- After seeing the Dalai Lama moving with the clumsy grace
of an elephant, his kindly, avuncular face bending toward the crowd with
an expression of pure benevolence, and hearing his deep, mellifluous voice
explain the purpose of Mahayana Buddhism - to bring all sentient beings
to enlightenment and liberation - the monsters in the Tibetan Buddhist
temples come as sort of a surprise. Ceramic faces frozen into expressions
of horrible rage, fangs extending from wide-open mouths, rows of orange
skulls strung like a garland across grotesque heads, huge, weapon-like
sexual organs. These are the most frightening idols one can imagine. The
paintings on the walls of the temples are no less gruesome. Monsters eat
the entrails of a doomed, screaming man. A huge eagle flies away carrying
a man's eyes in his beak. Only if you look carefully, amid all the horrors,
can you see the image of a man meditating in a cave crusted with snow,
an eye of calm at the center of a storm of cruelty.
-
- "This is the protector of the monastery,"
explains
an elderly monk in a dark room in the monastery that lies high above the
village of Disket in the remote Nubra Valley region of Ladakh. He has
opened
the room just for us, and he is motioning toward a particularly frightening
statue, whose giant white head has the face of a deranged clown. "A
few hundred years ago, a Muslim army tried to conquer the region. The
commander
came up here to the monastery and immediately fell down dead. The monks
threw the body into the river, but it kept mysteriously reappearing in
the monastery. Finally, one of the monks cut off the commander's head and
placed it in the arms of the idol. After that the body stopped
returning."
-
- My eyes now adjusted to the dark, I stare at the idol's
large hands. Still cradled between them like a toy, stuck now to the hands
by the accumulated residue of centuries, is the commander's skull.
-
- Counter-clockwise prohibition
-
- One thing that is strictly forbidden in the world of
Tibetan Buddhism is to turn the prayer wheels counterclockwise. The wheels,
placed strategically at street corners, at the entrance to monasteries,
or over a rushing stream, contain a prayer that is activated when they
are turned - by hand, by a waterwheel, or through the force of hot air
emerging from a perpetually lit oil lamp. Not until we meet Tshering Dorje
in Keylong, the regional capital of the Lahaul district, do we understand
why the counterclockwise direction is taboo.
-
- When Mr. Dorje was 12 years old, his parents sent him
to a famous monastery in western Tibet, 20 days' journey from home. There
he was expected to become a high-ranking lama, filling a seat that his
family, he tells us, had held for seven generations. When he was 18 years
old, the systematic Chinese attacks on Tibetan monasteries began, and his
teachers were arrested or killed. Tshering returned home to India. Now
close to 70, his gray eyes tinged with a cloudy blue, he is obsessed, not
with the fate of Tibetan Buddhism, but with the tribal religion called
"Bon" that it defeated and incorporated. The events of his life,
including the Chinese invasion of Tibet, have sent him searching for
origins.
"The Bon religion that came before Buddhism was basically a form of
shamanism. It is still alive in the villages here." For the Bon,
Tshering
tells us, counter-clockwise held magical power, so the Buddhists made sure
to reverse directions.
-
- Tshering is an intellectual - he has several volumes
of the Talmud in his extensive library - who had a long career with the
Indian civil service. But in the last decade or so he has devoted himself
to befriending and investigating the male and female "oracles,"
in the area near his ancestral home. Trained from the time they are
children,
the oracles enter trance states in which they are possessed by the gods
of trees, waterfalls or mountains. Dancing wildly, often twirling
unbearably
heavy objects, sometimes piercing their faces and necks with metal pins,
they foretell the future and cure the illnesses of the villagers in
attendance.
"When they awaken from the trance," Tshering tells us, "the
oracles remember nothing."
-
- "And these oracles are Buddhist?" I ask.
-
- "No, they are not Buddhist," Tshering answers.
"The villagers who believe in them may be Buddhist, but classic
Buddhist
texts absolutely forbid this kind of thing."
-
- "But the Dalai Lama has oracles as well," I
remark.
-
- "State oracles!" Tshering answers, cutting
the air with his hand for emphasis. "He can't move a single step
without
consulting them."
-
- "So Tibetan Buddhism is actually part
shamanism?"
I ask.
