Barbara Crossette is an American journalist and author. She served as editor and chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia for The New York Times, and was their United Nations bureau chief from 1994 to 2001. She has been awarded the 1992 George Polk award, a 2008 Fulbright prize, and the 2010 Shorenstein prize for her writings on and coverage of Asia. She is currently United Nations correspondent for The Nation.
BUDDHIST NEPAL
Lakpa Nuru Sherpa was happy to be back in his two-room house in Chaurikarka, a hamlet deep in a sheltered valley a couple of thousand feet below the village of Lukla, a starting point for treks into the Mount Everest region of Nepal. The Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, nearly the size of Florida, must support a population of almost twenty million people scattered over difficult topography; life is hard for most. Lakpa Nuru, a mountain guide like many of his fellow Sherpas, was lucky. Fit and healthy in middle age, when many other Nepali men are dead or spent beyond their years, he was able to retire from the trail and come home to tend a small plot of land. He sent his children to school. And then, with what money was left from his years of trekking and climbing, he went off to India, several hundred miles away, to buy books.
The Sherpas are Buddhists, descendants of migrants from eastern Tibet who settled centuries ago in the Solu-Khumbu region of northeastern Nepal, the region best known to foreign trekkers. Before he died, Lakpa Nuru said, he wanted to own the most precious thing he could think of: a set of Lord Buddha’s teachings, produced in all their authenticity by Tibetan monks in the northern Indian hill town of Dharamsala, the headquarters of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile. Like all traditional Tibetan Buddhist books, these volumes are assemblages of narrow loose-leaf pages inserted between boards, wrapped in colorful cloth and secured by a bright ribbon. The script, read horizontally, is in a classical Tibetan language unknown to Lakpa Nuru. He spent his life savings knowingly on a set of books he will never read. That didn’t matter. “Maybe my children and grandchildren will read them one day, because they are more educated,” he said, as he asked to be photographed with his treasured library. When I told the story later to His Holiness Ngawang Tenzing Zangbo, abbot of Tengboche monastery, in the shadow of Mount Everest, he was not surprised. “Every Sherpa home is a cultural center,” he said. “How much so depends on each family’s means.”
“The government may call us a Hindu kingdom and His Majesty may be an avatar of Vishnu,” a businessman once told me in Kathmandu, “but if you scratch the surface of Nepal almost anywhere, you’ll see how Buddhist we really are.” Buddhism came to Nepal early, as might be expected, given the religion’s origins in nearby northern India, and was soon adopted by the people called Newars, who are as close to an indigenous population in the Kathmandu Valley as anyone will probably ever find in the darkness of barely explored Nepali history and legend. The Newars were not alone in their faith. All over Nepal there were other Buddhist minorities, particularly along the Tibetan border. All or most of Nepal apparently fell under Tibetan dominance in the seventh and eighth centuries, but with or without conquest, Tibetans and Newaris cross-fertilized each other’s highly developed Buddhist cultures for hundreds of years.
Much of this history can be politically inconvenient not only in Nepal, where most of the kings and all the hereditary Rana prime ministers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were Hindus, but also in India, where upper-caste Hindus have dominated politics since independence and Buddhism is more coopted as part of history than honored as a living religion. Not a few Indians argue that Buddhism is no more than an offshoot of Hinduism; Hindu priests have control over some of Buddhism’s holiest places, including the temple at Bodhgaya, where Buddha reached enlightenment.
