So Close to Heaven (14 page)

The Himalayas host a cosmos of spirits, malicious or mischievous but always in possession of their own bit of terrain. Standing on the ramparts of Bhutan’s Tashigang Dzong one afternoon, listening to the
dzongda
, a district administrator akin to governor, Rinzin Gyetsen, talk about creeping deforestation on nearby mountainsides, I noticed a small shrine a little way down the hill from our commanding height on a narrow ridge. “That is the home of the protective deity,” the dzongda interrupted himself to explain. Somewhere in the dark depths of legend-history, that spirit had reached an agreement with civil authority to look after this critical fortress in return for a proper respect from the warriors on the ridge. It was a story repeated, with variations, everywhere I went.

In homes and villages in Bhutan and parts of Nepal and Ladakh, garden gods are propitiated by the burning of offerings in constructions that look like backyard fireplaces. Where rooftops are flat, families light incense fires in bowls placed on the parapets of their homes. It used to be popularly believed that all such rituals had their origins in a shamanistic
ancient religion loosely described as Bon. Some guidebooks still leave the impression that Bon (whose followers are called Bonpos) is no more than the worship of spirits and natural objects that thrived for centuries around these mountains and valleys, springs and rushing rivers.

Western scholars and Bonpo religious leaders have now demonstrated that Bon is more likely an early form of Buddhism with local underpinnings and a distinct history. By their definition, Bon would be, in effect, a fifth order of Tibetan Buddhism, joining the classical four: Nyingmapa, Sakyapa, Kagyupa, and Gelugpa. Orthodox orders, experts say, have been the leading detractors of Bon, helping to perpetuate the notion that it is a primitive throwback to pre-Buddhist Tibet.

In Nepal, Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche, a Bonpo leader whose name is better known in Paris, Rome, Rio, or New York than in most Himalayan towns, takes exception to the notion that Bon is just another form of mainstream Buddhism, though he does acknowledge areas where his faith and at least one Buddhist school intersect. He is directing the building of the first Bonpo monastery in the Kathmandu Valley to train mainly novices from Tibet and western Nepal, where the faith has its deepest roots but a lack of scholarship and educated religious leadership has led to deterioration. The presence of a Bonpo gompa near Kathmandu, a thriving Buddhist center, may do a lot to bridge gaps in understanding and establish a more respected place for Bon in the Himalayas.

Tenzin Namdak has found considerable support in France and the United States, where this extraordinary religion is, surprisingly, gaining many adherents who prefer to see it more as an ethical system than a faith denigrated in the past as an outgrowth of black magic and the worship of rocks. If this reputation for shamanism is no longer relevant (or was always a misperception), this is only one of many points of debate about Bon among experts on Himalayan religions, who are still learning and refining their knowledge of early Tibetan worship. It is obvious that not only Bon but also the mainline Buddhist schools have accepted if not incorporated a good deal of pre-Buddhist belief and ritual. The stories of deals struck with local spirits by the Guru Rinpoche, Himalayan Buddhism’s founding saint, are important symbols of this.

Tenzin Namdak’s monastery climbs a vertical hill facing a sea of rice fields that was blanketed in spring green when I went to visit him. Across the fields, on another hill, looms the ancient Buddhist shrine of Swayambhutnath. The rinpoche says the isolated spot is full of spirituality
and natural beauty, where Bonpos from everywhere can feel at peace. As we climbed the stairs to his sanctuary, we passed a group of cheerful monks happily making
momos
, the small Tibetan dumplings filled with vegetables or meat that sustain pilgrims and travelers across the Himalayas.

The Tibetan-born Tenzin Namdak, who escaped a Chinese prison in 1961, had for nearly two decades been in charge of a Bonpo monastery-school he founded in the Indian state of Himachal. But there, he said, there was no hope of a truly permanent home. “Most of the students coming to India from Tibet and Dolpo in western Nepal are in monasteries right in the center of Hindu villages. There are no holy places for them nearby, nothing. This place will be bigger. It is also very beautiful. People should look after it well.”

We sat down for tea in a small classroom dominated by an altar over which hung a thangka, a religious painting on a silk scroll, bearing the blue-white likeness of Samantabhadra, the preeminent Bon god. Tenzin Namdak, wearing dark maroon monastic robes not unlike those of Buddhist abbots, explained that while his order accepted the existence of the Buddha Shakyamuni it did not take his teaching as the basis of their beliefs, insisting that Bon had other origins, albeit within the same Buddhist universe. As for Padmasambhava, another name for the Guru Rinpoche, his divinity is also denied, though it is said that he may have been the son of a Bonpo sage. Bonpos venerate instead a founder whom they call Shenrap, who seems to approximate closely the position of the Buddha Shakyamuni in orthodox Buddhism. Shenrap (or Shenrab) and Shakyamuni are competing manifestations of this era’s version of the universal Buddha, who has past, present, and future forms symbolized by the Buddha Dipankara, the Buddha Shakyamuni, and the Buddha Maitreya, respectively.

Bonpos believe that their faith has roots in West Asia: “Kashmir in olden times, the Swat Valley, Gilgit, and Persia—we say Tazig; this we call the source of our religion,” the rinpoche said. The teachings blossomed in Shang-Shung (or Zhang-Zhung), an independent ancient realm that is now western Tibet. Bon entered the Tibetan mainstream when Tibet became a unified kingdom, Tenzin Namdak said. This raises the intriguing possibility that what the Bonpos saw as a distinctive import from another part of Asia was really early Buddhism coming back via Central Asia (i.e., Tazig = Tajik) and areas of what are now Pakistan
and Afghanistan, where it had spread soon after the Buddha Shakyamuni’s enlightenment. No one knows for sure; in any case, Tenzin Namdak doesn’t put much credence in that hypothesis of Buddhism come full circle. For him, Bon stands alone, historically. “We have a very rich culture, so we don’t have to take from any other source.”