-
- "Fifty percent," Tshering answers. "At
least 50 percent!"
-
- Roads and bridges
-
- Thirty or 40 million years ago, the Indian subcontinent
was still an island floating in the sea, like Australia. When it crashed
into Asia, the Himalayas were formed, pushed upward by the impact. During
successive ice ages over the last million or so years, glaciers ground
and cut the mountains, scooping and carving the stone, exposing layers
of bent and colored rock, stripping the mountains naked and brilliantly
adorning them at one and the same time. Across this Himalayan bridge,
Buddhism
penetrated to Tibet from India in the seventh century.
-
- Tibetan Buddhism quickly spread in numerous directions,
including south and west into Ladakh, Lahaul, Spiti and Kinnaur - tiny,
continuously threatened Himalayan kingdoms that are now part of India.
Until the early 1990s, many of these areas, which form part of India's
often-tense border with China, were closed to foreigners, and there are
still places where the official Indian relief maps suddenly go blank, with
etchings of mountain ranges and lakes are replaced by the single word:
"restricted." Ladakh also borders Pakistan to the west. In 1999
the Pakistani army infiltrated glacial outposts high above the Nubra Valley
that the Indian army had abandoned for the winter. More than 5,000
combatants
were killed during the Kargil war that erupted after the snows melted in
June; aided by Ladakhi scouts at home in the forbidding high-altitude
terrain,
the Indian air force pummeled the Pakistani army into retreat.
-
- The roads to Ladakh, Spiti, Lahaul and Kinnaur are not
meant for those who fear heights. They hug the edge of mountains; on one
side, there is always an abyss. Open only for five months of the year
because
of the heavy snowfall, the sections made of asphalt crack during the
freezing
winters. Crews of dark-skinned workers, from the poorest Indian state,
Bihar, can be seen camping by the road every few kilometers, heating and
spreading tar, working under the supervision of the Indian army, which
has a vital interest in keeping the roads clear.
-
- "Are you happy to be working here?" I ask one
crew who are on lunch break, eating rice with lentils.
-
- "It's a good deal," they tell me. "We
earn 100 rupees [NIS 10 shekels] a day - twice as much as at
home."
-
- Every hundred kilometers or so, at the top of a pass
or the entrance to a new district, soldiers write the names and passport
numbers of travelers passing through in huge official notebooks. In the
middle of the night, a middle-aged soldier with a paunch and three days'
growth of beard, working by the light of a single candle, asks me a
question
to which I have a hard time formulating an adequate reply, perhaps because
of the hint of bitterness clouding his voice.
-
- "Most of the people traveling here are Israelis
22 years old or so. How do they have the time? Don't they have to work
at all?"
-
- Kibbutz India
-
- Israelis, indeed, are everywhere. "India is like
a kibbutz," says Naomi Harpaz, an Israeli woman old enough to remember
the days of the European kibbutz volunteers who spent a lot of time
seemingly
idle, smoking Lebanese hash and listening to Led Zeppelin in the huts where
they lived, duly segregated from the kibbutz teenagers. "Except all
the volunteers are Israeli."
-
- And indeed many of the Israelis seem to be doing as
little
as possible while in India, playing backgammon, smoking charas, trading
insights about guest houses in the Himalayan towns on the Israeli route
to Dharamshala, Manali, Leh, Kosul and Rishikesh, and calling home to
Netanya
or Rishon to reassure their parents at reasonable intervals. But there
are still enough Israelis around so that the most energetic travelers we
meet, the most
-
- adventurous, daring and learned, are also Israeli: Yahel,
a mountain climber who speaks Hindi and has been traveling through India
for six years on a motorcycle; Yaki, who has been studying Tibetan for
the past three years and has been asked to accompany a famous Lama to
Australia;
and Gila, a fiery, vigorous woman in her forties who is translating the
Dalai Lama's lectures into Hebrew, but says that she is hard-pressed to
find the Hebrew equivalent of "mindfulness."
-
- We are unusual for Israeli travelers: four families,
six adults and 12 children ranging in age from 7 to 16, making our way
together through the mountains. When we arrive at Old Manali, where nearly
every store has signs in Hebrew, and Steakiyat Itzik Hagadol competes with
Falafel Yehuda me'Goa, the kids pour into Ha'ayin Hashlishit, a restaurant
that serves shakshuka, labaneh and hummus, whose young Indian owner has
an Israeli girlfriend and where Meir Ariel tapes are played over and over
again, until the Nepali waiter complains to me that he is sick of Israeli
music.