Back in Chaurikarka, Lakpa Nuru had invited me to visit his lheng, or prayer room – in effect, half his house – where he had constructed a traditional bookcase of deep cubbyholes beside the family altar to house his new library. He was wearing a trekker’s abandoned T-shirt that read “Enjoy Victoria B.C.” and a woolen stocking cap that said “Aspire” as he sat down behind a rough reading desk to unwrap a sacred volume. His altar was a wondrous thing, covered in part with aluminum foil and festooned with paper chains, gauzy white khata scarves, a peacock feather, more than a dozen Buddha images, statues of the much-traveled Guru Rinpoche and the goddess Tara, incense burners, butter lamps, and offering bowls. A photograph of the Dalai Lama shared a large picture frame (its glass cracked) with various postcards of people and places important to his faith. Though his small house, built of stone and wood, was roughly finished elsewhere, the prayer room had religious paintings on two walls; these were inherited from his father and grandfather, who had lived in the house before him and employed an itinerant artist to do the work. The room next door, where his family lived, ate, and slept, was a much more spartan place, except for a collection of Chinese ceramic rice bowls and copper plates displayed (along with two Chinese thermos flasks and two glass tumblers) on shelves along one wall. The family cooked on a stove made of stone and fueled by a wood fire. There was no running water.
Chaurikarka is a small hamlet with a few dozen houses, almost all built of stone, their roofs of loose wooden shingles held down by more rocks. In simple villages like this, Himalayan Buddhism is lived in its most down-to-earth form around countless family altars by people who speak Tibetan dialects, far away from the great lamas of their faith, who disdain their rustic ignorance and superstition. There are compensations, though, in a setting that is both physically magnificent and spiritually alive. In the center of Chaurikarka, a solid chorten sat astride the path leading away in the general direction of Khumbila, the Khumbu Sherpas’ sacred mountain, whose distant presence bestowed blessings on those within its view.
This path toward the distant holy landmark is also Chaurikarka’s main street, a porters’ highway from the last market town – several days’ walk back down the trail – into vast alpine regions without roads or airstrips. In a patch of open space near the chorten and a cubbyhole general store with very little for sale, about a dozen porters, Tamang people from farther west, plodded into town and paused to rest along a stone wall just high enough to serve as a shelf for the huge woven backpack baskets of consumer goods they were hauling to the scoreless interior. The porters backed wearily toward the stone ledge and eased the weight of their burdens onto it without having to unstrap from their shoulders the cargo of blankets, small jute rugs, at least one bolt of cloth, tins of oil, boxes of crackers, sacks of rice, instant noodles, and a few plastic utensils and toys. The loads, most of them extremely heavy, were borne by young men, some still in their teens, and by one or two white-haired porters in faded, shredded clothes, too old to be doing this job but too poor to stop. Tamangs from north-central Nepal, who are also Buddhists, are a cut below Sherpas in the world of mountain people. Sherpas are the guides and mountaineers, talents they have developed to an art in recent decades of climbing Mount Everest – called Chomolungma by the Sherpas and Sagarmatha by other Nepalis – and the Tamangs are the heavy lifters.
Later, on another trail leading to Namche Bazaar from Lukla, a Tamang porter passed by carrying a thick plate-glass window four or five feet square roped to his back in a wooden frame; he had to turn sideways to let others on the route go by. His face was a portrait of strain as he shouldered this piece of air freight, yet he was barely out of Lukla, with its crazy little grass-and-gravel ski-slope airstrip, and had at least another day to march, most of it uphill. Porters have delivered all kinds of cargo to Namche, including a whole dental clinic, disassembled. They also serve in emergencies as human ambulances, rushing trekkers stricken with altitude sickness to lower levels or ferrying their own lame or elderly up steep and rocky tracks.
The porters pausing in Chaurikarka had thin, sinewy legs from years of walking. Some didn’t own shoes, but maneuvered along the stony trail in rubber sandals or the remains of flimsy Chinese sneakers. They spoke little as they paused to stretch and relieve the weight they bore, except to exchange a few pleasantries with Sherpa women bent over their short hoes planting potatoes in a small walled field beside the trail. Each porter carried a walking stick with a T-shaped top, which could be used (when there wasn’t a handy wall) to rest the large basket long enough for a breather. They were dressed in tatters, the shoulder seams of their thin cotton shirts lacerated by the straps of their baskets despite the thicker sleeveless vests most of them wore to protect their skin. These men are the human trucks and freight cars of Nepal. They are not the porters who work for trekkers and have the down vests, baseball caps, satin team jackets, and English, Italian, German, French, or Japanese phrases to show for it. These are the long-distance haulers, passing through a landscape hardly changed since ancient times – instant noodles notwithstanding. Chaurikarka is like that: no bicycles or other wheeled vehicles make movement easier (the mountainsides are too steep for bikes or carts), no electricity lights the houses, no cooking gas or kerosene eases the burden of gathering firewood.