“Long before there was Tibet as a kingdom, there was Bon and it was what the people believed there,” the rinpoche said. “It became a national religion.” Bon has its own set of texts that, in centuries of philosophical development, grew closer to old Buddhist canon, shedding a shamanistic image, he said. “If you are looking at an outside picture of us, we are very much similar as the Nyingmapas, Buddhist Nyingmapas.” There are a few practical differences, which he called “details.” Apart from the unfamiliar image of Samantabhadra at the altar, there is the counterclockwise circumambulation of holy sites. Where Buddhists pass or walk around a shrine keeping it to the right, Bonpos go the other way, with the object of veneration to the left.

Tenzin Namdak, an internationally recognized and published scholar as well as a teacher of Bon who has done much to universalize its appeal, says he practices neither old Bon nor new Bon, but a third stream called Swastika Bon, which has historically been dedicated to education. The swastika, an ancient Indian symbol of eternity or good luck, is common to both Hinduism and Buddhism. His choice of spiritual path is partly explained by his upbringing. Until he went to study at the famous fifteenth-century Menri monastery in central Tibet, he lived in a household where his father’s side followed old Bon, the religion associated with magic and nature worship, and his mother’s family were new or reformed Bonpos. But he does not reject all the old spirituality and pantheism of ancient Bon, or whatever worship may have predated it and later got its name.

“In the first Bon, whether in Bhutan or in Nepal or in Tibet, so many gods they are worshipping—the mountain gods, the water gods, the fire gods,” he said, as we sat at the classroom seminar table over tea served by a novice. “That is part of the Bon tradition. It is also part of the tradition of Tibet generally, even among the Nyingmapas and other Buddhists, for many centuries.” The rinpoche said that the Dalai Lama had recognized Bon as an integral part of Tibetan culture. Although Tenzin Namdak does not accept the older worship as part of modern Bon teaching, he said that in the countryside he is often asked to visit a spot where there
is a natural spirit to be honored in prayer, and he goes there out of understanding for the people to whom this matters. He added that he still hears occasionally, though very rarely, of blood sacrifice among Bonpos and Buddhists, who share occult rites in remote communities, often to appease a demanding natural deity. “Goats or sometimes, I heard, yaks are sacrificed,” he said. “This is very rare, but they do.”

On the positive side, the lingering preoccupation with nature and the spirits living in the elements of earth, fire, and water can form a base for teaching about respect for the environment, Tenzin Namdak said. “This is a very large part of the culture in Bon. Fire, rocks, water, trees, everything—each of them we must preserve. We believe that these natural things are like relations.” He thought this emphasis might be part of Bon’s contemporary international appeal, despite the efforts of Tibetan Buddhist scholars to discredit the Bonpos’ formal canon. He also believes that the popularity of Bon and various forms of Tibetan Buddhism almost inevitably followed the Tibetan diaspora into the West and East Asia.

“Myself, I’m thinking that there is much more knowledge about Tibetan culture than before,” he said. “People can see us and what we are doing here. Otherwise in earlier time, they are just hearing stories about us from other people. Westerners clearly are taking interest in Bon. They are even practicing our highest teaching,
zog-chen.
These people are not scholars. Very often they are people who find they need some religion. You may want to prepare for the next life. Meanwhile you can have peace and calm and quiet and gentle life now. Obviously if you practice this you can do good for your country.”

Tenzin Namdak led me higher up the hillside to the imposing new temple he is building above the monastic school and monks’ quarters. At the back of the high-ceilinged, airy room, several artists were at work constructing an altar with a Buddha image seven or eight feet high. Where had he found the artists?

“They are Bhutanese,” he said. “I asked around for people who could do this, and someone found them for me.”

How fascinating is the evolution of the Buddhist world. Centuries after Bhutanese monastery builders sent for Nepali craftsmen, a Bon temple in the Kathmandu Valley, headed by a Tibetan-born teacher with an international following, has closed a Himalayan circle by going back to Bhutan for an authenticity and purity of craftsmanship not found in many other places outside the last of the vanishing kingdoms.

T
HE
JOURNEY
of this ancient faith that seeped northward to settle comfortably in the cool Himalayan valleys and on the arid Tibetan plateau began in the steamy groves of Lumbini, where alpine Nepal flattens out to meet the great Gangetic plain of India. Sitting one torrid Nepali summer day under a bo tree, watching pilgrims from the mountains come to pray near the spot where millions believe that Queen Mahamaya gave birth to the Buddha Shakyamuni, I thought again about an ambitious fantasy I have been nurturing for years. A group of adventurers with months to spare would assemble here in the hot Terai region of southern Nepal, in a land still inhabited by the Shakya clan into whose royal family Prince Siddhartha was by legend born. From this sacred ground, now being developed by Buddhists from around the world as a center for meditation, study, and environmental conservation, we would turn quickly and directly westward to the edges of the old Hellenistic, Turkic, and Persian worlds, where Buddhism flourished early and with spectacular success in the centuries following Lord Buddha’s enlightenment. That journey would take us first to Afghanistan, where we might pause to mourn not only a ruined past but also a tragic present. Central Asia, where Tibetan was once the language of diplomacy and Buddhism the culture of the trade routes, would be next. Southeastward, then, to Pakistan and India before turning north into the heart of the Himalayas to follow the still-warm trail of Tantric Buddhism across Ladakh, Nepal, and Sikkim to its last outpost in Bhutan. (There would
have to be other excursions someday to the shrines of Buddhism’s other schools, in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Indochina, Korea, and Japan.)