-
- Outside Ha'ayin, late one night, the teenagers meet Ofer,
who is here, so he says, trying to forget Operation Defensive Shield (an
Israeli army operation in Jenin in 2002). "The army damages
people,"
he says. "Who wants to hit an old woman? We didn't force her to get
up. But a terrorist was hiding behind her, and as we were leaving he jumped
out and shot my friend to death. That's why I'm in India," he says
sadly. "Maybe that's why we're all in India."
-
- `The right not to go insane'
-
- In Dharamshala, I meet Lhasang Tsering, mustachioed,
eloquent, the proprietor of the Bookworm bookshop and a leading Tibetan
politician and intellectual, who introduces himself to me, with a touch
of irony, as the Dalai Lama's "opposition." He is heartbroken,
he says, about what is going on in Tibet, and furious at the Dalai Lama's
policy of nonviolence. The leader's misplaced trust in the Chinese, his
retreat from the demand for Tibetan independence to a quest for autonomy
and peaceful coexistence with the Chinese are wrong, all wrong. What
tortures
Lhasang the most is that there is still a slim window of time left in which
to change things. The Chinese settlers who are being poured into Tibet
by the government haven't really taken root there. The Three Gorges Dam,
a giant hydroelectric project the Chinese are building, and which will
change the ecosystem of the Tibetan plateau, is not yet completed.
-
- A plump, white-haired American woman who is searching
the bookstore for the three-volume guidebook of rules for Tibetan nuns
is shocked by the vehemence of the proprietor's critique of the Dalai Lama.
"Don't give up," she chides him softly, her face a mask of piety,
as if the fate of his soul were in danger.
-
- "Don't give up?" Lhasang is practically
screaming
now. "Tell him not to give up!"
-
- Born in Tibet, Lhasang and his family escaped to India
in the early 1960s. When he was 18, in the early 1970s, he heard about
the Tibetan resistance fighters in the Mustang region of the Tibet-Nepal
border, who had been trained by the CIA in Colorado for sabotage missions
in Tibet. He asked to join the fighters, and was sent for a meeting with
the Dalai Lama: "He practically jumped out of his seat and raised
his voice to me. `Do you think you alone can defeat the Chinese?' he asked
me. But he eventually gave me his permission."
-
- In 1973, Henry Kissinger's historic visit to China
resulted
in a withdrawal of U.S. support for the Tibetans, and a Nepali crackdown
on the Tibetan guerrillas. The Dalai Lama sent a taped message to the
fighters
- in order, Lhasang says, that there would be no mistaking his distinctive
voice - ordering them to lay down their arms. "Commanders and some
of the fighters committed suicide after hearing that tape. What did they
have to live for anymore?"
-
- Lhasang believes that there is an inherent contradiction
in a religious leader, like the Dalai Lama, being entrusted with the
political
future of the nation. "The Dharma [a Buddhist's spiritual path] is
about freedom from the world. Politics is about freedom in the world,"
he says. "The Dharma will survive," he declares dramatically,
"but Tibet is in mortal danger. This life, I am devoting to Tibet.
But it's not only about Tibet," he adds.
-
- If you include India, China and Southeast Asia, Lhasang
argues, it means that half the world's population is hostage to the
conflicts
that will surely develop along the Indian border with China. "An
independent
Tibet could be a buffer zone between the two countries. Right now it is
quiet, but the Chinese see themselves as the eventual rulers of the world.
And the dams they are building are changing weather patterns in all of
India. Tibet is the roof of the world, and the Chinese are making a hole
in it."
-
- Although in his fifties, Lhasang says he is ready to
drop everything and fight once more. "My home, this bookshop - it's
all in my wife's name. Why do I still have hope? I am exercising my final
right: the right not to go insane."
