Beyond the Sky and the Earth (33 page)

The neighborhood women show up the next morning with bottles of arra to welcome me. The arra has been cooked with butter and fried eggs, which does little to make it more palatable. We sit on the kitchen floor, drinking, but I have forgotten too much Sharchhop to participate in the conversation. After several mornings and evenings with them, however, the language returns, and they attribute my increasing fluency to the potency of their brew.

I spend a good part of each day wandering through the village, up to the temple, down to the school, across to a ridge where I sit under the prayer flags, drinking in the green of the valley below, the flowing clean spaces around me, and I thank whatever force or god or karmic link has brought me here.
Namé samé kadin chhé,
thanks beyond the sky and the earth. This is the Bhutan that I love. It seems impossible here that heads can be cut off and left in jute sacks. And yet, I know it is wrong, dishonest to separate the two things, the splendor of rural Bhutan and the political situation. Bhutan is a real place, with a real history, in which real conflicts lead to real upheaval, the real suffering of real people. As much as I would like it to be, it is not a hidden valley.

 

 

 

I meet the teachers at Leon’s school, a mix of southern, eastern and northern Bhutanese, and Leon invites them back to his house for “Canadian drinks” one evening. In the flickering light of one candle stub, we mix up glasses of lemon squash and rum and hand them out. The teachers sip their drinks reluctantly, and adamantly refuse our offer of seconds. I think they are being polite until Leon lights more candles, and we see that we’ve given them mustard oil instead of rum.

We walk over to Tsebar, up to the ridge and along a mountaintop in the warm sunlight and down along a wooded slope. A thick mist squeezes its way through the trees, and the forest becomes eerie, all silent fog and shadow and hanging tangled dripping green. We are in Leech Forest. At first we stop to pull them off, but they drop from the trees and somersault off rocks, and for every one we remove, three more find their way on board, and finally we just run, clawing at branches and vines and gasping, until we are out again in a sunny meadow, where we sit and pluck them off and mop up blood with handkerchiefs. “They’re clever little buggers,” Leon says. “They release an anesthetic and an anti-coagulant when they latch on. You don’t even know they’re there.” In Tsebar, we have arra and bangchang with Jangchuk and Pema, and I try to imagine Jane waking up somewhere in England, knowing that Bhutan is impossibly far away. I try to imagine myself waking up in Canada, knowing that Bhutan is closed, finished, over, and the dark line of the mountains against the dawn, the million billion trillion stars in the bowl of the sky, the faces of my students, now a memory and a grief. Leaving will be like waking from a dream, I think, the most intense and wonderful dream, knowing you’ll never be able to dream it again.

The only way to avoid waking is to avoid leaving. I will not leave here until I have lived here thoroughly, until it seeps into me, into blood, bone, cell, until I am full of it and changed by it, and maybe not even then.

I tell this to Leon. He has just finished
Kiss of the Spider Woman,
and now he reads me the last line. “This dream is short but this dream is happy.”

But I want it to be more.

I
am marking homework in the staff room one morning when Mr. Bose sits down beside me, clears his throat, and informs me that one of my trial-exam questions is “wrong.”

“What do you mean ‘wrong’?”

“That business about write the letter Lady Macbeth writes in the sleepwalking scene.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it!” He looks dangerously close to a stroke. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it! It’s not the kind of question they’ll get asked on their final exam! You are not preparing them for their final exam!”

“But the questions they get on their final exams are ridiculous. ‘Summarize Act I of the play.’ I don’t care if they can recite Act I from memory, I want them to have their own thoughts about the play.”

“Never mind their own thoughts about the play! Can they answer the final exam questions? That’s what you should be concerned about,” Mr. Bose says, wagging a finger. “I’m going to have to monitor your work.”

“Mr. Bose,” I say furiously, “never tell me how to teach my class again.” In a second, my anger destroys all the calm I have built up through a week of progressive meditation exercises. It breaks over me, and I indulge in it, can you believe the nerve of him, who does he think he is, etc., etc., until I feel thoroughly poisoned by it.

The sky weeps and wipes its face on the mountains. My legs break out in blisters and boils. The students tell me boils are caused by “impure blood,” and if you get one, you will get nine. I have had three so far. One of my students, Kumar, develops a strange skin condition and is hospitalized in Tashigang. His bed is in an open ward, and two of his classmates stay with him, sleeping on the floor beside the bed at night, bringing his meals and arguing with the doctor over his treatment. “These college students,” the doctor tells me wearily. “They think they know everything.”