On the climb out of the hamlet toward Lukla on the ridge above, the hiker is struck by the deathly silence of the forest. It is forbidden to cut most trees in Nepal – a desperate measure, patchily enforced, intended to hold back rampant deforestation – so people unwilling or afraid to break the law scavenge for anything else that will burn. The wooded slope I climbed exuded a strange unreality: there were no leaves or twigs on the ground, no small animals or birds to be seen or heard. The trees stood alone, as if constructed for a natural history museum diorama; a stuffed squirrel would not have been out of place. The contrast to the teeming woodlands of Bhutan or Sikkim could not have been more stark. Nepal is one of the world’s most densely populated countries, and even here, in the shadow of holy mountains, life illustrates the statistics. A lack of environmental consciousness has no religious connection when people need fuel to cook their meals or warm their houses. It would have been lunatic to run around Chaurikarka pressing people to explain how Buddhists, protectors of nature, could allow this vacuuming of the woodlands to take place.
Not too long ago, Lakpa Nuru’s devotion to Buddhism, and moreover his hope that his offspring would follow his example, might have seemed pitiable, given the headlong rush of young Nepalis, including Sherpas, into urbanization and a taste for the material goods foreigners tote casually into Himalayan villages for all to admire. Before the Chinese suppression of a Tibetan uprising closed the Nepali-Tibetan border in 1959, Sherpas had been the Solu-Khumbu region’s commodity traders, bringing salt and wool from Tibet to barter for manufactured goods from Kathmandu and India. Nowadays they run teahouses, trail lodges, trekking and mountaineering services, and shops where trekkers’ castoffs may be sold along with a variety of unexpected imported goods shopkeepers have been quick to realize there is profit in stocking: toilet paper, track suits, canned beer, scented soap, and trail mix. Rustic cafés in Lukla serve French toast and muesli.
Some Sherpas who don’t succeed turn to job-hunting in Kathmandu (where richer Sherpas are investing in hotels) and run into competition with other Nepali Buddhists from the hills also searching for an income. Over the course of not very many years, Kathmandu has turned from a dozy, slightly ethereal town left over from a distant century into a warren of exhaust-choked, garbage-strewn streets and byways where thousands of shops tumble over one another, pouring out into the patchily paved lanes the cheap clothes, sweaters, and jewelry (almost none of it Nepali) bought by bargain-hunting backpackers, the descendants of the hippies who once made this town the narcotics nirvana of the Eastern world. More than a million residents scramble for space in hives and warrens above stinking gutter-sewers which foster the spread of epidemic diseases; the warnings were out for cholera and encephalitis on my last visit. Low-budget tourists, charmed by small lodges where a few dollars will still buy room and board, succumb with increasing frequency to gut-wrenching maladies. Japanese tourists and some international aid workers ride or pedal around wearing masks to filter the particle-heavy air. Oddly, a lot of us still love the place, though affection is tested a little more each year.
The mountain people are a particularly sad sight as they hang around the capital looking for work or for a foreign woman with a hankering to try some exotic Eastern sex. On a winter evening over dinner in a guesthouse in the capital, the French Tibetologist Françoise Pommaret pointed out several of her compatriots who had stayed behind to marry porters or trail guides, only to discover they didn’t quite belong in Nepal. They drift into budget restaurants to drink a good deal and find European company. On their laps they hold the tiny children who have given them a stake in trying to make life work here despite disappointments. At night, during one of the frequent power cuts, they stumble out into the potholed streets or the few treacherous patchwork sidewalks to bump into knots of young men lurking around some of the better-known nightspots – usually small restaurants of indifferent upkeep but reasonably safe and tasty food. All of this teeming world, it should be noted, exists outside the cocoons of the major hotels that shelter the higher-priced crowd. It is possible to spend days in Kathmandu and never have to walk its noisome streets; the sellers of wares and services will come to your gate, and air-conditioned vans do the rest.
