by Jamie Zeppa
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.”
A Flux of Light
Perhaps enough time has passed. Perhaps it is safe now to talk. By some mutual unspoken agreement, we approach each other again, cautiously at first, shyly, exchanging neutral greetings, but within a few weeks we are back to our old rushing conversations, and with the conversations, the same old desire rises. We never mention the night of the jam session, but nothing has changed between us. I see him outside the office, waiting for the mail, or with his big blue mug and a book, on his way to the student mess for tea. “Miss, have you read that Marquez story about the sea of lost time?” he calls out, or “Miss, what’s the oldest language in the world?” And I say yes, or I don’t know, and we stand there, in the hall or on the lawn, and I feel the college buildings shrink around us, bells and voices echoing dimly. I always tell him more than I mean to, whole passages of my life come spilling out. He listens and then from inside his gho, he pulls out small presents: a feather, a picture of white Tara, a mango, definitions copied neatly onto pieces of paper: aleatory—dependingon random choice; a lumen is a unit of flux of light; infrangible—unbreakable.
There is no privacy, no place or time to talk alone. I do not invite him to my house and he does not come on his own. We rely on these meetings in open corridors, trying to finish one last thought before the bell rings. They are not always happy or satisfying conversations. On the subject of the Situation, for example, we end up talking in circles, which Tshewang says prov
es his point, his point being that there is no point in talking about it.
“Anyway,” he tells me, “I hate talking about politics with you. I haven’t read what you’ve read. I haven’t been where you’ve been. You always argue me into a wall, and I can never be right.”
“That’s not true,” I say, hurt. But I fear it is. We bring too much with us into these conversations, it seems impossible to make a statement that is free of our separate pasts and upbringings and political cultures. My arguments arise from a culture that has named its own values as the highest aspirations of humanity. The fact that governments and corporations and individuals pay lip service to these values, the fact that there are grave inequalities and injustices and abuses of every sort in Western society, does not stop us—me—from pontificating in other places.
No, they are not always easy conversations, but each one adds to the ground we stand on together. In the evenings, I fall into dark fits of despair, asking myself where this can possibly go. It can’t go anywhere, I tell myself. Scalar—having magnitude but not direction. Then I wonder if I just shouldn’t give in and let it happen. Perhaps one night would quench this awful desire and then we could be free of it ... no, no, no. One night would not be enough, and it is not one night that I want. Throw out those little scraps of paper, I tell myself. What you want is impossible.
Nima has decided to leave secular school after class XII and go to a Buddhist college in southern India, where he will become a monk. His mother, he says, is disappointed, but he has his father’s blessing. “You know, miss, in Buddhism, we say that life is like housekeeping in a dream. We may get a lot done, but in the end we wake up and what does it come to, all that effort? I want to study what is really important.”
“Are you sure about this, Nima?” I ask, thinking of the rigorous monastic discipline, the long periods of isolation from his family and friends.
He pulls out a book from his gho, A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, and reads me a quote:
Suppose someone should wake from a dream
In which he experienced one hundred years of happiness,
And suppose another should waken from a dream
In which he experienced just one moment of happiness....
“It’s the same, isn’t it, miss? One hundred years or just one moment. It’s still a dream.”
I can do nothing but nod. He is many lifetimes ahead of me in wisdom and maturity, and in my heart, I bow to him as my teacher.
We go to the temple one afternoon, bringing offerings of incense and vegetable oil for the butter lamps. A long-haired gomchen opens the door and we leave our shoes outside and enter the main room. The floor is cold beneath us as we prostrate in front of the altar on which a single butter lamp burns before a statue of Guru Rimpoché. We pause to look at the paintings on the wall, and Nima points out the six realms of existence in the wheel of life. The realms form the continuum of cyclical life, and rebirth in the worlds of gods, demi-gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, or hell, occurs in accordance with one’s karma. Buddhist hell is remarkably similar to the Christian one, with its hot and cold tortures, except that it is not forever. Beings reborn in the hell realm remain until they have exhausted their negative karma. The hungry ghosts have stick arms and legs, stomachs grotesquely swollen with hunger, and twisted, knotted necks that do not permit them to swallow. They remind me of dieters in the West.
I do not believe in separate hell realms, I tell Nima. There are enough horrors right here on earth. “But what about these gods and demigods?” I ask. “They look very happy.”
Nima nods. “They are happy for now, miss. Their world is very beautiful and pleasant, but they have not escaped cyclic existence, and sooner or later, they will use up their good karma and will be reborn in one of the lower realms. ”
I notice a black door off to the side painted with white skulls, and ask Nima if we can go in there. He says he can but I cannot. The room houses the temple’s guardian deity, and women are not allowed to go in. The gomchen asks if we would like our fortunes told. Nima takes a pair of dice from a brass tray and holds them against his forehead briefly before throwing them down. The lama looks up the answer in a book and reads it aloud. Nima seems pleased. Now it is my turn, and I take the dice and look at Nima for help. “You have to think of a wish or a question,” he says. I touch the dice to my forehead and drop them onto the tray. The lama reads out the answer.