Kumar’s face is thin and peaked. The rash makes his skin look like sandpaper. He says the hospital is not so bad, “except at night, miss, it is impossible to sleep. Everyone is groaning and praying.”

On the way out, I pass by a man sitting on the stairs. A large chunk of his leg is missing, and I can see the glimmer of bone at the base of the wound. He sits quietly, waiting for someone to come and tend to him. I had meant to ask a doctor about my boils, but they seem silly now.

Everyone has them. Another student, Tashi, holds a clean handkerchief over the large angry boil on his cheek throughout class. When I pass him in the hallway the next day, I do not recognize him. “It’s me, miss,” he says. “Tashi.” His face is swollen beyond recognition, and he has trouble speaking.

Early the next morning, the college peon knocks on my door with a notice. One of the students has died in the night, and all classes are canceled. I see a group of his classmates climbing up the embankment toward my house, and I know it was Tashi. They tell me the infection went to his brain; they took him to the hospital in Tashigang but it was too late. They wait while I put on a kira, and I follow them to the temple where Tashi’s body, covered in white scarves, is laid out beneath a white canvas canopy. The Dzongkha lopens are leading the prayers, a recitation of the
Tibetan Book of the Dead,
and two students sit by Tashi’s side. A plate of food has been placed beside him. His classmates will take turns sitting with him until his family arrives for the cremation. I sit with the students, the prayers rising and falling around me, and try to pray but I cry instead. “You should try not cry, ma’am,” Chhoden tells me, squeezing my hand. “We say that it makes it harder for the spirit to leave, if people cry.”

It takes Tashi’s family three days to make the journey from their village. For three days, his classmates continue their vigil in shifts, never leaving the body alone. Two of Tashi’s friends have to prepare the body for the cremation. This includes washing the body and breaking the bones to force it into a fetal position. The body is laid upon the pyre and covered with scarves and Tashi’s best gho. After a long prayer and many offerings to the corpse, the wood is lit. But the body does not burn properly, and the lama heading the ceremony says it is because of the spirit’s attachment to this world. Tashi’s classmates bring his flute and his paints from his room and cast them onto the fire, admonishing his spirit. “You’re dead now. See, all your things are gone. We don’t want you here. Go now.”

“How awful,” I say to Chhoden.

She shakes her head. “No, madam. We have to tell like that. If we show how much we loved him, his spirit won’t want to leave and then it will be stuck here. It has to know it’s dead.” She says some people know immediately that they are dead, but others just wander around, sitting down with their family to eat, wondering why no one will speak to them. “That’s why we leave food out near the body, so that the person will not feel so bad.”

More wood is added to the fire and the cloth covering the body shrivels up. Tashi’s brother walks around the pyre with a bottle, pouring water into the dust. “The water is offered to the dead person, for the terrible thirst the fire causes,” Chhoden says. Everyone stands and watches the flames, and what I thought would be unbearably gruesome is merely a sad fact: the flesh melts away and the bones turn grey and crumble, falling into the cinders at the bottom of the pyre. Someday that will be me, I think.

There is none of the sanitized grief that I associate with death in my own culture. Tears are hidden not for the sake of appearances—there is no need to hold up well in the eyes of the community—but for the sake of the dead, so that they will be able to leave behind this lifetime. Grief is everywhere, in the stunned expressions of Tashi’s friends, in his mother’s collapsed face, but there is also a stoic acceptance.

“Everyone dies,” Nima tells me after the cremation. “This is what the Buddha taught.” And he relates the story of the mustard seed: a woman, deranged with grief at the death of her small child, goes to the Buddha and begs him to restore her child to life. He tells her that he will, if she can bring him a handful of mustard seeds from a house in the village where no one has ever died. The woman goes from door to door, and although everyone is willing to give her a handful of mustard seeds, she can find no household that has not known death. Realizing the universality of death, she brings her son to the cremation ground, and returns to become a disciple of the Buddha.

“But the fact that everyone has to die does not make it any less sad,” I tell Nima. “Because each person is unique, their personality and relationships and life.”