-
- Global warming
-
- Dolka and Tinless, two petite 20-year-old Ladakhis in
jeans, take us on a trek across 4,000-meter-high mountain passes. It takes
us five hours of sweat and muscle burn to climb each pass, but the local
students walk over them to high school every day, returning home in the
evening. The path is yellow dust, the mountains are blue, ash gray, orange,
red. At night we sleep in villages - islands of luxuriant green, with
streams
pouring down from glaciers that feed water-operated mills for crushing
barley into flour, as well as prayer wheels spinning enlightenment for
all sentient beings. Ladakh, like Spiti and Lahaul, is a desert with water,
as much as anyone might need.
-
- But even that may be changing. Motti Stein, from the
geology department at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that the
glaciers
are shrinking rapidly, probably because of global warming caused by cars
and industry, and that when the water dries up, possibly in 100 years or
so, the villages will no longer survive.
-
- The concerns of Dolka and Tinless are more immediate.
They belong to a student's organization that is fighting to change the
school system in Ladakh. Officially part of the larger state of Jammu and
Kashmir, Ladakhi schoolchildren are taught in Urdu instead of Ladakhi.
The textbooks make no mention of the things the Ladakhi children are
familiar
with: yaks, barley, Buddhism or the Ladakhi kitchen, with its orderly rows
of copper pots, its urns for churning butter. Teachers from Kashmir beat
the students, they say, and imply that they are incapable of learning
because
Ladakhis are stupid. According to the young women, it is nearly impossible
for Ladakhis to pass the matriculation exams the Indian government requires
after 10th grade.
-
- "So what do the boys do?" I ask.
-
- "After the Kargil war," they say, "the
Ladakhis gained respect as fighters. Now all the Ladakhi boys are in the
Indian army."
-
- And, in fact, in the villages, many of the women are
living alone - their husbands are in the army or the police, or driving
a Jeep for tourists - or, as in the case of Tinless's elder sister, they
are widowed. She works the fields by herself, and also attends to a tiny
Buddhist temple in a room off the courtyard of her home. In the early
morning,
she lights butter lamps on the altar and sweeps the temple clean.
-
- The village of Mudh, population 120, is the last outpost
in the Pin Valley district of the Spiti region. From here, it is a four-day
walk across a high mountain pass to the next village. In the winter, snow
leopards can be seen as they hunt ibex or, if they are daring and
desperate,
one of the yaks that are more numerous here than people. "If a leopard
doesn't manage to break the yak's neck on the first try," our host
tells us, "then the yak has the advantage." The woman of the
house we are staying in here have a different problem then the women we
met in Ladakh: multiple husbands. We count two moving through the house
simultaneously. Although in Ladakh, and among Tibetan refugees, the
practice
is dying out, here in Spiti, polyandry - the opposite of polygamy - is
very much alive. When an elder brother marries, his wife automatically
becomes the de facto bride of all his younger brothers. In a region with
sparse arable land, this is a method for ensuring that farms are not
subdivided
every generation, and also a way to keep the population down.
-
- Do people know which of the brothers is the father of
each child? "The woman may know," I am told, "but this is
a closely guarded secret, the secret that keeps everything together."
And what about the extra women? Who do they marry? "If there are extra
female children, perhaps they are consecrated as nuns."
-
- Another guest house, where part of our 18-member
traveling
party is staying, is run by a smiling middle-aged woman with creases of
infinite patience that line her face: she is a nun, and the guest house
belongs to her brother, a policeman in Spiti's capital, Kaza. In addition
to the guest-house, she is charged with taking care of a small temple built
on a hill above the village. Two bus drivers, Indian Hindus from Kullu,
are sleeping at the guest house. Like drivers everywhere, they like to
talk about sex.
-
- "Yes, she is a nun, but that doesn't mean she
doesn't
have sex. It just means it is forbidden for her to get pregnant. I don't
mean her specifically, but in these villages, sex is quite free. I mean,
not with outsiders, but among themselves."
-
- His friend smiles, takes issue. "Not only among
themselves," he says. "At least not always."
-
- "And what about your children?" I ask the host
in my guest house. "Will any of them become monks or
nuns?"
-
- "Perhaps our middle daughter, the 12-year-old. She
is talented at school and has been recommended by her
principal."
-
- "And who will decide?"
-
- "The final decision? That is in the hands of the
rinpoche."
