by Jamie Zeppa
At the end of the main road is Tashichho Dzong, the seat of the Royal Government of Bhutan, a grand, whitewashed, red-roofed, golden-tipped fortress, built in the traditional way, without blueprints or nails. Beyond, hamlets are connected by footpaths, and terraced fields, barren now, climb steadily from the river and merge into forest. Thimphu will never look like New York to me, I think.
The Bhutanese are a very handsome people, “the best built race of men I ever saw,” wrote emissary George Bogle on his way to Tibet in 1774, and I find I agree. Of medium height and sturdily built, they have beautiful aristocratic faces with dark, almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones and gentle smiles. Both men and women wear their black hair short. The women wear a kira, a brightly striped, ankle-length dress, and the men a gho, a knee-length robe that resembles a kimono, except that the top part is especially voluminous. The Bhutanese of Nepali origin tend to be taller, with sharper features and darker complexions. They too wear the gho and kira. People look at us curiously, but they do not seem surprised at our presence. Although we see few other foreigners in town, we know they are here. Gordon said something this morning about Thimphu’s small but friendly “ex-pat” community.
When we stop to ask for directions at a hotel, the young man behind the counter walks with us to the street, pointing out the way, explaining politely in impeccable English. I search for the right word to describe the people, for the quality that impresses me most—dignity, unselfconsciousness, good humor, grace—but can find no single word to hold all of my impressions.
In Thimphu, we attend a week-long orientation session with twelve other Irish, British, Australian and New Zealand teachers new to Bhutan. Our first lessons, in Bhutanese history, are the most interesting. Historical records show that waves of Tibetan immigrants settled in Bhutan sometime before the tenth century, but the area is thought to have been inhabited long before that. In the eighth century, the Indian saint Padmasambhava brought Buddhism to the area, where it absorbed many elements of Bon, the indigenous shamanist religion. The new religion took hold but was not a unifying force. The area remained a collection of isolated valleys, each ruled by its own king. When the Tibetan lama Ngawang Namgyel arrived in 1616, he set about unifying the valleys under one central authority and gave the country the name Druk Yul, meaning Land of the Thunder Dragon. Earlier names for Bhutan are just as beautiful—the Tibetans knew the country as the Southern Land of Medicinal Herbs and the South Sandalwood Country. Districts within Bhutan were even more felicitously-named: Rainbow District of Desires, Lotus Grove of the Gods, Blooming Valley of Luxuriant Fruits, the Land of Longing and Silver Pines. Bhutan, the name by which the country became known to the outside world, is thought to be derived from Bhotanta, meaning the “end of Tibet” or from the Sanskrit Bhu-uttan, meaning “highlands.”
While the rest of Asia was being overrun by Europeans of varying hue but similar cry, only a handful of Westerners found their way into Bhutan. Two Portuguese Jesuits came to call in 1627, and six British missions paid brief but cordial visits from the late 1700s until the middle of the next century. Relations with the British took a nasty turn during the disastrous visit of Ashley Eden in 1864. Eden, who had gone to sort out the small problem of Bhutanese raids on British territory, had his back slapped, his hair pulled, and his face rubbed with wet dough, and was then forced to sign an outrageous treaty that led to a brief war between the British and the Bhutanese. Considering the consolidated British empire in the south, and the Great Game being played out in the north between the colonial powers, Bhutan’s preservation of its independence was remarkable. I am full of admiration for this small country that has managed to look after itself so well.
Sessions follow on Buddhism, Bhutanese Customs and Etiquette, the Education System, Village Life, Health and Emergencies. I take notes frantically, filling up page after page: visiting someone for first time, always bring small gift, biscuits or juice, always refuse whatever is offered a few times before accepting. Visitors will do same in your house so keep insisting until they accept. Cup will be refilled three times. Arra = rice-based alcohol. Puja = religious ceremony. Lhakhang/gompa = temple. Never cross your legs in front of high official (bottom of foot considered disrespectful). La/Lasso La = respectful addition to end of sentence. Eat well-cooked meat only (pork = tapeworm, trichinosis).
