The intricate and colorful torma offerings, the amulets, the robes, the vessels of copper, the stuffed wild animals, the images of bodhisattvas, all objects (except maybe the stamps and the antique armory), speak of the daily intermingling of life and belief. “Here all can see what kind of offerings
we make, how the images are placed, what are the venerations,” the rinpoche said. “And all of this is real—no reproductions.”

The first time I came to Paro, late on a spring afternoon, fresh from the mania of Kathmandu, I stumbled into another kind of unexpected encounter with the continuity and authenticity of Bhutanese life. The occasion was an archery contest on a field near the sixteenth-century Druk Choeding temple. Archery, Bhutan’s national sport, is also a ritual with roots in a warrior past. The archers, whose powerful bows shoot arrows to targets nearly four hundred feet away with a speed that makes following the line of flight almost impossible, celebrate each score with a brief slow-motion dance accompanied by incantations and howls drawn up from a timeless past. The effect is electrifying and chilling in its other-worldliness. So much so that it took a few extra minutes to notice that some of the archers were using hi-tech American-made Hoyt bows. The bows, and argyle knee socks from New York or London to wear with a gentleman’s gho, are among the country’s most highly prized imports.

The trip from Paro to Thimphu, everyone’s jumping-off point and provisioning place for a road tour of Bhutan, takes less than two hours. But the short journey is a primer for what is to come. As the Paro Valley narrows, the eye catches small temples or monasteries identified by a wide red band painted high on the outer whitewashed walls. There are farmers at work in their fields near farmhouses not only decorated in the distinctive colors that enliven window frames but also adorned with folk paintings on the walls. Folk artists have a pretty standard repertory of themes: real and mythological animals, some of them characters in fables, and phalluses. It is not unusual to see a large erect penis or, better, two, one painted on each side of the door, gently adorned by the artists’ rendition of floating ribbons and sometimes flowers. Wooden phallus shapes accompanied by daggers dangle from the eaves of homes; an erect clay phallus may protrude over a doorway, draped in a silken
thaka
, a gauzy white scarf. These serve not as fertility symbols, as I was once told erroneously by a guide reluctant in his modernity to discuss superstitious throwbacks, but as guardians and protectors of the home.

Long before Chhuzom, the road begins to snake through a gorge, clinging to hillsides or teetering along the edges of cliffs. It will get much, much worse, but not until after Thimphu, when fear and nausea begin to compete ferociously for attention in the consciousness of many a tourist. It doesn’t help that most four-wheel-drive vehicles in Bhutan
run on diesel fuel and reconditioned engines. Straining on steep gradients, the motor pours clouds of acrid black smoke through ventilator ducts into passengers’ faces and clothes. One begins to appreciate Aum Rinzi’s revulsion for the age of motor travel.

Racketing cars and trucks are quickly coming to symbolize what Bhutan gave up in tranquillity when highway construction began not so long ago. It may seem strange to us, but in many developing countries there is a real debate about the cultural destruction caused by roadbuilding, which often speeds up unwanted urbanization as farm folk flock to town. On the other hand, there are advantages. People who would surely have died of disease or injury can be brought to hospitals if they are reasonably near a roadhead. Mobile medical teams bearing vaccines and antibiotics can reach isolated hamlets in a shorter time. Families living at subsistence level can improve their lives by raising crops to bring to market and sell for cash to buy small luxuries or different foods to diversify and improve their diets. In Bhutan, whole hillsides are being turned into orchards because harvests can be loaded on the bus or jeep for quick transport to Thimphu or Phuntsholing. A bumper fruit or vegetable harvest might mean new clothes for the children, a radio, or a gas-cylinder stove.

Few Bhutanese—not even Aum Rinzi, who is closer to her extended family by car than she has ever been—would want to roll back the highways. In fact, everyone wants a road. The king and the planning chief spend a lot of time explaining why every hamlet cannot have one in a country where the cost per mile to build roads is astronomical. Once, the king ran out of patience during an audience when the hundredth request for a road was made by a rural villager, someone traveling with him told me. “His Majesty just suddenly lost his shirt, and cried out, ‘Okay, break for lunch!” ’ he said. “He cooled off during the meal, but after eating, the people came right back and asked for the same thing.”

The unregulated explosion of private vehicles on Bhutan’s narrow, twisting roads is undeniably subtracting from the joy and adding to the hazards of travel in a country where the airstrip at Paro is one of only a few flat surfaces. Bhutanese guides are especially proud of a stretch of the east-west highway called the Yadi bends, a dizzying series of hairpin turns that zigzag down a mountainside of airy, long-needled conifers about twenty miles from Mongar on the road to Tashigang in eastern Bhutan. Because the filmy trees and unusual topography make it possible
to see the whole collection of Yadi bends from the top of the slope, they are a major tourist attraction. Locals say they made the
Guinness Book of Records.
That begs the question of why all of Bhutan was not entered in the competition.