“What you want will be very difficult,” Nima translates. “Things will work out, but not in the way you expect.”
On the way back down the hill, Nima tells me he asked about his spiritual training in India. “The answer was very positive. And miss, I know what you wished for. You wished to stay in Bhutan, isn’t it?”
“Sort of,” I say. Out of the starry cluster of wishes and questions that filled my head when I picked up the dice, only Tshewang’s face remains clear now.
The students bring news of planned demonstrations in southern Bhutan. Arun comes to ask if I think he should go ... down ... to join the others, the demonstrators.
I say no. I don’t want him to be hurt, trampled, run over, arrested, kidnapped, beaten up, shot, his head cut off and left in a sack. I don’t want him to disappear. I don’t want to lose any of them. I want them to stay here. All of them, north and south, the combination and the contradiction. I want them all to stay right here and make a final effort to talk to each other, to fight the real enemy, which is mutual mistrust and rhetoric, to find what they still hold in common beneath the cant.
I remember a verse from the Buddhist canon: Not at any time are enmities appeased through enmity but they are appeased through non-enmity. This is the eternal law.
The Kuensel reports that armed anti-nationals swept through the southern villages, rounding up people and forcing women and children to walk in front. The demonstrators grew violent, the paper reports, but the Bhutanese security forces were under orders not to fire. The crowds converged on district headquarters, stripping people of their national dress and burning office records. The militants ordered letters of their demands be carried to the central government. The contents of these letters are not reprinted.
Arun has not gone to join the demonstrators. “It could have been solved without this,” he says. “If the government would only listen to what we are saying. If only they didn’t make it a crime to say that we want something else. Personally, ma’am, I don’t want a separate country for the southern Bhutanese, and none of my friends do, either. That’s a ridiculous idea. But we don’t want things to go on as they are, either. We’re educated, we want our rights. We want to be able to say what we really want. And to be who we are. We are also part of Bhutan, isn’t it. But they make it so that we can only be Bhutanese if we turn into them and even then we aren’t real Bhutanese. It was okay before, when we only had to wear national dress in school and at office. Some of my friends say no, we shouldn’t have to wear it at all, but I didn’t mind. Then they made it the law and now I hate wearing it. Now just see how it has turned. After this, they will be completely right and we will all be criminals.”
“I think it can still be solved, Arun.”
“No, madam.” His voice is hard and certain and very bitter. “This problem will never be solved.”
After he leaves, I pull on shoes and run out of the house, up the driveway behind the staff quarters to the main road. The sky is dark and swollen. Lightning splits open a cloud and I am drenched in rain and sorrow. I am afraid that Arun’s prediction will come true. I stand under the eaves of a shop, wiping water and tears from my face.
At a jam session to celebrate the end of the school term, Tshewang and I dance together once, and then sit outside on a bench behind the student mess. Whenever the music inside stops, we can hear the winter wind roaming wildly in the valley below us.
“What will you do in Canada?” he asks.
“See my family and friends. Go to bookstores, see movies, eat.”
“You won’t
want to come back, maybe.”
“No, I’ll want to come back.”
“I’ll miss you,” he says, looking elsewhere. In the weak yellow light of the overhead bulb, I study his profile, thinking how much I like him, his quick energy and wit and the thoughtfulness underneath. I know if I said, come back to my house with me, he would come. The burden of keeping silent is killing me. It is the only thing keeping me safe. I lean over and kiss his cheek. “Goodbye, Tshewang.” He turns and we kiss again, a brief, shy, utterly delightful kiss. “Goodbye, miss.”
I walk home alone, the sky full of stars, the night full of the smallest sounds, my whole self full of longing and sorrow that run clean and clear, a dark, quiet river over broken stone.
Return
Ahi-lux has been sent to Tashigang to take the Canadian teachers to Thimphu at the start of the winter break. After we load our luggage into the back, we go to the Puen Soom for a last cup of tea with Karma. “Today not good for travel,” he tells us. “Today is the Meeting of Nine Evils. Better you stay and go tomorrow.”
“My students told me the same thing,” I say. So did Kevin’s; so did everyone’s. Many years ago, the story goes, a man and a woman met at a crossroads. Unaware that they were actually a brother and sister who had been separated in infancy, they fell in love, and when they consummated their relationship, the nine evils descended upon them. No one could tell me exactly what the nine evils were, but everypne had warned me to stay at home in order to avoid them. We look at each other, wondering, and then Kevin says no, we have to go today, let’s not be silly about this. “Maybe the Nine Evils won’t bother phillingpa,” Kevin tells Karma as we climb into the truck. Karma looks doubtful.