Buddhism considers all life sacred, therefore do not kill insects or rodents in your home in front of Bhutanese. Prayer flags usually found in high places or over water, wind carries prayers to heaven. Bacterial dysentery = diarrhea with blood & fever. Amoebic dysentery and giardia = diarrhea with mucus, no fever. Languages of Bhutan: Dzongkha, Sharchhop (east), Nepali. English = medium of instruction in school. Many other dialects throughout country. Very hierarchical society. Discuss everything with your headmaster first, do not go over his head, always go through the Proper Channels.
Someone asks about relationships. The group leader says that the Bhutanese are very relaxed about sex, especially the eastern Bhutanese. Usually, people get married by moving in together. They get divorced by moving out. There is no stigma attached to divorce or having children out of wedlock. “Now, out in eastern Bhutan,” she tells us, “you may hear the term night-hunting. This refers to the practice of sneaking into a girl’s house at night, which is a lot more difficult than you would imagine, considering that in most houses, the whole family sleeps in one room. Generally, the idea is, if you’re still there in the morning, you’re married.” We all laugh. She goes on. “You’ll find that if you do have a relationship with a Bhutanese, the village will be quite accepting of the whole thing. Just remember, they say there are no secrets in Bhutan, especially in eastern Bhutan, so you can expect everyone to know about it by the next day.”
She clears her throat. “Just don’t have a relationship with any of your students,” she says, looking straight at me. I glance around—no, she is definitely looking at me. I raise my eyebrows at her. “Are you the young lady going to the college?” she asks.
“No, I’m going to Pema Gatshel. Grade two, ” I answer indignantly, thinking, well, now I know the whole story there. Too young indeed! The Jesuit principal thought I’d run off with a student.
We move on to other concerns. If you fall seriously ill, go to the nearest hospital. If there’s no hospital, go to a basic health unit. Send a wireless message to your field director. There are stories about teachers who had to be carried down mountains on makeshift stretchers by their students. Our field director says they’ve been fairly lucky, though; they’ve had very few emergency evacuations. He reminds us what is meant by emergency evacuation: getting down from your village to a road, finding a vehicle, making the two- or three-day journey back to Thimphu. Someone asks, “So basically, if my appendix bursts out there in Tashi Yangtse, I’m a goner?”
“Well, yes,” our field director says, and smiles apologetically. “Sorry, but it’s not like you can call a helicopter.” Everyone nods. Of course you can’t.
I do not ask about those little yellow dial-a-copter cards that WUSC gave us in Canada with a phone number for medical evacuation. I carry mine with me, tucked into my passport. I seem to be the only one who actually believed I could call 1-800-GET-ME-OUT.
The other teachers, many of whom have taught in other developing countries, do not seem the least bit alarmed. Quite the contrary, they are having a wonderful time. Everything is funny to them. The power blackouts, the icy hotel rooms, the coxcomb in someone’s chicken curry. They call the orientation itself “disorientation,” the health session is dubbed “From Scabies to Rabies.” The stinking local bus is the “Vomit Comet,” the dubious-looking dumplings we eat at lunch are “Dysentery Danishes.” Instead of a copy of Where There Is No Doctor, they call for copies of “Where There Is No Body Shop.” They tell horror stories with glee. The man who loses all his bottom teeth after getting a simple filling. A woman with tapeworm cysts in her brain. Leeches in various orifices. A Canadian in Tashigang cracked up and was found runn
ing around the prayer wheel in the center of town, naked; he was taken out in handcuffs. Typhoid, paratyphoid, hepatitis A, B and C, TB, meningitis, Japanese encephalitis. They make up a little song. I try to join in but my laughter sounds loud and empty in my ears; I am steps away from a prolonged, hysterical outburst.
There are frequent power failures in the evening. We go to bed early, because it is too cold to do anything else, and there is nothing else to do anyway. I read my book of Buddhist teachings by candlelight. My first exposure to Buddhism came through Robert, who had practiced Zen meditation in his days as a musician. I had never been at ease in the Catholicism in which I had been raised; it left too many false notes and dead ends in my head. The basic teachings of Buddhism stretch and trouble me, but they also ring clear and true. According to my book, this is the first of four degrees of faith: a feeling of mental clarity when hearing the Dharma—Buddhist teachings.
