If anywhere on our planet could be described as the landscape of the soul, it must be Tibet. This remote, rugged land, closer to the heavens than any place on earth, became the home to scores of thousands of temples, shrines, monasteries, and convents, with a culture and social structure uniquely focused on spiritual pursuits. It has long been a treasure unappreciated by the world that still offers lessons for us today.
Some of those lessons relate to respect for the earth and the extraordinary sustained efforts by Tibetans to populate their land with structures of reverence. While Gekho’s Roost is the product of a novelist’s imagination, Gekho was an important earth deity worshipped long before Buddhism arrived in Tibet, and his Roost is an amalgam of many authentic sites, encompassing even the fields of standing stones left by the devout forebears of modern Tibetans. Many of these prehistoric patterns of stones have been identified, mostly in western Tibet, and have intriguing links to the ancient horse warrior cultures of central Asia, as further examined in John Vincent Bellezza’s valuable book The Dawn of Tibet. What was it about these high ranges that caused so many to linger and build monuments to that which they held sacred? What was the process by which the devotion of fierce warriors evolved into the complex cosmology of compassion that became Tibetan Buddhism?
Such questions led me to suggest in this tale that these lands might be characterized as the Rosetta Stone of the soul. If so, then perhaps it is inevitable that they encompass extremes of the human journey. The Tibetans spent several centuries reverently constructing their temples, eschewing technological advancement and economic progress so they might focus on the mysteries of the human spirit. The Chinese have spent several decades dismantling those buildings and the peaceful society that erected them so they might advance a more secular, intolerant political agenda. Over ninety percent of Tibet’s holy buildings, numbering in the tens of thousands, have been destroyed over the past sixty years in a relentless campaign of cultural annihilation. Another lesson of Tibet, often reflected in Inspector Shan’s saga, has been that it is darkness that defines the light, and suffering that gives meaning to compassion.
The roots of the Tibetans still run deep, and from time to time significant new Buddhist institutions do emerge, such as the teaching center of Larung Gar. While I overlaid a novel’s plotline upon that academy, it is a real-life microcosm of Tibet’s struggle. Larung Gar remains a rare ray of hope for Tibetans, despite Beijing’s wrenching initiative to reduce its size and importance to the Buddhist community. As reflected in these pages, thousands of monks and nuns were abruptly expelled from the school and forced to abandon their monastic careers by officials who seemed to equate spiritual pursuits with acts of political rebellion. Larung Gar endures, however, keeping ancient traditions alive.
One of those venerable traditions that have always fascinated me is that of the hailchasers. For centuries these weather charmers, who were often trained as rigorously as Tibet’s acclaimed medical doctors, roamed the land, consulting and placating the earth deities to protect farmers and herders. Elaborate festivals, with roots in pre-Buddhist Tibet, were often staged in monastic centers to honor those deities in the hope of avoiding the land’s violent, sometimes fatal, hailstorms and earthquakes. Some in Tibet suggest that the failure to keep harmony with such deities is why its landscape has been so ravaged in recent decades. Mountain ranges have been stripped of their fertile forests, huge mines have depleted their minerals, and the land’s unique wildlife decimated. Major new dams are being built at a frantic pace to power Chinese cities in the east, without meaningful environmental assessment. Some Tibetans in remote regions have been abruptly introduced to the twenty-first century by the arrival of clearcutting timber crews and bulldozers that scrape away the mountain that had always been home to their protective deity.
As I immersed myself in these modern Tibetan realities while writing the Inspector Shan series I came to see Tibet as a vital barometer of our own humanity. The rest of the world too often turns a blind eye to the oppression that occurs there and in neighboring Xinjiang Province, preferring to focus its moral outrage on issues that pale in comparison to the abject human rights abuses of this struggling region. Those abuses diminish all of us. We can’t fight for human rights in one place, in one political context, and not fight for them everywhere. The most profound lesson of all from Inspector Shan is that the Tibetan journey has become our journey too.
:Lha gyal lo, Eliot Pattison