But Nima says, “Not so unique, miss. Everyone is born, everyone grows up, everyone wants the same thing—to be happy, and everyone avoids the same things—pain and unhappiness, and in the end, everyone dies, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but within those parameters, every individual’s life is unique and precious, what they think and how they react.”

“But see, miss. If I think how many countless times I have been reborn in this world, we say millions of times, then how many times have I been happy already? How many times have I married and had children and fulfilled all my goals, and how many times have I suffered and died? Then I think I must have experienced everything by now, but I am still here, so I have not learned anything. Then I feel tired, miss. I feel tired of this life and I think I should become a monk and go to a cave and find a way out of all this coming and going in circles.”

Later, in meditation, these words come back to me. It is like something opening in my head, too fast for words.
Imusthave experienced everything by now, but I am still here, so I have not learned anything.
In a moment, I grasp it. Not the Buddhist theory of the self, how there is no essential Jamie Zeppa, how she is only a collection of changing conditions, attributes and desires common to all sentient beings, but the experience of that fact. Everything falls away. It is the experience of pure freedom, a momentary glimpse of how it would be—to be in the world and not be attached to it, to move through it, experiencing it and letting it go. It is impossible to put the feeling, the certainty, into words, but later, I know that this is the moment I became a Buddhist.

I come out of the meditation and the feeling dissipates slowly, dissolving into the common objects about me, straw mat, wax candle, tin cup. I am left with only the shell of the experience, the words. It was like this, like that, it was like things falling away. I feel forlorn, inconsolable—I want the feeling itself back, and then it occurs to me that I have only identified the goal. Attaining it will be a lifelong task. Not all my questions about Buddhism have been answered, but I am ready now to make a commitment to this path.

A week later, at a puja at the old lhakhang above the college, I stand in line behind mothers who have come to ask a visiting lama for blessings and names for their babies. The lama is a young man with a spiky haircut and John Lennon glasses, but the women in the line assure me that he is a very important Rimpoché. And he knows English, they tell me, so I am very lucky. I watch as he touches the forehead of each child, pausing to think of a name. When it is my turn, I prostrate and explain what I want. The lama says that to become a Buddhist, I must take refuge vows. “You take refuge in the Three Jewels,” he says, “the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha—the Buddha, his teachings, and the religious community.” He explains that taking refuge is the first step to Buddhist practice; you acknowledge that refuge cannot be found in worldly things, all of which are impermanent and incapable of leading to true liberation, and that Buddhism is your true spiritual home. It does not mean you give up living in the world and go into a monastery, the lama explains. That is the path for some people, yes, but every person has their own path. When you take the refuge vows, you commit yourself to following the Buddhist path in your daily life. You endeavor to practice nonharming in body, speech and mind, you endeavor to follow the Noble Eightfold Path.

From his briefcase, he takes a little booklet which explains the vows and the refuge prayer, and on the cover he prints a Buddhist name: Kunzang Drolma.
Kunzang
means “all good,” and
Drolma
is the Bhutanese name for Tara, the goddess of compassion.

Later that afternoon, Nima helps me set up an altar on the mantle in my sitting room. In front of pictures of the Buddha and Guru Rimpoché, he puts seven small silver bowls, which he fills with water.

“We offer water because even the poorest farmer can afford to offer it,” he explains. “But in our minds, we imagine that we are offering food, water for drinking and water for washing, flowers, incense, light, and perfumed oils.” I must fill the water cups every morning and empty them before nightfall, he says, as an offering to the gods and to all sentient beings. Then he shows me how to twist cotton batten into a wick for the butter lamp. When he is gone, I sit cross-legged in front of the altar and watch the flame burning steady and strong above the little lamp until my mind feels quiet. I am grateful that I could take the refuge vows outside such an old and sacred temple with a Bhutanese lama who could speak English. It is apt and beautiful and undoubtedly auspicious, but the small ceremony was only a reinforcement of the powerful experience I had in meditation. In the same way that marriage vows are not the marriage, the refuge ceremony is not the practice. The practice is the practice, I think. For the rest of my life. On a small card on the altar, I have copied a verse from the Buddhist canon: “Mindfulness is the abode of eternal life, thoughtlessness the abode of death. Those who are mindful do not die. The thoughtless are as if dead already.”