The historical Buddha was born a prince, Siddhartha Gautama, in northern India, in the sixth century BCE. A sage predicted that he would either become a great monarch or abandon worldly power altogether and seek enlightenment. Alarmed at the prophecy, Siddhartha’s father created a world of rich comfort in the palace so that the boy would not be bothered by spiritual questions. At the age of twenty-nine, however, the young prince managed to get out of the palace, and was shocked at the suffering he found outside the walls. He was especially disturbed by the sight of an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a mendicant. Realizing that his life was also subject to decay and death, he decided to leave the palace and seek the true meaning of existence. For seven years, he practiced rigorous asceticism until his body collapsed. Practice was no longer physically possible, and he still had not reached enlightenment. He understood then the truth of the middle way—that neither extreme of self-indulgence nor self-denial could lead to the realization he was seeking. After bathing in a river and drinking a bowl of milk offered to him by a village maiden, he sat under a Bodhi tree to meditate, and as a full moon rose, he came to understand the true nature of reality, and the way out of suffering.
The first of the Four Noble Truths taught by the Buddha claims that life is suffering. The second truth explains why. We suffer because the self desires, grasps, clings, is never satisfied, never happy, never free of its many illusions; we desire what we don’t have, and when we get it, we desire to hold on to it, and when we are sure we have it, we lose interest in it and desire something new. In our constant, blind striving for something more, something better, something new, something secure and permanent, we act in ways that hurt ourselves and others, and create bad karma, which leads to rebirth and therefore more suffering. Even if we manage to be content with what we have, we are still subject to old age, sickness and death, and so are our loved ones. The third truth says that we must end this ceaseless wanting and grasping if we want to end suffering. The final truth explains how—through the Noble Eightfold Path of Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration.
The Buddha did not claim to be a deity. When asked about the creation of the universe and the existence of God, he refused to speculate. He was not offering a new religion but a way of seeing and living in the world. For me, though, one of the most interesting things about Buddhism is not that there is no all-powerful God who we must fall down and worship, but that there is no permanent self, no essence of self. It isn’t even clear among scholars if Buddhism accepts the idea of a soul, an immortal individual spirit. Separateness is an illusion. Nothing exists inherently on its own, independently of everything else, and a separate, permanent, inherently existing self is the biggest illusion of all. There is nothing we can point to and say, yes, this is the self. It is not the body or the mind, but a combination of conditions and circumstances and facilities. At the moment of death, these conditions and facilities break down, and only the karma generated by that life remains, determining the circumstances of the next rebirth.
This is a principal tenet of Buddhism, but the Buddha tells his disciples not to take his word for it. They are to analyze and search and test what he says for themselves. On his deathbed, he reminds them, “Decay is inherent in all compound things. Work out your own salvation with diligence.” I am struck by this spirit of independent inquiry, by the fact that enlightenment is available to all, not through a priest or a church or divine intervention but through attention to the mind. In Buddhism, there is no devil, no external dark force—there is only your mind, and you must take responsibility for what you want and how you choose to get it.
I read until my eyes burn and my head hurts, until I fall asleep.
But my sleep is punctured by the barking of dogs and frequent nightmares. I wake several times a night, and some nights merely float on the surface of sleep and anxiety, wondering if the other new teachers feel the same way, wondering what those goddamn dogs are still barking at, wishing for earplugs, wishing for Robert, wishing for home. I wake up exhausted. Even Lorna and Sasha, who have been completely unfazed by everything so far, complain of restless sleep and strange dreams. Someone says it is the altitude.
I send telegrams to my grandfather and Robert to say that I have arrived safely. What I do not say is that my body has arrived but the rest of me is lost, perhaps in transit. In my dreams at night, I have lost my luggage, my wallet, my passport. I cannot find a taxi, I miss the bus, I drive past the airport again and again. I have brought the wrong ticket, I must make a phone call but I cannot find a quarter. My suitcase is full of toilet paper, full of ants, full of Orange Cream Biscuits. In my dreams, I do not know where I am going: am I coming here or going home? It is more than just the altitude.