The prosperous Sherpas – more than other Buddhists from the mountainous north who still struggle for a livelihood – are one of the engines pushing a Buddhist revival in Nepal, though Buddhism itself took root here long before the Sherpas were a significant presence. The Kathmandu Valley’s creation myth (or at least the most popular one) tells of a turquoise sea where the capital now stands. Out of the water grew a magnificent phosphorescent lotus recognized as a manifestation of Swayambhu, yet another form of Buddha. The Boddhisattva Manjushri, wishing to reach the flower, which radiated an entrancing light, grabbed his sword and sliced through the valley wall to drain the lake. When the water had receded, he built a stupa on the hill where Swayambhunath’s cluster of shrines now stands, capped by a golden spire with an eye on all four sides of its base to watch over the valley. No one knows exactly how old the first buildings at Swayambhunath are, but an ethnic Gurung Buddhist happily and ecumenically named Krishna Lama assured me as we walked around the main stupa that it had been there at least three thousand years.
Though the borders of Nepal encompass the birthplace of the historical Buddha, this is a nation where Buddhism and Hinduism – much of the worship of Shiva and his omnipresent phallus, the shivalinga – coexist to an often confusing degree. Bodhnath seems to nurture a rigorously Buddhist milieu, yet Hindus come to worship and leave offerings there as well as at Swayambhunath, where it is not uncommon to find a nearly naked sadhu daubed in vermilion sitting cross-legged in front of a side altar. In the Durbar squares of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur, Buddhist and Hindu shrines and iconography mingle in endlessly fascinating ways and places.
In a Kathmandu neighborhood where I once stayed for a month, every morning began with Buddhists igniting fires in bowls of incense on their rooftops and the Hindus pausing at a small crossroads shrine to pray, light a candle, or leave an offering. Then Buddhists and Hindus (and their Muslim neighbors) merged and mingled on the dusty lanes on the way to work, school, or the daily shopping. The scholar David Snellgrove, whose Indo-Tibetan Buddhism provides the most exhaustive and lucid early history of this region, thinks that Nepal’s Buddhist-Hindu symbiosis provides the last living example of what religious life in northern India must have been like before aggressive Hindu Brahminism and the Muslim conquests changed the landscape forever. “One realizes,” he wrote, “how much has been lost in India, and how fortunate we are to have a small surviving replica in Nepal.”
With the arrival of many Tibetan exiles in the 1950s, especially after 1959, Buddhism got a critical if unexpected boost in the valley, where new religious centers sprang up, existing communities expanded, and monasteries proliferated. Tibetans, successful in a variety of businesses, most of all carpet-weaving, give generously to monks and shrines. An articulate and cosmopolitan Tibetan middle class, larger than that of any other Himalayan Buddhist community, has been successful at explaining and promoting Tibetan Buddhism internationally. So apparent was the resurgence by the 1980s that some influential Nepali Hindus sought to curb the growth of Buddhism. In the royal government of King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, the call resonated among those who saw the high profile of Tibetan Buddhists in Nepal as a potential irritant to China. Many Tibetans vow openly to see their homeland liberated from Chinese rule, a thorn if not the hoped-for dagger in Beijing’s side. Consequently, in deference to China, the Dalai Lama has never been able to make an official visit to Nepal, except for Lumbini, and public celebrations of his birthday are banned or severely restricted. For Nepal, good relations with the Chinese are a necessary balance against pressures from India, which is forever seeking a dominant role in Nepali affairs.
Not long ago, Tibetan refugees in Nepal worried that their welcome was wearing thin. Searching for information on events in Lhasa, where an anti-Chinese movement is always rumbling beneath the surface, exploding now and then in demonstrations, I met new émigrés from Tibet nearly surreptitiously in the late 1980s, so great was the concern of host Tibetans who had established themselves in Nepal and did not want their livelihoods jeopardized. But in 1990, a Nepali democracy movement forced a change in the country’s constitution to reduce the power of the monarchy. New elections brought secular parties into office, and threats to Buddhism seemed to dissipate, just as they did when Nepal first tried democracy in the 1950s.