-
- The rinpoche and the rabbi
-
- The rinpoche is the head of the monastery, the religious
leader of the villages in his region, and he is nearly always, like the
14th Dalai Lama, believed to be the incarnation of the last religious
leader
to have held his post. The incarnate lamas are thought to have special
powers: They are healers, rainmakers, name-givers, and they even decide,
on a case-by-case basis, whether the dead of their congregation will be
buried, burned, cast into the river or placed on a mountain top to be eaten
by animals.
-
- Tenzin Kalsang Rinchen is the rinpoche of the Key
monastery,
which rises on a barren mountaintop high above Kaza, the capital of Spiti.
At the age of four, he was discovered by the search committee appointed
by the Dalai Lama, aided by official oracles, to look for the 19th
incarnation
of Rinchen Zangpo, the "great translator" who was born in 958
and is one of the most important personalities in Tibetan Buddhist history.
At the age of five, in 1966, Tenzin was enthroned as the rinpoche of Key.
In the early 1990s, Tenzin was appointed head of the search committee to
locate the new incarnation of the Panchen Lama, the Tibetan leader second
in importance only to the Dalai Lama himself. The Chinese later kidnapped
the child they found and consecrated. His whereabouts and those of his
family are still a mystery.
-
- Visiting the Key monastery, we ask if we can meet the
rinpoche, and we are surprised: He readily agrees. We fill the long room
where he sits on a wooden chair elevated on a platform - 13 of us, without
the smallest of the children. He is handsome, humble, fluent in English
and - part of his charm - appears to be as interested in us as we are in
him, willing to talk to everybody, including the children, as equals.
"You
have some problems in Israel ... Some Europeans told me the land belongs
to the Palestinians. Is it so?"
-
- "You see," we tell him, "we were in exile
for a long time. Like the Tibetans. There are many Arab Islamic countries.
But we have only one place. The question is whether the Arab Muslims are
willing to allow another people and religion to live and have political
freedom in the Middle East."
-
- "Yes," he assents. "We have to be tolerant
of all religions, but Islam - it seems to be a problem today. We Buddhists
experience it in Ladakh, with the Kashmiris."
-
- Shira, 16 years old, asks him the question we all want
to ask. "Do you really feel that you are the 19th reincarnation of
somebody?"
-
- He smiles, pauses for a moment, and answers: "I
don't know about all 19. But I do feel that I am the incarnation of the
previous rinpoche. I remember when I was a child recognizing his friends,
experiencing many different memories."
-
- "And you still remember?"
-
- "No, not anymore. But I remember having
remembered."
-
- "And do you try to have the same ideas and make
the same decisions that the previous rinpoche would have, in your
understanding?"
-
- "No. Decisions must be made according to
circumstances.
Now there are new circumstances."
-
- "What I want to know," asks Natan, also 16,
"is about all the monsters, the frightening statues and pictures you
have. If Buddhism is supposed to be about peace, about enlightenment, why
so many scary things."
-
- "Ah," he remarks, reminding himself. "You
don't have idols. Things are not as they seem. These frightening objects
represent our innermost fears. When we meditate on them, we lose our fears.
You see, we don't believe in a creator god. We believe that our minds
create
our own reality. Because if there is a creator, why did he create the
world,
where there is so much suffering?"
-
- "But life is not all suffering," someone in
our group exclaims.
-
- "No," the rinpoche agrees. "Not all
suffering."
-
- Another member of our group, an Orthodox rabbi, continues
arguing the merit of creation with the rinpoche. "You say that it
would be better if we were all enlightened beings, if we all had already
reached a far higher level of consciousness. But if 10,000 years from now
we all do achieve enlightenment, won't it still be so beautiful that we
met each other today?"
-
- The rinpoche is intrigued. "Today?" he repeats.
"So beautiful?"
-
- "Do you know the story of Pinocchio?" the rabbi
asks.
-
- "No," the rinpoche answers.
-
- "It's about a wooden puppet that wants more than
anything else to become a real little boy," the rabbi says. "The
way I understand what the Jewish tradition is saying, God created the world
in order to allow us the chance to become more real."
-
- The rinpoche nods his head, as two young monks enter
the room to tell him he is urgently needed somewhere else in the monastery.
Like the generous host he is, he allows us the last word.
-
- "More real," he repeats, as if turning his
supple, fearless mind around the notion. "More real."
-
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