On Saturday morning, I go with Lorna and Sasha to the open-air vegetable market. Under roofed stalls, farmers preside over piles of potatoes, skinny green chilies, dried fish, unidentifiable roots and bulbs. Several varieties of rice, including Bhutan’s own “red” rice, which turns a pinkish-brown when cooked, baskets of rice crisps, buckwheat, barley. Strings of dried cheese cubes, pungent balls of raw cheese, dried mushrooms and apples and fierce red chili powder measured out in blackened tin cups. The odor of the cheese mixes with the caustic smell of betel nut and the lime paste it is chewed with, and sends us scurrying away. In the handicraft section, we find religious books and ritual objects—little brass bowls, chalices, long musical horns, incense. Bamboo baskets and mats, twig brooms, a black yak-hair blanket. I run my hand over it and shudder at the scabrous texture.
At one end of the market is the meat department. Men with axes hack apart carcasses, hang up strips of red flesh. Legs and hoofs in one pile, intestines in another. “I grew up on a farm,” Lorna tells us. “This doesn’t bother me.” It bothers me, but I maintain a grim silence. I’m trying to appear as imperturbable as the others. Three pigs, the color of old wax, lie side by side, eyes frozen open. A man brushes past us, hoisting a bloody leg of something over his shoulder. “Yes, madam?” calls a boy with an axe in his hand. “Anything?” We shake our heads and move on.
On the way out, we pass religious men with prayer beads, chanting prayers, telling fortunes with handlettered cards and dice. One man has a miniature three-storied temple, called a tashi-go-mang, its myriad tiny doors open to reveal statues and intricate paintings of deities. People touch coins and bills to their foreheads and then press them into the doorways for luck and blessings. “Do you want your fortune told?” Lorna asks. I shake my head vehemently. That’s all I would need—confirmation of my grandfather’s predictions.
At the market, we see a few tourists for the first time, distinguishable from the resident expatriates by the cameras around their necks; the expats are carrying jute bags loaded with tomatoes and onions. Tourism is carefully regulated, we learned during orientation, so that Bhutan can preserve its culture. The number of annual visitors is kept low by a daily tariff of two hundred U.S. dollars.
After the market, we go to the bank to cash travelers’ ch
ecks into ngultrum, the Bhutanese currency. I feel I have walked into a scene from Dickens. In the gloom inside, dozens of clerks behind wire-mesh walls labor over massive, dusty ledgers, writing figures with leaky fountain pens, counting stacks of money, tying up sheaves of yellowed paper, seemingly ignoring the customers who are pressed up against the counter, waving slips of paper. I am required to sign my name an inordinate number of times before I am given a brass token and told to wait “that side.” I head in the direction of “that side” and wait for an hour, folded into the crowd at the counter, standing on tiptoe to see what the clerk in the cage is doing, straining to hear my number, irritated with the whole disorderly, inexplicable process. There’s no sign telling me where I should be, there’s no line, people push and press and squeeze in front of me, and the clerk is ignoring us all as he chats to a blue-uniformed guard with an ancient, rusted rifle. Do these people have all the time in the world or what? This is something I have already thought a good number of times, waiting for breakfast in the hotel, standing at the counter in shops or offices, stuck behind a truck blocking a lane, wondering why the bakery isn’t open yet when the sign says clearly OPEN 8 AM and it’s already 8:20. Everything seems to take up more time, and the more time things take up, the more time people seem to have. “Doesn’t this just make you crazy?” I ask Lorna.
She shrugs. “It’s not like we have to be anywhere,” she says. It’s true. We aren’t going anywhere. What is my problem? I have all the time in the world, and I am more impatient than ever.
After the orientation session, we begin a week of language lessons. For a small country, Bhutan has an extraordinary number of languages and dialects; at least eighteen have been recognized, some confined to a single village. Lorna, Sasha and I are to learn Sharchhog-pa-kha, which means “eastern-staying people’s tongue,” the main language of eastern Bhutan. Chuni, the pretty, soft-spoken young woman who is to be our teacher, says we can call both the people and the language “Sharchhop” for short.