The Buddhist renaissance has probably had the least effect on the Newars, despite long years of good relations with the Tibetans, says Purna Harsha Bajracharya, a Newar from a family of Buddhist scholars. Bajracharya was instrumental in beginning the Nepali Archaeology Department’s first excavations of Lord Buddha’s birthplace in Lumbini in the 1960s. His name, vajra-acarya in its Sanskrit form, literally means a Tantric master. I went to see him at his small home above a busy bazaar near the center of Kathmandu. The high-pitched product advertising of the street vendors and loud arguments of barter combined with bicycle bells and the horns of motorized rickshaws were so pervasive that Purna Harsha’s soft voice was hard to hear when I played back my tapes of our first talk that evening.
But this cacophony was probably appropriate, for the Newars have always been Nepal’s most committed urbanites, thriving at the heart of commerce. For more than a thousand years, they dominated trade routes between India and China from their family bases in the Kathmandu Valley and their trading houses and mercantile associations in Lhasa. Wool, silk, tea, rice, precious corals, works of art, silver, and finally manufactured goods moved along Himalayan trails on pack animals. Along the same routes, Tibetan Buddhists came south to visit the great shrines of Nepal. Newar lamas, including Purna Harsha’s forebears, went to Lhasa to exchange learned opinions. The Newar trade monopoly was not broken until early in the twentieth century when the British encouraged the opening of new routes to Tibet from the northeastern Indian hill town of Kalimpong through Sikkim.
Purna Harsha’s house backed onto a much quieter zone built around a Newari Buddhist vihara, a small temple-monastery marking the home of an important family. This vihara was in a state of decline, its owner having died some years ago “without issue,” in Purna Harsha’s words. He has informally taken over responsibility for the small enclosed square with delicately carved wooden doors and lintels that enclosed the shrine to a god now gone. A tailor has moved in on one side; other families fill the rest of the space, using the pump that Purna Harsha’s family installed over a centuries-old well that still produces good water. In front of the shrine stands a chaitya, the Newar equivalent of a chorten or stupa. Purna Harsha, a man of great dignity and generosity, says that his duties amount to little more than “putting a few flowers there from time to time.” In truth, he seems to take pains to salvage this corner of history, abused as it is by newcomers without an appreciation of its value.
Many other Newar compounds have suffered amid the general decay of old Kathmandu, where buildings collapse and mounds of fly-covered garbage fill once-sacred pools and pile up at many an intersection, repelling tourists. Newars, with their considerable intellectual and design skills, were responsible for the architecturally remarkable cores of the valley’s three magnificent medieval cities – Bhaktapur, Patan, and Kathmandu – and were sought after across the Himalayas and in Tibet as craftsmen for both Buddhist and Hindu buildings.
Newars believe that one of their own, the young Princess Bhrikuti, carried a civilized form of Buddhism with her to Tibet when she became one of two wives of the Tibetan king-emperor Songsten Gampo in the seventh century. Indeed, Newars say that she took with her to Lhasa a statue of the Lord Buddha so valuable and exceptional in its execution that the famous Jokhang temple was built (by Newar craftsmen) to house it. Purna Harsha says that Newari women have always taken important parts in religious ceremonies and family affairs. They were traditionally free to move around the town and sometimes took lessons from monks – at least until the Rana period, when they became the targets of licentious officials whose militant Hindu upbringing conveyed little understanding of the Buddhist social order. A kind of self-imposed purdah set in, and is only now being broken down.
That the Newars’ Tibeto-Burman language became Sanskritized, and that the Newars were apparently forced beginning in the fourteenth century under the Malla dynasty to adopt a Hindu caste system completely alien to Buddhist teaching, did not diminish their firm commitment to Buddhism, even after the Gorkhas, Hindus of Indian origin from the Terai, took over the Nepali monarchy in the eighteenth century. Purna Harsha Bajracharya argues that the caste system was forced on Newars out of necessity by the Malla kings, some of them Buddhists or sympathetic to Buddhism, who feared Newari solidarity. “When the rulers found everyone united among us, they were angry. The caste system became useful to divide us.” It was enforced more rigorously after the end of Malla rule by Gorkha rulers, who also imposed caste on the Tibetan-speaking people of the north and assigned most of them a low status.
Purna Harsha says again and again that the Newars never had a quarrel with Hinduism, which some of them adopted. The problems were political. He adds that in any case the term “Hindu” is too broad to apply to most Nepalis, who concentrate their devotion on one god in the Hindu pantheon, Shiva, and should rightly be called Shivaites. “In the histories of Nepal you won’t even find the word ‘Hinduism,’” he said. “Buddhism and Shivaism grew side by side here. Both hold each other in great respect. We speak of the Shiva-dharma and the Buddha-dharma.”
Purna Harsha Bajracharya, now retired, talked about how the persecution of Newar Buddhists during the century dominated by the Rana dynasty of hereditary prime ministers had inevitably led to a lack of self-assertion and a paucity of research into their own history and culture. He tells of scholars unable to publish or forced into exile because they did. Newar Buddhist culture can never really be obscured, however, because of the extraordinary public architecture and religious institutions it contributed to Nepali life. The child goddess Kumari, whose temple in Kathmandu’s Durbar Square draws sightseers hoping to catch a glimpse of the living deity, is a Newari ingredient in the Nepali cultural mix. The prepubescent Kumari, to whom by legend the valley belongs and to whom, therefore, everyone, including the king, must pay tribute once a year, is one of several such goddesses; Newar temples once had many more.
News of the vigor of Buddhism in Nepal is fast spreading beyond the Himalayas. Because Nepal, once closed to outsiders, has in recent decades become one of South Asia’s most open societies, easily accessible by air from both Western nations and East Asia, Kathmandu is attracting more international scholars and new believers from several continents. Go to prayers at almost any gompa around Kathmandu and there is likely to be, in addition to a few American or European voices, a handful of respectful Japanese, Thai, Malaysian, or Singaporean worshippers. The Westerners are no longer the stock characters who once drifted in from the fringes of the drug-taking, hippie Freak Street culture that was prepared to get high on just about anything the Nepalis could offer in the 1960s and ’70s, including the erotic Tantric Buddhist art whose proliferation a nineteenth-century Englishman had labeled a “filthy custom.” That carefree scene bottomed out sometime in the 1980s after the overland route from Europe was closed by war in Afghanistan and by a Nepali decision to raise the costs of travel in Nepal and to reorient tourism toward more affluent visitors and serious trekkers. The casual age has not entirely passed, of course. In a Kathmandu garden café I heard two backpacking Americans discuss what to do with their day. “Let’s go to Swayambhunath,” one said. “A lot of really cool things go on there.”
At the well-heeled Orgyen Tolku Gompa at Bodhnath, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche said he had noticed a continuing evolution of tourism in recent years. “Before, tourists came to look at the mountains. Then some started coming to see the monasteries. They see Kathmandu is a special place. Very holy. Tourists changed. Some began wanting to hear some teaching, to study with us,” he said. With new interest obviously came money. The rinpoche’s private quarters include a private chapel of evident affluence, decorated in the brilliant colors traditionally favored by Tibetans. The high ceiling was painted a bright aquamarine, with rafters lacquered red. Stylized paintings of religious motifs covered the walls, along which six brass and crystal sconces had been installed for light. From the rafters hung two large crystal chandeliers. At the altar, dominated by a larger-than-life image of Buddha, there was a collection of gold statues and fine ceramic temple guardian lions. The floor was carpeted in Tibetan rugs. The one unharmonious note was the hideous three-tiered plastic waterfall with a trick faucet and plastic flowers installed on a corner table. The faucet seemed to be suspended miraculously in midair, producing a stream of water from no visible source. (The water was being pumped up to the shiny golden tap from the bottom collection dish, through an unseen clear tube obscured by the stream flowing back down around it.) Incongruous kitsch though it was, it certainly caught the attention of disciples. Two boys sat riveted in front of it.
One of the most powerful and beloved of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist lamas, the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, established his base in Kathmandu, where he and his followers built the impressive Shechen temple and monastery. His Holiness, who had at one time instructed and inspired the Dalai Lama and served as a personal guru to members of Bhutan’s royal family, was the internationally recognized ranking lama of the Nyingmapa school and one of the last – if not the last – of the great Tibetan-born teacher-saints and tertons, discoverers or revealers of holy treasures. Twenty-two years of his life were spent in meditation, some of them in isolated caves in the manner of the great lamas of the past. He established and consecrated temples in Bhutan, India, and the West as well as in Nepal and set up a school of classical studies at Bhutan’s Simtokha Dzong. (His daughter Chhimi Wangmo is assistant director of Bhutan’s National Museum.) Though rooted in the Nyingmapa school, the rinpoche devoted much of his later life – he fled Tibet for Bhutan in 1959 – to preaching a nonsectarian Buddhism, drawing on the holy writings and philosophies of all schools.
I had often heard in Bhutan about the blurring of sectarian divisions. I remember in particular what the abbot of Tashigang Dzong told me as we stood by a huge, complicated, multifaceted sculpture in one of his temples that looked at first sight like a confusing jumble of images piled on a giant plant. “This is the holy tree,” he said. “Here is the lotus grown from the lake. On the leaves the different Buddha scholars are. We have different sects. Here is the leader of Nyingma and how he achieved enlightenment. And next is another sect called Karmapa, and this is its lineage. And this is Guru, and this is the sect that was followed by Shabdrung. Up there at the top is Buddha himself. So you see no matter what denomination or what sect, the root is same, the body same, and ultimate truth is one. Root is same, ultimate goal is same. Only approach is different.”
In poems, essays, and talks in Asia and the West, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche went beyond mere nonsectarianism. He gave the religion that recognized him as a leader in 1910, while he was still in his mother’s womb, a true sense of universality. After he died in September 1991, Bhutan spent more than a year praying and preparing for his final funeral rites. Present at the purjang or cremation ceremony in November 1992 – during which, Bhutan’s weekly newspaper said, “the last mortal remains of His Holiness dissolved into the state of luminosity” – were the Bhutanese royal family, more than fifty thousand monks and tulkus, and thousands of other followers and admirers from around the world. Many more would have come if Bhutan could have handled them. The cremation took place on a meadow in Paro, in view of the Taktsang monastery, where the Guru Rinpoche was believed to have descended on a flying tiger in the eighth century bearing the Nyingma Tantric teachings. The cremation pyre of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was a work of Bhutanese artisanship at its best: a carved, roofed pavilion bedecked in silk, with altars around the clay coffin overflowing with the finest offerings of food and religious objects. Tibetan Buddhism may never again see this exalted ceremony performed with such purity of ritual and in such an unspoiled cultural and natural environment. While Himalayan Buddhists await the rinpoche’s reincarnation, his legacy lives on in Kathmandu in the shadow of Bodhnath.
“Kathmandu is developing into an important center for Buddhist study,” another Tibetan lama, Khenpo Rigzin, said during one of our conversations at the Nyingma Institute of Nepal, a new monastic school just outside Kathmandu memorable for its quiet, superserious atmosphere. The institute has a Tibetan-American patron, Tarthang Tulku, a publisher of Buddhist texts in Berkeley, California, Khenpo Rigzin said. Novice monks – still all boys, no girls – from across the Himalayan region and India come here to take a nine-year course that is heavy on Buddhist philosophy. So far, no Westerners had enrolled as students, Khenpo Rigzin said, though they are admitted for research. He added politely, even sweetly, that Western students might pose a problem, given the very different intellectual and spiritual environment that produced them. In his experience, he said, he found it took them a little longer to grasp things. A concept he could teach a Bhutanese, Sikkimese, or Sherpa in a week would take two or three weeks to penetrate the mind of an American, he thought.
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.